from the border’ (p. ix). Her book, situated at the intersection of cultural studies, critical theory and literary analysis, both thematizes and performs the cultural work that has been done by feminists writing from the borders. Curti argues that the need for women writers to re-think their relation to canonical litera- ture, ‘to re-visit and look at fathers and mothers with different eyes, has brought about the blurring of genres and the transformation of models: metamorphosis and grafting have produced new hybrid forms, monstrous shapes and bodies’ (p. xiii). The two core chapters of the collection, ‘Hybrid Fictions . . .’ and ‘Monstrous Bodies in Contemporary Women’s Writing’ explore some of the ways in which women’s narratives (postmodern novels, short stories and tele- vision serials) have transgressed boundaries between popular and elite culture, fiction and reality, genres and genders. In her analysis of fiction by writers such as Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson and Toni Morrison, Curti lucidly shows how in transgressing generic and gender boundaries, feminist narratives have created monstrous bodies and ghostly presences, which have enabled them to powerfully re-imagine gendered identities and life trajectories. Curti’s detailed and wide-ranging study of the life and writing of Jane Bowles – which com- bines biography, discussion of the role of travel in Bowles’ life and literature, reflection on Bowles’ long-standing relation with an Algerian woman, Cherifa, and literary criticism – is itself an exemplary performance of genre crossing. A collection of essays, Curti’s text is linked through thematic and theoreti- cal associations rather than through a strong central argument. The essay col- lection format is not unusual. Some of the essays, however, were originally written in the 1980s or early 1990s, and in some cases, the interventions that were so important at the time are now familiar. For instance, the first essay, ‘The Swing of Theory’ (presented at the 1990 Cultural Studies Conference in Urbana, Illinois) surveys debates between feminism and postmodernism, and essen- tialist and anti-essentialist camps within feminist theory. While Curti’s point – that feminist theory thrives on the interplay between both positions – is well taken, today feminist theory has moved beyond the rigid polarized construc- tions of essentialism and anti-essentialism. ROSANNE KENNEDY Australian National University, Australia Momin Rahman, Sexuality and Democracy: Identities and Strategies in Lesbian and Gay Politics. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2000, 218 pp., £14.95, ISBN 0–7486–0958–X In the inaugural issue of Feminist Theory the two-fold gesture of making visible the gendered relations of power and thinking beyond to the possibilities of a non-gendered social order is shown to have a history at least as long as second- wave feminism (Lorber, 2000). Given the intimate entanglements of gender and sexuality in theory as in experience, it is unsurprising that the central question of Momin Rahman’s Sexuality and Democracy – of how to combine a social constructionist understanding of (sexual) identity with a democratic politics – should have been pre-figured many times in feminist debate. Feminists have often thought of this two-fold gesture as sequential waves: a sort of ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ strategy. Those carried along on the first wave of protest on behalf of ‘Women!’ found themselves swept into a movement busily 134 Feminist Theory 2(1)