<p>What makes the textual image of a woman with a penis so compelling, malleable, and persistent? Although the figure of the phallic woman is in no sense unique to our age,<i>Every Inch a Woman</i> takes note of a proliferation of phallic feminine figures in disparate North American and European texts from the end of the nineteenth century onward. This multiplication, which continues today, admits of a corresponding multiplicity of motives. The phallic woman can be a ribald joke, a fantastical impossibility, a masculine usurper, an ultimately unthreatening sexual style, an interrogation into the I of the author, or an examination of female culpability.</p><p>Carellin Brooks takes up the textual figure of the phallic woman where Freud locates it, in the imagined mother that the little boy, in fantasy, credits with a penis of her own. It traces this phallic-woman motif backward to the sexological case study, and forward to newspaper accounts of testosterone-taking third-sexers. Brooks examines both high and low literature, pornography, postmodern theory, and writing that would seem to answer Lacan’s injunction to move 'beyond the phallus.'</p><p>Witty and engaging, <i>Every Inch a Woman</i> makes an innovative contribution to sexuality, gender, and women's studies, as well as psychoanalytic theory and criticism.</p><p><i>Every Inch a Woman</i> will be stimulating to serious readers of sexuality, gender, and women’s studies, students and scholars of psychoanalytic theory and criticism, and those interested in gender transgression in general.</p>