What is a woman? Sex, gender, and the body in feminist theory -- "I am a woman': the personal and the philosophical -- Appropriating Bourdieu: feminist theory and Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of culture -- The challenge of the particular case: Bourdieu's sociology of culture and literary criticism -- The missing mother: René Girard's Oedipal rivalries -- Representation of patriarchy: sexuality and epistemology in Freud's Dora -- Patriarchal thought and the drive for knowledge -- Is anatomy destiny? Freud and biological determinism -- Desire in language: Andreas Capellanus and the controversy of courtly love -- 'She died because she came too late ... '; knowledge, doubles and death in Thomas's Tristan -- Intentions and effects: rhetoric and identification in Simone De Beauvoir's 'The women destroyed'.