Takes up the textual figure of the phallic woman where Freud locates it, in the imagined mother who the little boy, in fantasy, credits with a penis of her own. This book traces this phallic-woman motif backwards to the sexological case study, and forward to newspaper accounts of testosterone-taking third-sexers.

In conclusion, Brooks locates the persistence of the phallic woman in recurring attempts, well-meaning or otherwise, to overwrite a specific feminine power with the characteristics of masculinity. She gestures toward a uniquely female textual space that is glimpsed in such writers as Kathy Acker and sandy huss. "Every Inch a Woman" 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.