ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the history of sexual indeterminacy in literary writing by focusing on a group of highly experimental texts that consciously avoid gender allocations to their fictional characters. Brigid Brophy creates a character who, suffering from "sexual amnesia", finds that he/she is unable to discover his/her sex by means of gender attributions which, again, are shown to exist independently of biological sex. Critical and deconstructive discussions of sexual difference focus unavoidably on the category of difference on which their program is based. During the nineteenth century, the polarization of gender ascriptions was taken to extremes. For instance, Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter have devised fantastic stories of transsexual metamorphosis which demonstrate that, to a high degree, sexual difference is culturally constructed. As such, degendering underpins the main agenda of social and literary gender studies: By highlighting the constructed nature of this opposition, it has encouraged further research into the processes of gendering and their discriminatory effects.
