In her highly influential essay ‘The Empire Strikes Back: a posttransexual manifesto’, Sandy Stone draws attention to the theoretical opportunity afforded by the transsexual body. The transsexual, she argues, enables us to recognize that ‘[bjodies are screens on which we see projected the momentary settlements that emerge from ongoing struggles over beliefs and practices within the academic and medical communities’.1 Stone repeatedly characterizes transsexuals as ‘screens’, ‘embodied texts’ and ‘genres’.2 For the field of gender studies, such an emphasis on the textuality o f the gendertransgressive figure3 has come to highlight a significant tension: between its potential for theorization, as a ‘screen’ onto which we can map the ‘ongoing struggles’ for comprehension about gender identity, and the significance of autobiographical narrative in presenting such a figure’s subjective experience and desires. Angela Carter’s novel The Passion o f N ew Eve (1977) directly engages with this tension in the depiction o f her very ‘textual’ transsexual, Eve(lyn).