ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the interrelations of the gift and gender through the novel Story of O by Anne Desclos, written under the pseudonym Pauline Rage. It is a widely acknowledged fact in anthropological and sociological literature that gender plays a highly significant role in gift-relations. The women circulating in and through the relations constitute and consolidate the society of the men and the solidarity among them. In their society, the gift and exchange are one and the same. However, at the same time the novel exhibits traces of another kind of economy, one that is not based on return and revenue, but on gratuitous giving. One could fruitfully describe the two economies also by employing Bataille's notions of homogeneity and heterogeneity, with appropriation as the basic impulse related to the first and excretion as its counterpart in the latter.
