Patrick Colm Hogan, a leading theorist of cognitive cultural studies, offers the first cognitive cultural study of identity in sex, sexuality, and gender. With precise conceptual distinctions, wide-ranging citation of empirical research, and careful explication of diverse literary works, Hogan defends a systematic skepticism about gender differences and a view of sexuality as evolved but also contingent and variable.

• Introduction: Sexual Identities


• Chapter 1: The Cognitive Organization of Sex, Sexuality, and Gender Identities: Marlowe's Edward II and "The Newly Compiled Tale of the Golden Butterflies"


• Chapter 2: What is Sexuality? Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Irons10's "Boyfriends Can Be Fattening"


• Chapter 3: What is Gender? Cao's Story of the Stone and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night


• Chapter 4: Sexuality and Regulatory Regimes: Jayánta's A Lot of Noise About Tradition and Banks's Lost Memory of Skin


• Chapter 5: Gender and Regulatory Regimes: Tagore's Stories and Woolf's Orlando


• Chapter 6: What is Sex? Vyasa's Mah and Binnie's Nevada


• Afterword: The Commitment to Identity

Patrick Colm Hogan is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in the English Department at the University of Connecticut, where he is also affiliated with the program in Cognitive Science and the Connecticut Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He is the author of 20 books and over 150 scholarly articles on topics in literature, cognition, emotion, and politics. His recent publications include Beauty and Sublimity: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Imagining Kashmir: Emplotment and Colonialism (University of Nebraska Press, 2016).