Sexual Artifice marks the evolution of Genders from a triannual journal to a biannual anthology. Henceforth, each volume will have a focus on a particular gender-related issue, offering original essays on the specific theme. This volume proposes that there is something more to the social construction of gender than what social science has been able to describe. On the contested state of international politics, public imagery, and nationalist cinema, the artifice of sexuality wields an enormous power to influence the interpretation of our social selves and the world we live in. These essays collectively explore the art of constructing gender in symbolic media images; in poetry, photography, and montage; in dramatic identity politics; and, last but not least, in contemporary feminism itself. With original essays on Virginia Woolf's Orlando; Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the culture of romance; Valerie Solanis (the woman who shot Andy Warhol); male hysteria and the U.S. invasion of Panama; and representations of women in Northern Ireland, Sexual Artifice offers up some of the most thought-provoking and daring young scholarship in contemporary cultural and gender studies.