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Lynne Layton's recent book Who's That Girl? Who's That Boys? Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory could not be timelier. As anyone interested in postmodernism in general and gender theory in particular knows, the last decade has been a dizzying journey in which no conceptual touchstone has gone unturned. Feminist and postmodern critiques have raucously exposed the sexist biases in traditional psychoanalytic accounts of gender and sexuality. Queer theorists have shaken our confidence in the very categories we use to think about such matters—categories such as female and male, feminine and masculine, heterosexual and homosexual. For psychoanalytic clinicians, the postmodern critique of things long assumed to be good (e.g., stable core gender identity) and the postmodern celebration of things assumed to be bad (e.g., a fragmented sense of self has made for some serious head scratching. Layton's book brings new light and much needed perspective to these contemporary conundrums. With a stunning mastery of complex and diverse areas of Theory, Layton manages and impressive integration of the two theoretical pillars of her book: postmodernism and relational psychoanalytic theory.
Layton describes herself as a committed feminist and relational analyst who found postmodernism—particularly its critique of the