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

"With Hogan's trademark brilliance of mind and breezy prose style he delivers the foundations we've all been looking for to really understand the miraculous and multifarious ways that we exist as situated sexual beings in the world. Turning to advances in cognitive and affective studies, Hogan adds to, deepens, and expands the major intellectual traditions that inform sexuality and gender studies. Liberating!"--Frederick Luis Aldama, University Distinguished Scholar, Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor at The Ohio State University "Solidly and critically based on cognitive science for methodology and using literary works with historical and cultural diversity as its valuable data, Patrick Hogan's book presents a brilliant, insightful and nuanced investigation of sexuality and gender. Considering the role of affect and emotion in shaping sexual identities, among other innovations and modifications, it is a provocative and significant contribution to the burgeoning field of cognitive cultural study."--Dan Shen, Changjiang Professor of English, Peking University "It takes a scholar of Hogan's iconoclastic brilliance, with his unique expertise in multiple disciplines and encyclopedic knowledge of world literature, to develop a project this breathtaking in scope and originality. Sexual Identities offers a critical integration of interdisciplinary insights on sex, sexuality, and gender identity, with a particular emphasis on transgender identity. Drawing on cognitive science, post-structuralism, feminism, discourse analysis, and queer theory, Hogan demonstrates that we cannot fully understand what drives sexual and gender dimorphism unless we inquire into the specific cognitive biases that structure our notions of identity. Coming from the humanities and remaining committed to the rich interpretive tradition of literary studies, Hogan is poised to transform both the sciences and the humanities."-Lisa Zunshine, Bush-Holbrook Professor of English, University of Kentucky

Selling point: The first cognitive cultural study of identity in sex, sexuality, and gender Selling point: Offers a rigorous reanalysis of social construction Selling point: Incorporates both evolutionary universalism and genderqueer affirmations of diversity Selling point: Systematically integrates literary analyses with empirical research in an accessible style

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).

Selling point: The first cognitive cultural study of identity in sex, sexuality, and gender Selling point: Offers a rigorous reanalysis of social construction Selling point: Incorporates both evolutionary universalism and genderqueer affirmations of diversity Selling point: Systematically integrates literary analyses with empirical research in an accessible style