Confusing cases: Forrester, Stoller, Agnes, woman

This article pursues the hypothesis that there is a structural affinity between the case study as a genre of writing and the question of gendered subjectivity. With John Forrester’s chapter ‘Inventing Gender Identity: The Case of Agnes’ as my starting point, I ask how the case of Agnes continues to inform our understanding of different disciplinary approaches (sociological and psychoanalytic) to theorising gender. I establish a conversation between distinct, psychoanalytically informed feminisms (Simone De Beauvoir, Juliet Mitchell, Judith Butler and Denise Riley) to move from the mid-20th century, to contemporary cultural debate.