In her 2002 essay ‘Gender as Performance: Questioning the “Butlerification” of Angela Carter's Fiction’, Joanne Trevenna reflects on a significant trend in scholarship on the work of the celebrated British writer Angela Carter (1940-92), a trend which was first identified by Joseph Bristow and Trev Broughton in their 1997 edited collection The Infernal Desire Machines of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism. Bristow and Broughton observed that it had become ‘almost impossible to read Carter's novels and short stories in the 1990s without noticing how uncannily they anticipate certain strands of current feminist theory’ and, more specifically, how they seem to ‘invite comparison’ with the work of Judith Butler, among others. Revisiting what Bristow and Broughton term the ‘after-the-fact “Butlerification” of Carter’, Trevenna notes that the queer frameworks which have been mobilised by feminist critics to enable reassessments of Carter's work have shaped the contemporary critical consensus on the author's fiction and ‘facilitated a kind of feminist “recovery” of Carter's work since the novelist's death in 1992’. However, Trevenna is one of a number of critics who have questioned the ways in which Butler's theories of performativity have been interpreted and applied, arguing that ‘divergences between Carter's overtly theatrical presentation of “gender as performance” and Butler's theories of “gender as performative”’ have been overlooked in readings which seek to assimilate queer concepts within pre-existing feminist frameworks. As we have seen, the uses to which transgender bodies and identities have been put in popular accounts of performativity and queer theory have been problematised by transgender theorists. In Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, Jay Prosser foregrounds the ways in which the transgender subject has been figured as a ‘key queer trope’, serving as a defining signifier of queer theory's ‘aptly skewed point of entry into the academy’. The transgender figure, it seems, has come to stand for queer theory and, hence, the presence of transgender themes within a literary text has sometimes been read as shorthand for a queer intent. The Passion of New Eve is no exception to the trend identified by Trevenna and its critical reception illustrates the ways in which motifs of gender crossing and ‘sex change’ have come to be equated both with Butler's theories of performativity and - as if by extension - with a queer sensibility.