This book makes a powerful and somtimes contentious contribution to current debates in gender, feminist, and queer theory. Tracing the hydraulic image in a range of theoretical texts on pedagogy, pederasty, reproductive fantasy, and the anthropology of body fluids, Naomi Segal goes on to examine this imagery in the writings of André Gide.

Gide's sexuality was explicitly central to everything he wrote, but it was complex and diverse, motivated as much by undesire as by curiosity and the chase. The ventriloquism of the female voice, versions of triangularity, the potentially endless male chain, the desire of sun on skin, a sideways genealogy, and the gratuity of crime, education, virtue, or playthese mobile patterns are found throughout his fiction and non-fiction. In Gide's polemic, it is always better to be loved by an uncle than an aunt; but all love is motivated by the fluidity of the swerve.