'"Sex, the Self, and the Sacred" amounts to nothing less than a rethinking of Pier Paolo Pasolini's entire corpus from a psychoanalytically informed feminist perspective. By focusing on female characters as embodiments of primal origins, authenticity, and an epic-religious approach to representation, Colleen Ryan-Scheutz gives a gendered slant to Pasolini's critique of today's desecrated cultural landscape. This is an exhaustively researched, generously annotated, clearly written, and compelling book.'-Millicent Marcus, Department of Italian, Yale University