From the 1980s to the turn of the twenty-first century, studies underwent a fundamental revision, as new scholarship revealed unimagined complexities in the gendered life of the iconically masculine author. Reflecting the author's commodified persona, Hemingway's biography always enjoyed a special status, but the confluence of his life and work reached a new intensity when an edited portion of The Garden of Eden appeared in 1986. Hemingway's manuscripts for the novel, expansive but unfinished at his death in 1961, showed the depth of his interest in homosexuality and the mutability of gender. (1) As published, The Garden of Eden describes a young American couple on their honeymoon in Spain and the south of France in the 1920s; David is a writer distracted by his wife's exploration of masculinity, racialized fantasy, and lesbianism. (2) Early in the narrative, Catherine surprises her husband with a haircut cropped as short as a boy's (14) explaining a girl, But now I'm a too (15). That night she goes further: He had shut his eyes and he could feel the long light weight of her on him. He lay there and felt something and then her hand holding him and searching lower and he helped with his hands and then lay back in the dark and did not think at all and only felt the weight and the strangeness inside and she said: Now you can't tell who is who can you? (17) Commenting on this scene, critics both observe its ambiguity and offer a litany of more or less mechanical explanations. (3) More important than what's happening, however, is the estrangement of gender from heteronormative conventions; to specify who does what to whom is to Hemingway's radical dissociation of gender from genital sex. After this merging of and femininity, however, later episodes of gender assume a heterosexual pattern: Catherine will become a boy and ask David to change into a girl. (4) The result, for David, is the approximate obverse of what Judith Halberstam has named female masculinity (9)--something we might well call femininity. (5) Such textual incidents were quickly adduced as biographical evidence, especially where gender was concerned. In an influential 1987 biography, Kenneth Lynn recounts how Hemingway's mother dressed and coifed him in feminine styles as a toddler and cast little Ernest as a twin sister to his older sibling Marcelline (38-43). Mark Spilka's 1990 study, Herningway's Quarrel with Androgyny, draws on The Garden of Eden and retrieves extant material from Mary Welsh Hemingway's 1976 memoir regarding the sex-change fantasies she and Ernest enjoyed on one African safari (352). And in his 1999 study, Hemingway's Fetishism, Carl P. Eby delivers an exhaustive report on Hemingway's sexuality and gender identity, quoting portions of Mary's diary included in her memoir, in which, on the same 1953 trip, established a New Names Department, rechristening himself as Kathrin Ernest Hemingway and her as Peter Mary Welsh-Hemingway (179). Mary's memoir suggests that sometimes imagined himself as a woman in their sexual encounters, and on a few occasions styled his appearance in ways he considered feminine, although he never wore women's clothing. Eby regards as symptomatic Hemingway's hair-dying at home in Cuba in 1947 (202-03), shaving his head like a Masai girl (190) on the 1953 safari, and on the same trip, his (unrealized) wish to have his ears pierced (173). This is interesting material, but it is also problematic--not because chose to explore male femininity, but because some of his most prominent critics have found that exploration essentially and irremediably pathological. Lynn sees Hemingway's self-portrait in the pervasive deviationism (540) of The Garden of Eden; Spilka argues that the author's fictional cross-dressings (314) reveal his psychic wound of androgyny (222); and Eby calls the novel transvestic pornography (Fetishism 245). …