This book considers the importance of female heterosexual masochism as a site for critical and cultural innovation in the contemporary understanding of women's sexuality. Visiting the dominant historical approaches to conceptualizing female masochism in literature, sexology, and psychoanalysis, it explores how these approaches have shaped scholarly and popular understandings not only of female masochism, but of female heterosexuality more generally. Noonan fuses textual analysis with sexual-scientific insight in careful rereadings of Gaitskill, Shainberg, Jelinek, Ogawa, and James' masochistic heroines for multiplicity and incongruity, illustrating a flexible and innovative scholarly approach to the interpretation of complex female heterosexuality. Historically, feminism has responded to the paradoxes of female masochism -- its unique coupling of pleasure with pain, voluntarity with submission, and liberation with constraint -- as a challenge best met by steady and singular refinement of its principles. In so doing, this book argues, feminism has missed an outstanding opportunity to theorize not only female masochism, but female heterosexuality overall as a multivalent phenomenon: complex, ambivalent, and frequently in defiance of any singular feminist approach to sexual pleasure or pain. Noonan remedies this critical lacuna by unveiling female masochism's historic and contemporary value for the shaping of feminist thought. The book offers a geneaology of women's masochism as a distinctly gendered phenomenon, tracing the origins of masochism as a theoretical and clinical construct describing perverse masculinity, and exploring the historic impact of this theorization upon feminist approaches not only to female masochism, but to female sexuality as a whole. This book reveals the capacity of the female masochist to demonstrate multiplicity as well as personal and political ambiguity in women's sexual practices.