My concern with the relationship between woman and representation bears directly on the critical controversies raised by Borges' work, specifically the relationship between his formalism/idealism and his textual politics. I will identify (1.) the strategies by which symbols or metaphors of the feminine—as idealized or poetic objects of desire—serve his mystical and metaphysical interests, and (2.) the ways in which the presence of an apparently more localized theme in Borges' work, the machismo cult (benignly understood as the over-determined Latin American male emphasis on courage, honor, and sexual prowess) operates as the inscription of women in a variation of the classic erotic triangle, even as Borges seems to want to move beyond it. By following the gallery of portraits of women throughout his career, one can trace a change in tendency or attitude away from ideality toward corporeality, especially in his later writings. My point will be...