I watched Sally Potter's film version of Virgina Wool's Orlando on DVD last night. Potter's film alternates genders and identities against shifting historical-cultural backgrounds as it follows a young noble's journey from the Renaissance to the modern era, first as a male and then as a female.

From memory Woolf's text equates instability of identity with instability of language and chart the social constructedness of gender to show that one's subject position as woman or man is only provisional. I recall that it was a complicated text to read, open to many interpretations, and that it invited us, as readers, to read the text against itself.