“Straight Talk” asks: how is heterosexuality constituted? How, precisely, are subjects produced as presumptively heterosexual? And where might one locate agency in this production? Enabled by feminist theory and queer theory, which have so successfully analyzed gender and homosexuality, this study articulates a theory of heterosexuality as “scripted” in the interplay between psychic structures and social structures. “Straight Talk” reads the feminist postmodern fictions of Fay Weldon, Angela Carter, and Kathy Acker as investigations into the relationship between signification and the gender-specific solicitation of subjects into a coercive heterosexual script. This script, simultaneously “written” by various institutions, discourses, technologies, the family psychodrama, and even our signifying system, has as its goal the preservation of current systems of power. “Heterosexuality,” as signifier and as practice, is fundamentally, then, a regulatory ideal which, in the interests of its own self-replication, operates as a performative script, an utterance which not only says something, but which does something. In my readings of the fictional texts, I argue that heterosexuality is constructed through repeated skirmishes between a performative script and self-conscious performances of that script which may subvert and subsequently alter future performances of the heterosexual script. The fictions of Weldon, Carter, and Acker expose the conventional heterosexual script as a script and imagine a performance of sexual scripts which destabilizes the heterosexual performative. The heterosexual script, which is comprised of multiple sub-scripts that operate more or less co-extensively, solicits female subjects into a normative reproductive sexuality which works to limit the amount of social power available to them. Nevertheless, I argue, agency is possible. In my analysis of Weldon’s, Carter’s, and Acker’s texts, my use of Althusser’s theory of ideology, Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalysis, and Peirce’s semiotics is guided by the project’s double intention: first, to investigate the often obscured connection between power, semiotic and cultural apparatuses, and individual subjects’ positioning in the sex and gender system; and, second, to examine how these particular novels reflect, critique, and participate in the culture’s construction of heterosexuality, as both erotic desire and social system