Toril Moi (born 28 November 1953 in Farsund, Norway) is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies and Professor of English, Philosophy and Theatre Studies at Duke University.

[5] Moi made her name with Sexual/Textual Politics (1986), a survey of second-wave feminism in which she contrasted the more empirical Anglo-American school of writings, such as gynocriticism, with the more theoretical French proponents of Ecriture feminine.

While widely perceived at the time as an attack on the Anglo-American approach, Moi would later highlight her respect for their more politicized stance, as opposed to the idealism of the post-structuralists.

[7] Sexual/Textual Politics was followed by further explorations of contemporary French feminists such as Julia Kristeva, before Moi turned to her ground-breaking 1994 study of Simone de Beauvoir.

Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, V. Joshua Adams claims that Moi's book "makes a case for rejecting the approach to language that the 'theory project' produced," and that "beyond challenging the ways that literary studies thinks about language, Moi challenges the distinction between literature and life.