Gender dissolved in narrative: jeanette winterson’s narrative strategy in written on the body

Contemporary British writer Jeanette Winterson, in Written on the Body (1992), problematizes the construction of gender and gendered narratives by undertaking an experiment through a narrator whose sex and gender remain nameless. Winterson’s text displays discontinuity of the narrator-subject who recognizes inconsistency. Not an “intelligible” body, but a “specter of discontinuity and incoherence,” as Judith Butler calls, the narrator is “constantly prohibited . . . by the very laws that seek to establish causal or expressive lines of connection among biological sex, culturally constituted genders, and the expression or effect of both in the manifestation of sexual desire through sexual practice” (Butler 1990, 17). Concentrating on the androgenic nature of the unconscious manifesting itself through writing in Winterson’s novel, this paper aims to reconsider why the writer presents a narrator whose gender and sex remain undeclared. It also aims to analyze how Winterson creates a narrative which backgrounds gender to transform the hetero-narrative and its gendered pretexts.

Jeanette Winterson ,

Written On The Body ,

Gender ,

Body As Text/Text As Body ,

Judith Butler ,

French Feminism ,

Jeanette Winterson ,

Written On The Body ,

Toplumsal Cinsiyet Ve Roman ,

Çağdaş İngiliz kadın yazar Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body adlı aşk ve tutkuyu anlatan romanında, toplumsal cinsiyet rollerini tekrar gözden geçirmek ve klişeleri sorgulamak amacıyla anlatıcının cinsiyetini roman boyunca saklı tutar. Yazar romanda, toplumsal cinsiyet rollerini vurgulamak yerine ‘cinsiyetsiz bir metin’ yaratarak dilin cinsiyeti var mıdır sorusuna da yanıt aramaktadır. Bu makale, Winterson’ın romanında sorunsallaştırdığı toplumsal cinsiyet rolleri, anlatıcının ve metnin bilinçdışı gibi konuları tartışmaktadır.

Metin-Beden İlişkisi ,

Judith Butler ,

Fransız Feminist Ekolü ,