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Written on the Body (Jeanette Winterson)
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“All my books are about boundaries and desire – the boundaries we should try to cross, like
fear and class and skin-colour and expectation, and the boundaries that seem to define us,
such as our sense of self, our gender” – Winterson
o

“All my work is experimental in that it plays with form, refuses a traditional narrative
line, and includes the reader as a player”

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Genderlessness
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Winterson “teases the reader out of thought and into a desire which is precisely a
desire for nothing nameable” – Catherine Belsey, Postmodern Love: Questioning the
Metaphysics of Desire (1994), p
...
84)

o

“We put ourselves into watertight compartments, break ourselves up into parts, cut
ourselves into two, and more
...
If we separate ourselves that way, we “all” stop being born” – Luce
Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One (1985), p
...
84)

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Feminism and language
o

“If woman has always functioned “within” the discourse of man, … it is time for her
to dislocate this “within,” to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers,
containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth
to invent for herself a language to get inside of” – Helen Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the
Medusa’, Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, p
...
73

o

Écriture Feminine
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“Expresses that original libidinal multiplicity within the very terms of culture,
more precisely within poetic language in which multiple meanings and
semantic nonclosure prevails
...
108
▪

“Women must write through their bodies, they must invert the impregnable
language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and
codes, they must submerge, cut through get beyond the ultimate reservediscourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the
word “silence,” the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before
the word “impossible” and writes it as “the end” – Cixous, The Laugh of the
Medusa

o

“Submitted to discursive analysis, exposed in its historical mutations, demonstrated
as a category available for positive and negative political appropriations, a category
which feminism appeals to but in which it can also find itself caught
...
161
▪

“Historicise the category “women”” and recognise that “devotion to, and
exasperation with, this category is the inevitable framework within which
feminist politics must fight itself out”

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Queerness
o

“Written on the Body, whatever the sex of its narrator, is a queer novel with a queer
plot” – Susan S
...
Farwell

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The body
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“We’ve been turned away from our bodies, shamefully taught to ignore them, to
strike them with that stupid sexual modesty; we’ve been made victims of the old
fool’s game: each one will love the other sex
...
153
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Postmodernism
o

“Winterson is commonly read and understood as a postmodern author…[her] work
is imbued with many of the conventions associated with postmodernism:
intertexuality, parody, pastiche, self-reflexifity, fragmentation, the questioning of
master narratives, the problematizing of closure, the valorization of instability, and
the suspicion of coherence” – Miguel Mota, What’s In A Name? The Case of
jeanettewinterson
...
192

o

Transformative power of storytelling
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“My equilibrium
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I had to have that story… I
built different houses for her, planted out her gardens
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She was in Italy eating mussels by the sea
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She wasn’t sick and deserted in some rented room with
curtains
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9)

▪

But language can also be deceptive



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