FLUID GENDER IDENTITIES IN JEANETTE WINTERSON’S SEXING THE CHERRY

Abstract

A giant female dog breeder and an adventurous boy who constantly questions (his) existence and truth live through the turbulent times of the reign of Charles I. A “mad” female scientist and a confused young man in contemporary times cross paths. Neither of these pairs fit into the attributions to their respective gender identities. Through alternating narratives of these characters, Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry dwells on the questions of gender formation and linear flow of time and history. Indeed, gender expectations are repeatedly put into trial and are deconstructed throughout the text. The inscribed rewriting of the story of the twelve dancing princesses draws attention to the questions raised by the novel about gender, identity, and social construction of these two. Sexing the Cherry, in its narrowest sense, is the story of Jordan and the Dog Woman. There are two specific time/spaces: the first one is the seventeenth-century England during the reign of Charles I, and the second one is the twentieth-century England. In this respect, the second part of the novel moves forward (and also backward) in time, and presents the late twentieth-century versions of Jordan and the Dog Woman. In the body of all these characters, gender identity becomes a pluralized, fluid, and contingent concept. As such, this paper argues that Sexing the Cherry disrupts conventional representations and perceptions of gender (roles) through problematizing both the male and the female gender codes.