Jeanette Winterson’s Love Intervention: Rethinking the Future

Abstract

Is there a future? More specifically, is there a future for the queer? Queer theorists have recently been wrestling with the question of futurity, and two polarized positions are emerging from the fray: the anti-social thesis with its emblem of ‘no future’, and the perspective of queer utopianism, which conversely asserts that ‘queerness is primarily about futurity’ (Munoz, 2006, p. 826). This chapter investigates the debate regarding queer futurity in the context of Jeanette Winterson’s novel The Stone Gods (2008). A foray into possible futures, The Stone Gods both affirms and defies a queer temporality characterized by the disavowal of a redemptive future. While Winterson echoes the anti-social concept of the future as fatal repetition through her depiction of repeating, self-destructive worlds, her novel also manages to resist the futility of this perspective by offering the possibility of a love intervention that disrupts the replication of the past. In describing how Winterson problematizes distinctions between queer/straight futurities, this chapter also contributes to the ongoing debate regarding the ‘queerness’ of Winterson’s work.