Queering Narrative, Desire, and Body: Reading of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body as a Queer Text

Abstract

Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body has undergone controversy and debate because of its hyper textuality which can be re-written (or reread) in a different light according to the way readers assume the first person narrator’s sexual and gender identity. In other words, Winterson opens up her text to multiple readings by concealing the sex and gender of the narrator. Focusing on the narrator’s desire for knowledge/power over the body of Louise who is a married woman, some critics see the narrator as a male replicating the heterosexual and masculine paradigm of “mapping” and “Othering” a female body. Valerie Miner, for example, claims that Winterson “promises a subversive portrayal of androgynous passion” but the story ends up with a romance that is “disappointingly conventional” (21). On the other hand, Cath Stowers argues that the female narrator “excavates the female body in a re-appropriation and parodying of the power of the phallus” and “the narrator’s turning away from the path of masculine models of conquest and possession to a more reciprocal duality of desire . . . leaves me [Stowers] with little doubt that this narrator is indeed female” (90, 92). Thus, Stowers reads this novel as a lesbian (feminist) text that tries to re-map, celebrate, and re-appropriate female body and sexuality against patriarchal and heterosexual definitions of femininity while Miner sees the narrative as conventional heterosexual romance. English Language and Literature Vol. 56 No. 6 (2010) 1281-94