‘Who Cares About Gender at a Time Like This?’ Love, Sex and the Problem of Jeanette Winterson

Abstract

Amongst both fans and academic critics, Jeanette Winterson's work has been celebrated as a breakthrough in lesbian feminist writing. For the writer herself, however, this has been far from unproblematic. This essay examines some of the most influential readings of Winterson's texts through questions of gender and sexuality, against the author's own sense of her mis-appropriation by critics. Considering much of her oeuvre, but focussing especially on her most recent fiction, the essay traces the emergence of an evangelical strain in her fiction that troubles orthodox interpretations of this writer. In her twenty-first century writing particularly, Winterson's commitment to an exploration of Love in the terms of the agapeic tradition, with its sacrificial shedding of the erotic body, have made it more difficult than before for critics to sustain the idea of a lesbian feminist Jeanette Winterson. In this way the essay explores a crisis in the reception of this important contemporary writer.