![]() ![]() ![]() In writing without a clear sex/gender, Winterson strips love of the usual boxes and frees it from the usual cliches. ![]() The most consistent element is the narrator’s overwhelming love for Louise. Winterson is masterful and allows the narrator to speak and act in ways that are sometimes stereotypically feminine and sometimes stereotypically masculine. ![]() Many readers might assume the narrator’s sex based on Louise’s, but by including lovers of both sexes, Winterson sidesteps this potential assumption. However, the narrator carries on romantic relationships with both men and women. Written on the Body is a love story detailing the narrator’s love for a married woman, Louise. “If a character does _, why do you assume they’re a woman?” Winterson is careful to never push her narrator too close to conventional ideas of masculinity or femininity, and even though students in both classes tried to guess, this only forced us to examine our own biases and assumptions. So much in our society carries the implication of being “for women,” or “for men,” but Written on the Body refuses to define its narrator this way. This book was required reading for two of my college lit courses: one for modern women authors and another titled “queer theory.” The former because Written on the Body was written by Jeannette Winterson in 1992 the latter because the unnamed narrator is of an undefined sex and gender. ![]()
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