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• Title: Gender in Winterson's Sexing the Cherry (Jeanette Winterson) (Critical Essay)
• Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
• Release Date : January 01, 2010
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 97 KB

Description

Jeanette Winterson, one of the best known contemporary British "postmodern" novelists, has made the interrogation of the categories of gender a central feature of her work. Winterson's novels are engaged in a project of resistance; they critique long-standing gender stereotypes and the allocations of power those stereotypes legitimate. Battling against normative heterosexuality, which retains its centrality in modern culture through a massive and multifaceted ideological inertia, Winterson explores a range of oppositional and alternative gender identities as well as the way normative gender categories slip or undo themselves. This aspect of her writing operates according to the principles of emancipatory pluralism, which aims at freeing the subject from the prefabricated molds of dominant social categories. Gender, in such a political model, becomes simply one more way in which the subject chooses a sexual identity. "Chooses" is the important word here, for pluralism implies a subject who can assume an abstract or external attitude towards his or her identity and re-choose at will. It is, ultimately, a supremely abstract model of subjectivity, in which the subject stands apart from all social determinants. While the emphasis on performativity has proved to be highly productive and clarifying in contemporary queer and feminist criticism, and while performance theory is of obvious relevance in any investigation of Winterson's writing, I would argue that her work also demands a reading that relies on a psychoanalytic, and specifically Lacanian, model of sexuality that emphasizes a permanently incomplete subject that is split within itself. In her 1989 novel, Sexing the Cherry, a disaffected ecologist declares her commitment to a performative subjectivity, and at the same moment demonstrates how that kind of subjectivity depends on a singularity--the self--that shape-shifts and inhabits various guises: "If I have a spirit, a soul, any name will do, then it won't be single, it will be multiple. Its dimension will not be one of confinement but one of space. It may inhabit numerous changing decaying bodies in the future and in the past" (144). If such a position relegates gender to a mere subjective accessory, there is another dimension to Winterson's work that also emerges in Sexing the Cherry that places the furtive, even frustrating, experience of living a gendered role at the very core of the subject. According to this perspective, gender (or rather, sex) is not an article of clothing, but is rather an inscrutable commandment that the subject cannot resist; it is an experience of finitude, limitation, and longing. It is between these two subjective positions (the first characterized by freedom, choice, plurality; the second characterized by compulsion, fatality, and romantic desperation) that Winterson unfolds her narrative.

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