Riki Ann Wilkins writes that, “[o]ne’s body continues to display a multitude of information through nonlinguistic signs, the language of gesture, posture, stance, and clothing”(Wilkins 153). The language that surrounds the body is core to gender presentation. As gender is so often treated as constant, so too is the language assigned to a body. But what then of the narrator of Winterson’s novel, Written on the Body. While their body is present, and core to the narrative, that same body is given no descriptors that might gender it. The narrator’s actions still display information, but the body itself is an empty space in the narrative. Perhaps, by removing those gendered signs, Winterson is allowing the reader to examine a body devoid of the very signs we use to shape gender.
Perhaps, on this ungendered body Winterson creates an alternative manner of analyzing gender, more in line with Wilkins’ theory. Winterson writes, “[w]ritten on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there”(Winterson 89). The narrator’s gender is part of this code, inscribe on the body, but Winterson only shows the reader the narrator’s body under a light that ignores the gendered signs. The body we are shown is covered in signs without the context of gender. Thus the body symbols are separate from the gendered symbols. Winterson uses this divide to hint at the difficulty in interpreting actions without a gendered form. As gendered signs can limit the interpretation of gendered actions, the interpretive framework for other symbols expands in the absence of gender signifiers. Thus the narrator’s symbolic form is rendered more complex once freed from the interpretive limitations of gender.