Queerness, ephemeral and inherently tied to transgression, is extraordinarily difficult to define. Sedgwick wants us to think of queerness as thing to be embodied, as a term that can only be used in the first person. Halberstam, alternatively, perceives queerness as a potential in everything that is transgressive. In this view, all things have the capacity to be queer as long as their state of being opposes what is expected and normative. Mûnoz wants us to reconsider these understandings of queerness as a state to be embodied, and instead insists that genuine queerness has never been achieved. Of queerness, he Mûnos writes: it “is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (1). Between this quote and the title of his book—Feeling Utopia—Mûnos establishes that queerness is less of an identity and more of a societal status that has yet to be realized.
Bearing this perspective of queerness in mind, I turn to Written on the Body. From its non-chronological form to its narrator’s ambiguous identities, this book is queer. The gender of the narrator is never made explicit—and indeed purposefully made unclear—and the variety of genders in the narrator’s partners affirms the fluidity of zir sexuality. Additionally, time is problematized as a reliable, linear experience throughout the book, particularly at the end when the narrator confesses that they “don’t know if this is a happy ending but where we are let loose in open fields” (Winterson 190). Unlike Mûnos, the novel has little certain for futurity or time of any kind—it is entirely interested in queerness as an active state of being, as a lifestyle, as a means of perceiving time and space.
If queerness is, as Mûnos suggests, “the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on…concrete possibility for another world,” then this book fails as a queer endeavor (Mûnos 1). Winterson’s book is not about the future or the creation of a queer world, but instead about queerness as a state of being. Fortunately for Winterson, Mûnos’ view of queerness is an unsustainable one, it’s one that will not lead to the production of community or spaces that queerness desires. Rather, this understanding of queer as “utopia” is one that asks queer people to continue to “feel that the world is not enough, that indeed something is missing” (1). Winterson’s narrator tells this story because ze cannot wait for some undefined future where zir unconventional love story can be told in a queer world to queer people. The world was missing this story, this queer experience of love and growth, and so ze brings queerness into our “here and now” (1). Ze is queer and that queerness is a legitimate lived experienced, whether or not we as a society have collectively “touch[ed] queerness” (1). So no, we do not know if this is a happy ending yet—but here we are, let loose and open, and to deny ourselves a “here and now” will surely do nothing but stunt “our possibility for another world” (1).