I think that Written on the Body is an excellent example of how gender is ascribed to different actions and how gender is not real. Judith Butler wrote, “If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity” (Butler 136). This passage tells me that it is really society and the norms of the time that create gender, gender does not create society’s trends because without those decisions or pressures, there would actually be no gender. It is the actual acts that denote gender, not the bodies. One of the important parts here is the “effects of a discourse” because gender changes and appears differently through time, it has to fit in with the current standard.
While reading, Written on the Body by Jeannette Winterson, everyone in class had different ideas of the gender of our narrator. We wanted so badly to attribute a gender to the narrator because of certain actions they committed. If we read Written on the Body through a male lens, then it would be a very different book then if it was read through a female one. Winterson chose to make it ambiguous to challenge these ideas of societal norms that we have.
The moment that stuck out to me the most was when the Narrator hits Jacqueline. “She’d angered me and I responded by thumping her. How many times does that turn up in the courts? How many times have I curled up my lip at other people’s violence?” (Winterson 87). While this is not about gender explicitly, as a society, we have the image of domestic violence in our heads as a man hitting a woman. I think the text even leans into that by mentioning the courts and how they are disgusted by the same situation in others. The part that plays into Butler’s theory is that the “discourse” around domestic violence is that the violence is a masculine trait whereas being the one hit or hurt is more feminine. The part that matters is the conversations happening around the action to make it gendered. This of course doesn’t make it right, but it does complicate our reading of the gender of the narrator.
This is so interesting! I found myself thinking about the narrator’s gender a lot while reading Written On The Body. When the novel was first pitched as a genderless narrator, I initially thought that meant the narrator was agender or somewhere else under the non-binary umbrella, then was even more interested when I realized it wasn’t that the narrator didn’t have a gender, the reader just didn’t know their gender. This post really made me think about my own relationship to the narrator’s gender. To me, I always read the narrator as a queer woman. But now I’m wondering why my brain even needed to gender them at all. I fully believe that gender is a social construct and is not real, but even I found myself putting gender on them. Thank you for making me think about my own biases and for sharing this post! Fabulous job!
Gender truly is a performance, I love the connections you are drawing here. Similarly to I think a lot of our classmates, I, in lack of gender in the novel assigned to the narrator, found myself assigning a woman to the narrator. I think it’s because I needed to picture the narrator in my head clearly, and I wanted to relate to the character more, and therefore assigned them as a woman. But it was happening subconsciously, really, which just shows how conditioned I am into the binary, and you made me think about that, which is super interesting. I think it’s worth it forcing yourself to not think in this binary, especially when the novel is providing that space for ambiguity.
I love your analysis of this and I had exactly the same thought as we were reading Written on the Body. It’s so intresting to think about how different our readings of the text would be depending on if the narrator is a man or a woman, espcially when the narrator hits Jacqueline or Elgin. I am honestly so glad Written on the Body was written without telling us the gender of the narrator. The fact that it was ambiguous made me focus more on the actions and thoughts of the narrator without having any association of the gender, conciously or subconsciously. Great post!
This is a really insightful post! It’s fascinating (and a little uncomfortable) how much we want to assign a gender to the narrator, as if doing so would stabilize the narrative or make the relationships feel more “understandable.” But Winterson resists that at every turn. Your focus on the Jacqueline scene is also really smart. That moment is really unsettling, and your reading of it through the lens of how violence is gendered in discourse rather than in bodies is a powerful extension of the Butler quote.