Ungendered Narrator In Written On The Body
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Within Jeanette Wintersin’s text Written on the body the role of the ungendered narrator is a highly subversive narrative strategy that serves to challenges traditional gender binarisms that exist as a perversive element within the phallogocentric ideologies of the West. I shall explore how Winterson engages with this task by positing �gender’ as unimportant in the construction of individual subjectivity. Secondly, the ungendered narrator challenges the phallogocentric assumption of heteronormativity through a range of characters whose gender and sexuality are constructed as fluid and multiple within the world of the text. In this way, the ungendered narrator implicitly highlights the fact that within contemporary dominant discourses, gender is not only important to lovers, it is what constitutes desire and sexual object choice. Readers are therefore incited to imagine a world, different from our own, in which desire has been dislodged from these regulatory regimes.
Judith Butlers theories of gender provide insight into the subversive status of the ungendered narrator. According to Butler, gendering, or assuming sex, is part of a complex process that constitutes subjects, ushering them into the symbolic and allowing the appropriation of the “speaking I” (Bodies 3). Butler goes on to explain that the formation of the subject simultaneously produces a “domain of abject beings, those who are not yet вЂ?subjects’, but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject” (3). Butler uses the term “abject” to describe the “unlivable and uninhabitable zones of social life” populated by those “who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the вЂ?unlivable’ is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject.” She claims that this zone functions as a “site of dreaded identification against which, and by virtue of which, the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claims to autonomy and life” (Bodies 3). If assuming sex is part of a complex process that constitutes subjects, then Wintersons ungendered narrator would belong to the category of abject, unlivable bodies. Even the language available to describe the narrator excludes the possibility of an ungendered persons existence. I am forced to use “s/he” or “him/her” since calling the narrator “it,” reinforces the idea that such a person could not exist as a subject, but only as an abject, unlivable body. However, using “s/he” and “him/her” also seems to be inappropriate since they too reinforce, through language, the binary understanding of gender. The narrator is not part “she,” part “he,” but rather is something other, which perhaps could be described as the slash between “she” and “he” rather than as the words on either side.
In contrast to Butlers formulation, the ungendered narrator in Wintersons text is a subject, a “speaking I.” The narrator is not positioned in the text as a “site of dreaded identification,” but instead is shown to be a person who attracts and is attracted to many types of people. S/he describes him/herself as a Lothario, a traditionally privileged subject position akin to the Don Juan character type. However, because it is theoretically impossible within current hegemonic discourses for an ungendered person, who necessarily stands outside the domain of the subject, to occupy this narrative position, the ungendered “Lothario” can only exist within the realm of fantasy. According to Laura Doan’s analysis, to state that Written on the Body is a fantastic or utopic text in no way robs it of its importance and subversive potential. Rather, the fantastic and utopian tendencies of Wintersons text are subversive because they imagine alternative possibilities that have been denied by oppressive discourses. Winterson imagines a character who is ungendered and a world in which the ungendered body matters.
This subversive strategy also challenges the heterosexual imperative because gender is not what constitutes sexual object choice. Butler claims that the process of gendering works in the service of compulsory heterosexuality, which attempts to construct a “natural” link between gender and sexuality. She explains that heterosexual logic conflates identification and desire: “If one identifies as a given gender, one must desire a different gender” (239). Homosexuality functions similarly: if one identifies as a given gender, one desires the same gender. In this framework, lesbian and gay identities, although far from compulsory, are considered problematic in that they too reify gender difference, which compulsory heterosexuality constructs as part of a causal line “between sex, gender, gender presentation, sexual practice, fantasy, and sexuality” (Butler “Imitation” 315). Butler argues that the regime of heterosexuality “mandates the compulsory performance of sex” and that “the very categories of sex, of sexual identity, of gender are produced or maintained in the effects of this compulsory performance, disingenuously lined up within a causal or expressive sequence that the heterosexual norm produces to legitimate itself as the origin of all sex” (318). According to Butler, the solution, or the way to expose heterosexualitys false claim to originality and normativity, may be “a matter of working sexuality against identity, even against gender,” a strategy that Written on the Body employs. In addition to the texts construction of an ungendered narrator, sexual identity labels, such as homosexual/heterosexual, are conspicuously absent from the text. Terms like gay, lesbian, and heterosexual would have very little meaning in the text because sexuality has been dislodged from both gender and identity in Wintersons fictional world. In short, Written on the Body deregulates desire, constructing sexuality as fluid, multiple, and nomadic.
The very existence of an ungendered narrator, who functions as a subject within a larger domain of power, rather than within some utopic space where the characters have sought refuge from oppression, illustrates that within the text, gender and sexuality are constructed as fluid and multiple. The narrator does not assume a sexed position because there is no legislative norm requiring her/him to do so. The narrator does not have to claim labels like man/woman and gay/straight, s/he does not have disavow parts of his/herself, nor foreclose certain kinds of connections and experiences. Butler points out the cost