Narrativizing Disease, Consuming the „Other”: Food, Illness and Gender Stereotypes in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body

Lazãr Mihaela-Cristina ()
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Lazãr Mihaela-Cristina: Ovidius University of Constanþa, Faculty of Letters

Ovidius University Annals, Economic Sciences Series, 2014, vol. XIV, issue 3, 159-164

Abstract: This paper tackles issues of gendered authorship and the connection female writing/female body in Jeanette Winterson’s novel, „Written on the Body”. I interpret the cancerous body of Louise from „Written on the Body” as an excessive body: the multiplication of cells in her diseased body is a metaphor of the transgressive, unbounded female body. The body turns against itself and engenders alienation, being perceived as an alien object. In the novel, disease is an equivalent of love, because both disrupt the borders of the self, threatening with the dissolution of the limit between self and other. Love is manifested as an urge to consume the body of the lover, as the tendency to be fused into a unified body. I also set out to investigate the gender indeterminacy and narratorial identity of „Written on the Body”, and to shed light on the conundrum of the genderless narrator of this novel.

Keywords: body; gender; consumption; disease; queer (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Z19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ovi:oviste:v:xiv:y:2014:i:3:p:159-164

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