SOURCE: Lindenmeyer, Antje. “Postmodern Concepts of the Body in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body.” Feminist Review, no. 63 (autumn 1999): 48–63.

In the following essay, Lindenmeyer discusses Winterson's reconciliation of postmodern and feminist views of the female body in Written on the Body, highlighting the novel's critique of conventional biological approaches to gender differences.

Postmodern Bodies

It has been said that postmodern theory is inimical to feminist goals, because it effaces the reality of female experience in favour of discursively constructed identities. In embracing postmodern theories of the body, one faces the, as Lisa More puts it, ‘dystopian possibility’ that the ‘discontinuous, heterogeneous experiences, sensations, desires and identifications that pulse through us as we experience our “bodies”’ become chaotic once the identity categories that structure our perception of the body are deconstructed’ (Moore, 1995: 104). However, I believe that Jeanette Winterson, in her novel Written on the Body, develops a postmodern concept...