SOURCE: Gilmore, Leigh. “Without Names: An Anatomy of Absence in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body.” In The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, pp. 120–42. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Gilmore examines Winterson's treatment of gender and sexual self-representation in Written on the Body, as well as discussing the novel's problematic explorations of female identity, lesbianism, and sexual difference.

A name makes reading too easy.

—Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher”

Written on the Body least resembles autobiography in the context I've developed here. Unlike [Dorothy] Allison, [Mikal] Gilmore, and [Jamaica] Kincaid, Winterson has neither asserted nor acceded to a primarily autobiographical context for understanding her writing. Following her first autobiographical novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson wrote the kind of postmodern fiction that does not readily lend itself to autobiographical reading. Why, then, read Written on the Body as a limit-case about...