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This essay addresses its title question by analyzing sex robots, real and imagined, as both representational objects and vital matter. Though frequently treated as perverse by popular media, actual sex robots are in fact remarkably conventional in their reproduction of a heteronormative sexual aesthetic that disavows the vibrancy of the sexualized object. Sex robot art and fictional narratives (both film and literature), including Jordan Wolfson's installation Female Figure (2014), Alex Garland's Ex Machina (2014), and Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods (2007), employ and interrogate this kind of mimetic design. In these texts, sex robots assert their vibrancy and agency via what Sarah Ahmed terms "queer use," while at the same time reinscribing the humanist hierarchies that precluded their vitality in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coming out novel has repeatedly come under fire for complying with heterodominance through its supposed focus on visibility and its believed teleology. The article counters these criticisms by means of three classic coming out stories. Audre Lorde's "Zami" problematizes the primacy of visibility associated with the genre, focusing on those who do not exhibit the presupposed visible markers and countering the essentialism that follows from an equation of visibility and identity. "Zami" as well as Edmund White's "A Boy's Own Story" and Jeanette Winterson's "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" exhibit a non-linear structure, showing that the coming out novel does not always unfold chronologically until sexual identity is established. A gay or lesbian identity, moreover, is not necessarily the genre's sole end product. Rather than complying with heterodominance, classic coming out novels such as "Zami," "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit," and "A Boy's Own Story" actually present unacknowledged challenges to the heterosexual mainstream. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay closely examines the narrative form of Margaret Atwood's and Jeanette Winterson's revisionary stories about the mythical figures Penelope and Atlas. Both novelists rely on the narrative tools of parody and burlesque travesty to challenge the genre conventions of high epic art. They parodically use mythologizing and de-mythologizing devices to achieve a semantic transformation of the classical myths and employ burlesque travesty to bring about their stylistic modification. The revision of the ancient mythical stories is underscored by the prominent use of the trickster transformation archetype. In both "The Penelopiad" and "Weight," the protagonists wish to liberate themselves from the limitations imposed on them by the traditional narratives. Atlas's desire to break free from the boundaries of the ancient epic story world is explored alongside the desire of Winterson's alter ego to free herself from the weight of her personal past and the burden of tyrannical (fictional) conventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critiques the novel "Written on the Body," by Jeanette Winterson. The author examines what techniques the narrator employs to involve the reader in her backstory, ethical dilemmas and decisions. The author also contends that if the narrator succeeds in engaging the reader in her unique ethical framework the reader may find provocative insights into the nature of love.

The article examines a mode of addressing metaphysical questions being offered by the experimental novel "Written on the Body," by Jeanette Winterson. Several reasons are given for philosophy's traditional contempt for literature. The strategy of Winterson is described as an alliance between philosophy and literature. The approach allows the reader to occupy the position of the protagonist in the text.

Consideration of Jeanette Winterson's novel "Sexing the Cherry" alongside selected Walter Benjamin essays illuminates the novel's commitment to a politicized historical narrative. Like Benjamin's essays, "Sexing" interweaves strains of materialist, postmodern, and redemptive historiographies. First, the novel's reinterpretation of England's Puritan Revolution enacts a Benjaminian materialist historiography in adopting elements of premodern storytelling, and attending to stories of the marginalized, "constellated" with present-day revolutionary moments, although Winterson's revision also foregrounds the roles of sexuality and gender in historiographic narrative. Second, the novel's postmodern traits, particularly the figure of the hybrid cherry, index the kind of historical narrative Benjamin mandated, grafting together narrative forms, and transplanting history into the present through artistic/technological acts of representation/reproduction. And third, the novel's evocations of light and space recall Benjamin's theological vision of Messianic time; both authors implant images of transcendence in their political historiographies, finding redemptive possibilities in the sparks and fragments of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on Jeannette Winterson's 'Sexing the Cherry' and Angela Carter's 'Wise Children,' two fictional attempts to challenge the gender stereotypes often upheld in traditional histories. What 'Wise Children' suggests about the myths of the patriarchal family; How 'Sexing the Cherry' depicts the revolution.

Compares the writing styles of authors Jeannette Winterson and Virginia Woolf. Details on Woolf's work being defined in part by sex and rifled with subjective prejudices; Reference to Woolf's book, `Modern Novels'; Embracing of the old dichotomy between critical feminism in Winterson's work; Discussion on the book, `Art and Lies,' by Winterson.