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Throughout her writing career, Jeanette Winterson has experimented with her life experience, revisiting in particular the complex relationship with her adoptive mother, Mrs W, in such works as Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Sexing the Cherry (1989), and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal (2011). This article examines the complex mother-daughter relationship between Jeanette and Mrs W to illustrate the birth of a feminist writer. In answer to her mother’s confiscation of her birth narrative, Jeanette Winterson has fictionalized Mrs W to alter traditional narrative paradigms she deemed repressive. The process has allowed the daughter to open up an enunciative space for herself through performative utterances: “I’m telling you stories. Trust me.” Finally, the parallel drawn between Mrs Winterson and Mrs Thatcher in the former’s fictional avatars highlights specifically the personal political itinerary of the feminist writer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender fluidity and queer non- normativity is a debated topic in the post modern social and literary scenario. The exploitation of the weaker gender in the name of the binaristic, fixed nature of gender, i.e. the division of masculine/ feminine had begun from the ancient time itself. This fixity defined peculiar tasks for both the masculine and the feminine gender and put forward the notion that each gender has an essence and thus a boy and a girl should behave in a fixed manner which is part of their essential self. The postmodern era, in its most revolutionary advancement in the social, economic and technological spheres questions the fixities of life and even the very essence of God and man. When post modernism presents human existence as incoherent, ambiguous and inconclusive, the very concept of gender fixities and binaries began to get questioned. With the emergence of Queer theory in the 1990s, gender began to be viewed as constructed and the queer theorists argue for non- heteronormativity. Jeanette Winterson is one of the daring voices among postmodern queer writers whose works celebrate gender fluidity and queer existence. Winterson abundantly alludes to myths and fairytales as vehicles to express the notion that gender also is constructed like a story or history and it is thus not fixed. This paper focuses on how Winterson adapts myths and fairytales in her two famous works Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and Sexing The Cherry to portray her characters who strive to surpass the fixed gender roles imposed on them by heteronormative society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A giant female dog breeder and an adventurous boy who constantly questions (his) existence and truth live through the turbulent times of the reign of Charles I. A "mad" female scientist and a confused young man in contemporary times cross paths. Neither of these pairs fit into the attributions to their respective gender identities. Through alternating narratives of these characters, Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry dwells on the questions of gender formation and linear flow of time and history. Indeed, gender expectations are repeatedly put into trial and are deconstructed throughout the text. The inscribed rewriting of the story of the twelve dancing princesses draws attention to the questions raised by the novel about gender, identity, and social construction of these two. Sexing the Cherry, in its narrowest sense, is the story of Jordan and the Dog Woman. There are two specific time/spaces: the first one is the seventeenth-century England during the reign of Charles I, and the second one is the twentieth-century England. In this respect, the second part of the novel moves forward (and also backward) in time, and presents the late twentieth-century versions of Jordan and the Dog Woman. In the body of all these characters, gender identity becomes a pluralized, fluid, and contingent concept. As such, this paper argues that Sexing the Cherry disrupts conventional representations and perceptions of gender (roles) through problematizing both the male and the female gender codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This reading of Sexing the Cherry focuses on the motif of consumption in its function to represent the female struggle for pleasure, power, and verbal expression. The novel abounds in images of consumption, literal and metaphoric, from innocent scenes of sharing food to suggestive descriptions of literally eating sexual organs, chopping up bodies, hunting, etc. I argue that the motif of consumption in Winterson's text stretches beyond the thematic and into the structural, becoming an integral principle of the narrative construction. The essay particularly discusses Winterson's use of the fairy-tale genre, exploring the function of orality to deliver marginalized experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The novels Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter and Sexing the Cherry and Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson rely on common narrative tactics and deal with very similar subject matter. This paper contains a brief comparison of the three novels in terms of their stylistic qualities, focusing on Carter's and Winterson's combination of magic realism, the picaresque mode, mythology, and historiographic metafiction with Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of carnival and the grotesque body, with a common aim of unmasking the stereotypical socially constructed ideas regarding the female body. The two authors use the grotesque bodies of their heroines as a site of resistance to and carnivalesque overthrow of imposed social hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Sexing the Cherry, Jeanette Winterson's Dog Woman is a gigantesque weapon yielding force to be reckoned with. As the title teases with the notion of gendering within language, both her physical appearance and actions beg for a reevaluation of what has been defined as both maternal and instinctual. She is at once a stable and loving, yet in order to protect her son from harm, she revolts against the powers that be and oscillates between time and place in both a selfmade utopia as well as a force-fed dystopia. To her son, she is shelter, to her enemies, menacing and elusive. What, I am always curious when I teach the novel in class, is Dog Woman to the reader? Winterson's focus on the biology of this character is paramount. The rendering of Dog Woman's 'self' in writing is a multifaceted project for Winterson, and before terminology such as 'hybrid,' or 'border identity' emerge, Dog Woman embodies many selves in one, and defies almost all categorization. Pulling from modern literary and philosophical theory, my discussion does address the possibility of whether Dog Woman ever actually appropriates the maternal. My position remains, however, that Winterson may have succeeded in inscribing a new maternal mode onto the literary and cultural consciousness of our time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents literary criticism of the books "The PowerBook" and "Sexing the Cherry" by Jeannette Winterson. Particular focus is given to themes of dislocation, gender, and grafting in the novels. Details on the relationship between the characters Ali/Alix and Tulip are presented. Other topics include queer identity, imperialism, and race.

Jeannette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry is an important example for postmodern narrative strategies. It employs such postmodern techniques as multiple perspectives, grafting and transplantation of literary genres, hybridization, destabilization of spatio-temporal dimension alluding to assumptions of quantum physics, and a challenge to traditional categories of a unifi ed and heterosexual subjectivity. Consequently, Sexing the Cherry mixes reality with fantasy and the fantastic, and the boundaries of any sort are breached. The characters/narrators are in search of alternatives to current positions/ conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Sexing the Cherry" by Jeanette Winterson is presented. According to the author, theory on the performativity of gender and psychoanalytic analysis of sex can both be productively applied to the novel's treatment of gender and sexuality. Topics discussed include normative gender categories, subjectivity, and the works of scholars and theorists such as Judith Butler, Joan Copjec, and Charles Shepherdson.

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.

ABSTRACT This essay deals with three British novels written by female novelists in the 1980s: Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus and Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry. The protagonists of these three novels are monstrous women who enjoy power over men in different situations. The essay considers the idea of monstrosity explored in each novet--from the freakish to the carnivalesque--and argues that, first, it is difficult to assess the feminist ideology of these texts as the respective writers do not write from clearly feminist positions. Second, that whereas criticism of these novels has focused on their (questionable)feminism, little has been said about the role played by men in them or about the implicit androphobic discourse of some fiction by women. Third, that the model of female power offered by these novels is too limited,' they pale besides the analysis of powerful female monstrosity offered in some novels by men. The conclusion, supported by Angela Carter's thesis that women are reluctant to acknowledge their own moral faults, is that women are offering a biased portrait of themselves, in which the exploration of women's weaknesses is too narrow, even when the issue of female monstrosity is addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]