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Historically, both the male and the medical gaze have sexualized and pathologized the female anatomy. Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body simultaneously perpetuates and problematizes the alliance between patriarchy and science that objectifies and disempowers women and their own stories. Her novel's genderless narrator first eroticizes her/his beloved Louise and later abandons her because she suffers with leukemia, leaving her in the hands of her husband-doctor, a man whom she no longer loves or trusts. Under the umbrella of medical humanities, this essay explores how Winterson's narrator dehumanizes and silences Louise by becoming the anatomist of her cancer to possess her entirely from afar and to mourn the loss of access to her sexual body; vicariously experiencing leukemia through storytelling, and thus depriving Louise of her right to make choices in her life, the comforting presence of the person she loves by her side, and the therapy of narrating her own account about terminal illness on the look of death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wittgenstein suggested that considering the context in which a word or sentence is used may help show the limitations of some ways of setting up a philosophical problem. In this article, I explore the role this suggestion may have in moral (philosophical) reflection, through a consideration of a literary example taken from Jeanette Winterson's novel, Written on the Body (2001). Using the example to elucidate ways of speaking in love that seem to embody an important truth and ways of acting and thinking that appear to be a denial of that truth, I discuss and attempt to show how different ways of attending to context may reveal the moral dimensions of this language use. I also consider one point at which attention to context seems to come to a halt and when acknowledging what is ethically significant seems to demand something different from us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an essay of the books "Written on the Body," "Gut Symmetries" and "The PowerBook" by Jeanette Winterson. She focuses on the idea of art being an energetic space. Particularly, queer space is discussed, the idea of creating livable lives for oneself, and same sex desires are looked at. It also mentions the importance of virtuality in order to explore these ideas. "The Nick of Time," by Elizabeth Grosz is mentioned.

Building on the foundational work of J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, this article investigates declarations of love as promissory speech acts that carry a daunting force. As its title suggests, Jeanette Winterson’s experimental novel Written on the Body explores the relationship between language, convention, and materiality that speech act theory also catalogs, yet the text’s elusive romance invites readers to question the sacrosanct linguistic customs that dictate love speech. Comparable to hate speech in its ability to engender uncertainty and vulnerability, the force of love speech, as imagined by Winterson, nevertheless supersedes any statement made in description of, or contract “written upon,” the physical form, and rather transcends the traditional opposition between constative and performative utterance. Through an analysis of Winterson’s literary lovers, this article locates the force of love speech in the collapse of the distinction between word and action, between the linguistic and the material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jeanette Winterson’sWritten on the Body([1992] 2001. London:Vintage) attempts to liberate identity and sexuality from binary imposition and essentialist categorizations through its use of a narrator who is not gender-bound. However, there is a tendency in some of the critical responses to the novel to interpret the narrator as a masculine force dominating and objectifying his/her submissive and powerless lover, Louise. This imposes essentialist distinctions on a text that seeks precisely to reject such classification. Against such reductive readings, I will argue for a reconsideration of the power dynamics at play in the relationship between Louise and the narrator, one which will seek to undermine critically the too easy imposition of a dominance/ submission binary. The article will consider how the way in which the narrator’s identity is constructed renders him/her inherently dependent on external sources for definition – it is arguably the dependency and uncertainty characterizing this identity that makes him/her vulnerable to the kind of reductive essentialist classification that the article opposes. I will also reinterpret the narrator’s depiction of Louise’s body in an attempt to counter the discourse that presents this depiction in terms of objectification and domination. Rather than the more common interpretive images of colonization and invasion, my alternative interpretation of the construction of Louise’s body will be conducted according to two sustained motifs: the lover as nourishment, and Louise’s body as a yonic vessel or shelter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article attempts to analyze the concept of Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body (1992) from the standpoint of queer theory. Winterson's corpus reveals in very seminal ways that feminist and queer movements are inherently different from one another. Aspects such as gender, sex, love and determinacy are explored in the text which is integral to queer theory. Predominantly due to her own life experience, themes related to religious, familial, and sexual betrayal find a salient place in her novels. Written on the Body is a painfully intimate first-person account of love won and lost. It is related by an ungendered, unnamed, sexually plural, spatially dislocated, unfixed, and, for a novel called Written on the Body, curiously disembodied narrator. Though Winterson's primary concern in the novel is with the language, the issues of gender that she tackles in the novel cannot be ignored. The novel offers constructive ways of theorizing the human body. Winterson develops a critique of androcentric science and medicine that strives to know the female body by dissecting it, analogous to the way modern society compartmentalizes human lives into neat manageable units. Against this, a concept of wholeness is strategically employed. As such Written on the Body has progressively de-emphasized plot and character; examines the nature of love, time, art, sexuality, self-discovery, and the evocative power of language and storytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [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]

Reading the narrator of Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body as transgendered, this article outlines how this approach more accurately accounts for the ambiguity at the heart of the narrator's characterization. Further, it enables a more complex understanding of Winterson's critique and revision of romantic discourse, fleshing out her conceptualization of the language of love as a kind of textual touching. Through this interpretive model, a transgender gaze emerges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I read Jeanette Winterson's novel Written on the Body in relation to Christian and deconstructionist concepts of negative theology. I argue that the impossibly 'gender undeclared' narrator of the novel transforms the sexual relations of the novel into something simultaneously transcendent and immanent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, discussing its use of the female body as a text and, more specifically, as a palimpsest. The article aims to demonstrate that the novel's genderless narrator uses the beloved's body as a palimpsest since in trying to celebrate it, s/he is unable to depict it as it is and merely inscribes a set of meanings onto it. The female body is described through two major sets of images: as a landscape, via a colonial language, and as a diseased body, via an anatomical language. The article discusses this particular use of the female body as a traditional way of describing it, which is confirmed by the novel's wide use of literary references from canonical texts. The novel, then, appears to be positioned outside a feminist or lesbian tradition, since it is not able to represent the female body in a new and fertile way and draws too much on an all-male literary tradition, configuring itself as a palimpsest just like the body it is trying to describe. [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.

Written on the Body depicts the textual diseasing of the narrator and his/her lover that results in "self"-quarantine, as illustrated by the SARS epidemic. Asian-Americans who had traveled to their home countries isolated themselves upon returning to America, a phenomenon the media called "self"-quarantine, which reinforced divisions between interior and exterior spaces. Winterson's narrator quarantines him/herself in a self-defined space of difference where s/he rewrites the spatiality of his/her and Louise's identities and their relationship. The narrator's undefined gender and his/her extra-marital affairs threaten the desire to control difference by clearly demarcating between bodies, genders, and relationships, as medical authorities made the SARS self-quarantines stand for differences between healthy and diseased bodies. I read the differences constructed by scientific discourse to expose the multiple discourses, spaces, and categories that can locate the self by crossing discursive and spatial boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

Presents a criticism and interpretation of Jeanette Winterson's novels. Comments on the language of Winterson's texts; Erotics of loss in Winterson's works, specifically, "Written on the Body" and "The Passion"; Mechanisms of the kiss in Winterson's texts; Languages of love in Winterson's novels.

Discusses how Jeanette Winterson confronts in the novel `Written on the Body' the limitations of science as a discourse about bodies, as a master narrative of salvation, and as a naturalizer of gender-biases. Perception of many reviewers on the main character of the story; Plot of the story; Argument raised by the author in regards to her writing strategy.

Focuses on Jeanette Winterson's use and reworking of postmodern concepts of the body in her novel `Written on the Body.' Constructive ways of theorizing the female body; Critique of androcentric science and medicine to learn more about the female body; Winterson's manner of unsettling perceptions of gendered difference; Body image in women; Different meanings produced by the text.

Presents a critical analysis of the book 'Written on the Body,' by Jeanette Winterson. Rhetorical description of the literature; Textual perspective of the book.

The article focuses on writing as seduction. It cites the novel "Written on the Body," by Jeanette Winterson, which transforms the dichotomy of male and female and achieved by the nameless and genderless narrator. It states that for theorist Jean Baudrillard, seduction belongs to symbolic order, evokes playfulness and deception, and binaries of male and female. It adds that in narrating the novel, the narration becomes seduction in which it diverts things from their identity.