According to Judith Butler "[i]f gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way" (6). By this quote, Butler wants to argue the idea that both sex and gender are products of the culture; we can say that they are socially constructed. We can relate this statement with the novel Written on the Body written by Jeanette Winterson. The novel deals with identity, sexuality and discourse. The author does not focus on an issue to find an answer in her novel; she focuses on the idea of telling a story in a different way. She concentrates on cultural boundaries, which are the binary pairs that society is based on, and she deconstructs the binary pair based on gender, which is male and female. Jeanette wants to escape binary oppositions and she uses a lot of literary issues in order to show the deconstruction of boundaries, such as fairy tales, romances, among others. We find that Winterson plays with the ambiguity of desire, sex and gender as a parallel of male and female. The author claims gender being cultural, not natural and she divides the issue of the body into two: sex as a natural issue and gender as a cultural issue. There are two main examples in the novel that Winterson uses in order to deconstruct gender and, also the stereotypes that readers have according to culture and society. On the one hand, we see a genderless narrator in order to evoke the reader to question gender assumptions in order to classify the gender of the narrator. On the other hand, Louise's character in the first and the second part, this represents different figures. In the following essay, I will be discussing the issue of gender and sex in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body.
To begin with, gender is assumed to be something culturally fixed. The best example in society would be women because they have a fixed role and behaviour in the Western culture.
