Ungendered Narrator in Written on the Body

Within Jeanette Wintersin’s text Written on the body the role of the ungendered narrator is a highly subversive narrative strategy that serves to challenges traditional gender binarisms that exist as a perversive element within the phallogocentric ideologies of the West. I shall explore how Winterson engages with this task by positing ‘gender’ as unimportant in the construction of individual subjectivity. Secondly, the ungendered narrator challenges the phallogocentric assumption of heteronormativity through a range of characters whose gender and sexuality are constructed as fluid and multiple within the world of the text. In this way, the ungendered narrator implicitly highlights the fact that within contemporary dominant discourses, gender is not only important to lovers, it is what constitutes desire and sexual object choice. Readers are therefore incited to imagine a world, different from our own, in which desire has been dislodged from these regulatory regimes.

Judith Butler's theories of gender provide insight into the subversive status of the ungendered narrator. According to Butler, gendering, or assuming sex, is part of a complex process that constitutes subjects, ushering them into the symbolic and allowing the appropriation of the "speaking I'" (Bodies 3). Butler goes on to explain that the formation of the subject simultaneously produces a “domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects’, but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject” (3). Butler uses the term “abject” to describe the “unlivable and uninhabitable zones of social life” populated by those “who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the ‘unlivable’ is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject.” She claims that this zone functions as a “site of dreaded identification against which, and by virtue of which, the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claims to autonomy and life” (Bodies 3). If assuming sex