Fluid identities and gendered intimacies

Winterson’s Written on the Body (1992) deals with a brief but passionate relationship between its narrator and a beautiful, married woman called Louise. The novel tackles romantic relationships, love, loss and sexuality from an experimental point of view and presents an interesting, challenging feature: a genderless narrator. Winterson has created a narrative where every reference to the gender of the narrative voice has been carefully omitted, thus engaging the reader to participate in the construction of both the novel and the narrator’s identity. For this reason, I would like to argue that this deliberate play on gender ambiguity places the reader in a situation where he or she is induced to deconstruct perceptions about sexuality.