Embattled Subjects: the Role of Textual Masculinity in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body

In theorizing lesbian fiction, there is frequently an emphasis on heterosexuality as the social norm and on external heterosexual structures battled by and battering the lesbian protagonist (or protagonist couple), usually in an antagonistic relationship so that rewriting heteronormativity is stressed at the content level. A reading of Jeanette Winterson’s novel Written on the Body that is congruent with lesbian politics is hard to achieve if the emphasis is on looking for an overt critique and opposition to a heterosexual society. It is, however, easier to achieve if the emphasis is on looking at the evidence for a resistance to a patriarchal heterosexual gender matrix, but it is still not clear-cut. It is not about a failure to choose sides. Winterson’s text chooses a side, but it is a side that says relationships and sexuality are complicated, and intrinsically both fraught with a struggle for power and engendered. The dividing line between masculine and feminine, however, is not sex. Gender vacillates within sex in Winterson’s writing. Dominance