Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body is a love story which challenges not only how the love or sexual desire of one person for another may be expressed or experienced, but how heteronormative society anticipates and expects a determination and categorization of sex or gender as a guarantee of sexual identity. Many critics have debated the gender of Winterson’s narrator to the point where it has become, as Rubinson (2001, p.219) points out, “the component of most interest”. Some, such as Annan, Miner and Kendrick (Rubinson 2001, p. 219) suggest the narrator’s gender ambiguity is a “gimmick”. Others, such as Sutherland, Sheehan and Stuart (Rubinson 2001, p.219) assume because the author is female, so too must be the narrator. Kendrick (Rubinson 2001, p. 219) determines the potent and passionate veracity of the narrator’s love for Louise could be nothing other than heterosexual, and therefore, the narrator must be male. But, as Rubinson (2001, p. 220) asks, “What motivates the desire to know the narrator’s sex? And How would the knowledge affect our reading of the text?” Is the awareness of gender difference – or sameness – a necessary prerequisite for who, how or why we love?

Woods and O’Brien (2005, p. 10-6, 10-7) suggest “Winterson’s text foregrounds the degree to which we use gender as the first and foremost marker of self”. Winterson’s tactic of denying her readers the possibility to form an identification with the narrator based on gender emphasizes that apparent need. The narrator her/himself makes it quite clear that he/she does not consider gender a determinate in her/his choices in sexual partners. And why, Winterson would seem to be asking, must we? Though it is undeniably a novel of romance, it stands apart from other texts of the genre by what it refuses to indulge in as romantic. There are no voluptuous breasts, curvaceous hips or firm buttocks; no bulging biceps or pouting lips. There is no hard, throbbing penis or dripping, expectant vagina. Rather than dwell on the obvious physical iconography of sexual attraction, titillation and consummation, the narrator indulges in erotic fascination with a soup Louise has prepared for them to share:

I would gladly have traded the blood in my body for half a pint of vegetable stock. Let me be diced carrot, vermicelli, just so that you will take me in your mouth (Winterson 1992, p. 36).

Rather than looking to the bedroom for sexual fulfillment, the narrator desperately searches her/his soup bowl:

When I ate my own soup I strained to taste her skin. She had to be here, there must be something of her left. I would find her in the oil and onions, detect her through the garlic (Winterson 1992, p. 36-37).

In the latter part of the novel, the narrator’s love for Louise becomes even more interesting, or perhaps obsessive, or even, as Woods and O’Brien (2005, p. 10-8) claim, pathological. The narrator, having run away thinking Louise’s battle with cancer will be better fought if she is with her doctor husband, begins to imagine him/herself not merely touching Louise’s skin, but dwelling beneath it, coursing through every nook and cranny of her inner flesh: “Let me penetrate you….I would devote my life to marking your passageways” (Winterson 1992, p. 119). As Woods and O’Brien (2005, p. 10-8) put it, “the narrator celebrates Louise’s flesh at a cellular level”. Yet still, the narrator does not indulge in fantasising the penetration of those internal organs which are crucial to Louise’s identification as female. What happens is even Louise’s gender is pushed aside as irrelevant, as the narrator explores a fantasy of flowing through her veins like the blood we all share, male or female. She/he begs to “stand guard over” Louise by being within her veins to stop her rebellious T-cells (Winterson 1992, p. 115). If, as Butler (Lindenmeyer 1999, p. 49) states, “the very surface of the body … is produced gendered”, going beneath that surface degenders the body.

By providing the reader with a narrator of indeterminate gender whose love is not driven by gender, Winterson, as Lindenmeyer (1999, p. 48) claims, ruffles “perceptions of gendered difference” and thereby challenges categories of male/female and heterosexual/homosexual. Winterson suggests there is another way to love that has no need for physical, social or sexual determination. Winterson, as Hansen (2005, p. 367) states, “offers an alternative mode of addressing metaphysical questions such as what it means to love, what love is, or how we know ourselves and others in loving”. Winterson challenges the cultural necessity to determine and categorise sex as a guarantee of sexual identity and in doing so, subverts the notion that sexual relationships depend on that identity being firmly established and stable.

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