Literary de-construction of identity categories: a reading of the queer crossings in Jeanette Winterson‘s fiction from a Butlerian perspective of parodic contest


Thesis Type: Postgraduate

Institution Of The Thesis: Middle East Technical University, Turkey

Approval Date: 2017

Thesis Language: English

Student: Mahsasadat Shojaei

Co-Supervisor: NURTEN BİRLİK, ARET KARADEMİR

Abstract:

This thesis aims at re-reading the selected texts of Jeanette Winterson with a Butlerian approach to identity which brings to light the complexities of sex, gender, and desire, as well as the ambivalence of agency and subversion which are often neglected in the academic reception of these texts. With a focus on the de-constructive deployment of parody in these texts, I will explore the "subversive confusions" in Written on the Body, Sexing the Cherry, and The Passion and the way these confusions trouble the heteronormative categories of sex, gender, and desire as well as the myth of continuity and coherence. I will also explore the paradoxical relationship between agency and subordination in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and The Stone God and the way these texts reveal agency irreducible to the free will-determinism binarism.