To explore gender in language use in Written on the Body I drew up a typology of gender clues in (written) language and applied them to the novel. Given Winterson’s contestational stance on gender, sexuality and identity and their subsequent transposition into and representation in fiction, and the numerous critical responses the book has received from scholars and others working within gender studies, etc., the translation was examined to see whether the emergent translation strategy manifested an awareness of Winterson’s sometimes evasive style of writing in the novel. The focus is in particular on how the translator dealt with difficult issues of gender, sexuality and identity in the novel. In my master’s thesis I examine the translation tactics and overall strategy used in the Dutch translation Op het lichaam geschreven (1992) of Jeanette Winterson’s novel Written on the Body (1992). Androgyny’s ability to bring this about can be seen to lie in its fluid and multidimensional nature. Concepts of androgyny will be shown to be bound up with destabilizing the categorization of people via gender and sexuality in its ultimate aim to become obsolete as a referent in a post-gender society. The dissertation will look at how this is achieved within the novels through a consideration of plot, narrative and textual analysis. The forms in which androgyny is manifested in the four novels under consideration here will be seen to range from the embodiment of both maleness and femaleness in futuristic androgynous humans in Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), the earliest novel analysed here, through to poststructuralist genderless and intersexed narrators in the two later novels, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1992) and Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (2002). Androgyny will be shown to be an archetype which takes on various forms depending on the social circumstances in which it emerges. Concepts of androgyny within contemporaneous literary and social theory will also contextualise the fictional representations, looking at how they both draw on and reflect theoretical concepts and social discourses.
A brief overview of the development of the idea of androgyny within literary texts from early creation mythology, through Plato to the fiction of the modernists provides contextual background to understanding current representations.
This dissertation will look at the concept of androgyny and the form this takes in contemporary novels, focusing on four different works of fiction taken from the late 1960s to early 2000s.
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