"Sex, Gender And Desire in Jeanette Winterson's The Passion"

In this article I discuss how in her novel The Passion, Jeanette Winterson redefines the paradigm of fluidity as alternative to the Western dualogical order and its power structures. By drawing and reworking one of the most powerful symbolic events narrated in the Biblical text, the Passion of Christ, she explores and unravels a whole network of binaries to re-map the boundaries that delimit individual fixed identities and their relation to the external world. I focus in particular on the ways in which the process of subverting gender and bodily binaries is accomplished at a stylistic level through the deconstruction of the realist tradition of the novel through the adoption of historiographic metafiction and the fantastic. I examine how she gradually dissolves the initial dual structure of the text (two different narrative voices that embody two different worldviews) into a final fluid representation of narration and gendered subjectivity, whose redefinition entails an interaction with alterity. I then analyse how the interaction of the first-person narrative voices (male and female) of the two protagonists of the novel contributes to further destructuring the form of the novel as well remapping the boundaries between masculinity and femininity. In addition, I show how gender differences are blurred and then dissolved by the figurative journeys that the protagonists undertake – journeys across geographical, historical, bodily and gender boundaries, which activate a process of melting and overcoming of binaries. As a consequence, textual, narrative, historical, bodily and gender limits are deconstructed to unveil a multilayered version of identity and reality.