Language In Jeanette Winterson's Written On The Body

The Battle Between an Imperialist White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy and Subversive Language in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body

In an attempt to address the foundational “interlocking political systems” of Western society, American feminist and author, bell hooks uses the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy”(Understanding Patriarchy). There is a need to address this intricate phrase when trying to understand the usage of language and the influence culture has on the development of discourse because it is within this system that language gains authority. With this particular master narrative so deeply embedded in discourse it is nearly impossible to escape the hierarchical binaries that live within each of these

Scientific and artistic modalities are the two most notable forms of discourse Winterson handles during this renovation of language. These two genres are of relevance because “scientific and medical discourses have a history of conveying sexist ideologies” and aesthetic discourses are understood as the binary opposition to the scientific (Rubinson 218). The problem here is not that science and art are fundamentally different in some sense, that they oppose one another, but that within the language exists a hierarchy that helps define it. Furthermore, “scientific and medical discourses convey stereotypical gender characteristics in describing the body” rending the female anatomy “passive, receptive, fragile and dependant” (218). Additionally, “medical discourses typically assume a tone of anonymous authority” (218). However, in the following passages, the authority of this language is challenged when Winterson directly includes it within her text and critically confronts these ideologies by reshaping the language and aesthetically remastering the