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Written on the Body: Lambda Literary Award (Vintage International)

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As trans and non-binary folks, we are often discouraged from advocating for our own bodies, as if we do not know what is best for ourselves. This anthology is filled with such tenderness, resilience and vulnerability; a beautiful love letter to queerness, to otherness, to the power of reclaiming our bodies as our own. The novel breaks again from its conventional structure to offer a series of narrative poems on various parts of the body, including the skeleton, the skin, the cranial cavity, and the eye. 13y isolating and examining the parts of the body, the narrator burnishes her or his love for Louise in its particulars. Yet Winterson’s language for the first time seems less clever, less daring than before, as if by accepting the medical book’s categories and definitions her own adventurous language is stilted. These are familiar body parts, with familiar assumptions of what the body is and does. The one exception is the section on the nose, which is really a section on the scent of Louise’s vagina. In this loving, earthy detail, Winterson can shine, perhaps because she is claiming this untraveled literary territory as her own. “I shall visit her gamey low-roofed den and feed from her,” the narrator declares. The writing is provocative, and, more than in any of the other descriptions of the body parts, the narrator’s obsessive desire shines through.

I said: ‘Oh good. Now I can sleep easy in my bed tonight.’ The senior man exchanged a glance with his colleague and said: ‘So can we, laddie, so can we’. The vesicles multiplied, itched like hell, scabbed and eventually went away. I survived. But I felt as if one of the wings of the angel of death had casually brushed over my face. We never told my parents. Winterson, Jeanette (2011). Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?. New York, NY: Jonathan Cape. pp.17–18. ISBN 978-0-8021-2010-6. OL 16488820W . Retrieved 1 November 2023.Brooks, Libby (2 September 2000). "Power surge". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on 12 October 2008 . Retrieved 11 December 2016. With this new relationship come troubles in the form of fear of commitment and hurting the current partner Jacqueline. Jacqueline is described as a stable character, so the irony of the vile manner she handles the narrator's cheating is thus even more ironic. The Queen's Birthday Honours List 2018". gov.uk. Archived from the original on 10 June 2018 . Retrieved 8 June 2018.

Critical discussions of the story tend to focus on whether Kafka is foreseeing the murderous regimes of Hitler and Stalin (or even the tortures practiced in our own day). Is the apparently liberal and humanitarian visitor too cautious in declaring his opposition to this brutal method of execution, which is in any case on the verge of obsolescence? Is Kafka saying that life is bound to involve suffering? These are all intriguing questions and one can speculate endlessly on what the sage of Prague is really on about. But I would like to draw your attention to a more specific point in the story. The ‘sentence’ that is written on the condemned man's body is not what is to be done to him but the lesson that the authorities say he needs to learn. In the case of the prisoner in the story it's ‘honour thy superiors’ and in the case of the officer, who eventually decides to feed himself to the machine, it is ‘be just’. The story is told by an unnamed narrator whose gender is not revealed either. The narrator recalls his love life and talks about clichés of love, marriage and gender. From previous relationships can be gathered that the narrator has a difficult time settling down with one person, inability to maintain the love connection after some time has passed. Now when I see patients with that random pattern of urticarial papules distributed in haphazard little groups, I know exactly what is wrong. I tell them they have bed bugs. Most are inclined to think I am crazy or being offensive, but I persevere. It's not usually necessary to send for pest control: a good blast all round the home with a Crawling Insect Spray from the chemist will generally do the business.Winner, Lesbian Memoir or Biography category, Lambda Literary Awardsm for Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? [26] The strength of Written on the Body is in its discourse on love, especially love as encountered by this sarcastic, startling narrator. For readers looking for an exploration of lesbian or bisexual themes, this is a book closer in tone to The Passion, with its understated treatment of bisexuality, than Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, an account of a young lesbian’s coming of age. When read for its plot alone, the novel betrays an irksome, tedious quality. The writing becomes too earnest, overly sincere, intense. Still, there is plenty else here to appreciate, especially the quirky narrator and the seductive narrative voice. It is almost as if Winterson were demonstrating that the familiar love story of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl can be made new again through sheer virtuoso writing and clever gender-bending.

Jeanette Winterson: 'The male push is to discard the planet: all the boys are going off into space' ". The Guardian. 25 July 2021. Archived from the original on 31 August 2021 . Retrieved 3 September 2021. How interesting it might have been if Winterson had pursued her examination of the dramatic way the narrator’s boyfriend Frank marked his body by running a gold chain through nipple rings. This would have been an opportunity to delve deeply into the ways persons “write” their bodies and their bodies “write” them. Instead, the narrator simply says, “The effect should have been deeply butch but in fact it looked rather like the handle of a Chanel shopping bag”: quite amusing, yes, and also studiously dismissive of any other way the chain and nipple rings might be “read” by gay or straight culture.

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Bamby Salcedo, President & CEO of The TransLatin@ Coalition Written on the Body beautifully paints the picture of what happens to people of trans experience when it comes to sexual assault and violence. This book provides the opportunity to tell our stories on a way that is our own, because these are our experiences. It is a way for us to find some type of healing, to find comfort and to provide some type of hope to many of us who are still dealing with these difficult issues. Winterson, Jeanette (21 September 2023). "Jeanette Winterson: I didn't believe in ghosts… until I started living with them". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 22 September 2023. Jeanette Winterson on the threat of closure to her Spitalfields deli". Evening Standard. 31 January 2017. Archived from the original on 12 November 2020 . Retrieved 12 January 2019.

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