Subjective construction as discursive effect in Jeanette Winterson’s fiction.

• Main Author: Ng, Jean Kurniati.
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::English
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/50445
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Through the relationship between the body and discourse, representation and represented, imaginary and real, signifier and signified we are able to represent our world. The subordination of one term to the other is embedded deep in these signifying systems. It is within these signifying systems that the case for political legitimation of women must begin to be made. Yet the products of its constructs – primarily gender relations – limits the development of the female subject. The need to transform these signifying systems is pressing. For transformation to be possible, the systems that produce meaning must be first revealed in their inner workings. Second, a re-signification or re-working of meaning through the imaginative language of literary fiction must take place. In this paper I argue that Judith Butler does the first – dismantling the systems of signification in gender constitution – while the fictions of Jeanette Winterson do the second. Winterson’s fiction is a demonstration of a discursive constitution of subjectivity. As literary constructions, her constructs are very much bound up in signification systems. Winterson’s project of transformation, however, does not simply reproduce bodies according to the terms set out by the regulatory fiction. She points to places where there is a gap, a discontinuity between signifier and signified, and language and meaning, to lead to productive insights on a more plural subjective constitution. Through a close analysis of Winterson’s literary techniques, I will examine the ways in which gendered/sexed subjectivities are constituted discursively through these regulatory narratives of bodily conception and how a subversion of these regulatory narratives is possible.