BLURRING THE DICHOTOMOUS LOGIC OF MODERNITY IN JEANETTE WINTERSON’S SEXING THE CHERRY

Abstract

Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989) is a novel which narrates the story of a woman called the Dog-Woman, her adopted son Jordan, tales of Twelve Dancing Princesses who live happily ever after they marry but with a difference. The characters in the novel transgress  gender boundaries in different ways. In this line of thinking, Sexing the Cherry explores the constructed nature of gender roles and lays bare the epistemic violence done to the lower leg of the binary logic, namely women. This study approaches the text from a feminist perspective, since a woman without a name, a boy without an origin object to the dichotomous logic of Cartesian ideology and the conscious subversion of the Twelve Dancing Princesses’ tales reveal the fluid dynamics of gender construction. The way the characters cherish the multiplicity invites the reader to give a feminist hearing of the text. In order to display how gender roles are subverted and how the characters transgress the boundaries of patriarchy, this paper will mainly dwell on the Dog- Woman, Jordan, and Twelve Dancing Princesses by laying bare how they each challenge to the dichotomous logic of modernity in different ways. Toward this objective, the present paper elaborates on the Dog-Woman’s fight against the epistemic violence, Jordan’s lack of origin, and Twelve Dancing Princesses’ narrating their own stories; and argue that they all pose a different challenge - the logic of patriarchy. To that end, this study explores how these characters defy patriarchal authority and subvert the constructed gender roles.