Real and hyperreal: A politics of the other

Abstract

The English writer Jeanette Winterson opens a way for a politics of gender not constrained by the stereotyping binary oppositions of sexual difference. In her novel, The Passion she disrupts the discourses of sexual difference that determine how gender is constructed in our society today. Winterson’s bisexual protagonist the Venetian girl, Villanelle uses disguise in her pursuit of passion, a disguise that puts her in the in-between position of a bisexual, neither one nor the other. “I took to working double shifts at the Casino, dressing as a woman in the afternoon and a young man in the evenings”(1987:62). “It was part of the game, trying to decide which sex was hidden behind tight breeches and extravagant face-paste” (1987:54). Villanelle when speaking of her passion, her jouissance, her desire as an expression or as a construction of her gender says that, “What you are on one day will not constrain you on the next. You may explore yourself freely and, if you have wit or wealth no one will stand in your way” (Winterson 1987:150). Here, Winterson demonstrates that gender is performative because the body takes over in a discursive situation. Gender is performative because there is no definitive relationship between the surface of the body, ‘the map’ and its inner fantasies, “the cities of the interior”(Winterson 1987:150).

The cities of the interior are vast, and do not lie on any map. (Winterson The Passion 1987:150)