Thurs. 2/10
As some of you noted at the end of class on Tuesday: So much fruit in this book!! But hopefully that wasn’t too distracting and you were able to enjoy the complex story that unfurled throughout Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry. The dual narratives of Jordan’s and the Dog Woman’s perspectives combined with the multiple timelines and re-told fairytales mean that there is a lot to unpack in a book that isn’t very long at all.
I chose to read this at this after finishing up our Butler readings because of the way Winterson plays with gender, the passage of time, and other heteronormative constructs. This is also a book about, among many other things, rebirth and renewal (hence the title, if anyone knows what it means to “sex” a plant in gardening terminology), and I think there’s a lot there that can be connected to drag culture and gender performativity.
For your asynchronous work today, I’d like you to do some reflective writing about the book’s connections to Butler. In 2-3 pages in a document in your Google Drive folder, reflect upon where we see Winterson playing with heteronormative concepts (gender roles, gendered stereotypes, etc.) in the book. How do we see characters living subversively and not adhering to heteronormative frameworks? How does the book itself push against norms – could we say that Winterson was “queering” the typical novel in some way as she put this book together? If so, how?
For Tuesday, we’ll be reading Halberstam on “low theory” and failure as we move into a section of the course on playfulness, humor, and campiness in queer theory. There’s some campiness in Sexing the Cherry, too, which we’ll discuss.
