Subject area: English language and literature; Gender, sexuality, identity and psychoanalysis
Supervisor: Dr. Steve Vine & Dr. Brigid Haines
Research degree: PhD
Thesis Title: Fetishism and Fluidity: Jeanette Winterson's Narratives of Diverse Pleasure and Desire, 1985-2015
Jeanette Winterson is an award-winning contemporary British writer and an influential figure in English-language literature who has been described as ‘one of the most gifted writers working today’. This study examines in Winterson’s work the queering of fetishism, which is a new and important perspective on the psychoanalytical reading of such texts. A queer reading of fetishism is an extremely useful tool to analyse writing like Winterson’s, especially when discussing the body and fetishism, and insufficient critical attention has currently been paid to the possibilities it presents.
This thesis uses an amalgamation of established and contemporary theoretical approaches to the body, gender, and sexuality; this is necessary to understand the transcending of boundaries that occurs in Winterson’s treatment of gender, identity, and sexuality. Psychoanalytical theories from Sigmund Freud, Jacque Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler are employed, combined with an interdisciplinary span of contemporary literary criticism from post-structuralist, feminist, and cultural materialist writing. This thesis argues that Winterson formats, decodes, refashions, and innovates discourses of sexuality, identity, and gender to demonstrate the existence of diverse and fluid desire in the self and the other.
Swansea University Arts and Humanities Postgraduate Conference 2014 Journal
Published Article Entitle: Winterson’s Monstrous Bodies and Desire in The Daylight Gate (2012)
2nd Winner for Poster competition at Postgraduate Conference College of Arts and Humanities October 10th 2014
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