JEANETTE WINTERSON’S THE POWERBOOK:THE NARRATOR AS A CYBORG WRITER WHO ENGAGES IN QUANTUM THEORY

Abstract

In this paper, I strive to demonstrate how Jeanette Winterson, in The Powerbook, challenges the binary functioning of the Western Tradition and enacts the blurring of boundaries between male and female gender, between material and virtual ontologies, and between author and text, thus exposing the fluidity of these apparently opposing categories. Winterson‟s text is explored in ways that show how she, by writing in a way that can be related to Donna Haraway‟s cyborg manifesto and to Karen Barad‟s agential realist ontology, both confronts the idea of a self-evident author and makes evident how both sides of the binary “intra-act,” a term suggested by Barad, and contaminate each other.