Technological Practices of Embodiment Reflected in Jeanette Winterson’s Fictional Framing of Posthuman Subjects

Abstract

Focusing on The PowerBook and The Stone Gods, this article explores the ways in which Jeanette Winterson articulates the interconnections between consciousness and memory, delineates their role in identity formation and reveals how posthuman subjects’ practices of embodiment work to undermine both heteronormative and anthropocentric worldviews. The technologically inscribed bodies of the characters portrayed in these two novels, together with Winterson’s rhizomatic conceptualization of space and her vertical figuration of time, allow for the time-travelling endeavours of e-storyteller Ali/x and of Robo-sapiens-cum-Robo-head Spike. Such fictional entities prompt investigations into the essence of social-material encounters, of subject-object interdependence, of matter-energy vitality, of interaction and intra-action, of reflexive thought and of self-configuration.