Queer Objects: Gendered Interests and Distant Things in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Abstract

© 2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System ecent materialist literary criticism has freed the fictional object from its old duties―simulating verisimilitude or standing in for capital and commodity―and illuminated the structural, affective, and aesthetic roles of things in literature. But these newly visible objects are not easily interpolated into existing critical frameworks because they are neither properly material and independent from subjective description, perception, and concern nor entirely comfortable in the humanistic fabric of the novel. One practice well suited to describe such things is new feminist materialism, an umbrella phrase for a set of practices that share the goals of moving feminist theory beyond the impasse of the linguistic turn and reconciling the insights of constructionism with the thingness of the world. By balancing language and matter, new feminist materialism seems well situated to describe objects embedded in the aesthetic world of the novel.1 Yet a lingering