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If, as Michel Foucault maintains, the function of an author is "tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses" (130), then any dispute over the legal rights to an author's name will constitute a struggle over how that function should be defined and articulated. The issue becomes especially contentious when the site of the struggle is the Worldwide Web and the author is someone like Jeanette Winterson, who in much of her work celebrates the fluid, decentered subject. I would like to juxtapose Winterson's representation of a postmodern subjectivity in her fiction with the dispute over the domain name Jeanette Winterson on the World Wide Web, hoping to raise some questions about the subject's ontological status and its representation.
Winterson is commonly read and understood as a postmodern author. As Doan has argued, Winterson's work is imbued with many of the conventions associated with postmodernism: intertextuality, parody, pastiche, self-reflexivity, fragmentation, the questioning of master narratives, the problematizing of closure, the valorization of instability, and the suspicion of coherence (138). It clearly aims to challenge patriarchal and heterosexist discursive practices by facilitating a potentially productive oppositional stance and critique. Broadly speaking, Winterson's concerns in her fiction, the categories she interrogates, may be said to be history and the subject. Both of these she assumes largely to have been inscribed in the past by male-centered, male-privileged narratives. Her strategy is to reconfigure such narratives so as to construct other cultural spaces within which it may be possible to enact alternative performances. Often, though not always, she is concerned particularly with creating new spaces capable of articulating and celebrating lesbian identities and desires (Roesner 105).
In Winterson's repudiation of master narratives and in her attempts to give voice to alternative ones, one of her most consistent targets, not surprisingly, has been the Enlightenment subject: the fixed, unitary, coherent individual. As Meyer suggests, any "unitary approach" to Winterson or her work "forecloses on the multiplicity that she herself seeks to engender"; instead, "we must allow the novels to display the author's developing theory of contradiction in identity" (210). Winterson repeatedly celebrates the decentering of the fixed subject in her fiction, largely through what is for her the deeply political act of...