![]() It challenges the reader’s expectations and truly makes them think. It subverts the genre in more ways than one with respect to the narrator’s gender, it demonstrates that readers overall are familiar with the standard tropes of the genre-the archetypal “hero gets the girl” storyline is thrown away in Written on the Body, because we do not know much about the main character and, therefore, cannot neatly put them into preordained categories. Reading a love story without ever determining for sure the narrator’s gender puts an interesting spin on the genre of romance as well. If my theory is correct, it is therefore an interesting authorial choice to have her readers consistently second-guessing themselves about this topic as I did. Perhaps the intent of withholding the narrator’s gender is made to expose the reader’s underlying sexism that, even if we can’t help it, we as humans have a subconscious cerebral structuring system that seeks to label and classify things into familiar categories. The fact that I assumed the status of a person’s gender based merely on the way they communicated says a lot about me as a person-but also about humanity overall. Later, however, I kept changing my mind back and forth, because I was finding it difficult to put my finger on it. ![]() Personally, the narrator came across to me initially as a woman-for no specific reason other than the word choice and language used, which made interesting to me putting it in writing. ![]()
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