Bodies of water are not merely rhetorical devices in Jeanette Winterson's novels; they are new posthuman subject images that carry profound political and ethical connotations, directly responding to the urgent water crisis of the Anthropocene. Grounded in close reading of Sexing the Cherry, The Stone Gods, Written on the Body and other key texts, this study integrates Astrida Neimanis's theory of ‘bodies of water’ to challenge two interrelated yet distinct predicaments: modern water discourse reduces water to a universal and isolated abstract resource (H2O), engendering hydroschizophrenia – a cognitive fragmentation that severs water from its ecological and cultural specificity, leading to severe water resource destruction. Paralleling this, Nietzsche's ‘eternal recurrence’ embodies a philosophical rupture: it frames repetition as a sterile, non-generative cycle by severing life from its aqueous origins. Winterson subverts both paradigms by reimagining bodies of water as posthuman embodied images. Through connecting amniotic fluid with primordial evolutionary soup and revealing the abyssal qualities of the human body as a watery cyborg, Winterson endows water with gestationality, transcorporeality, and unknowability, impeling us to recognise material water as an integral part of the planetary hydrocommons we co-create. Ultimately, these figurations dismantle humanist myths of self-sufficiency and isolation, disintegrate its illusory unitary subject, and forge a relational ethic. They embody a hydrocommons ‘we’ – a porous, aqueous subjectivity that dissolves human/non-human binaries and extends responsibility across time and space, offering a textually grounded framework for posthuman ecocriticism and blue humanities.
Shaojing Lin (Fri,) studied this question.