THE INTERNET AS A TOOL 💻 🛠 in The Powerbook By: Jeanette Winterson by Briana Travers
Internet= the place where the narrator interacts with others, spends time, & writes 💻
Medium that isn't in the "external"/"real" world
IT IS ... 🛠
A way to Communicate & Create 🖊🛠 #
The Internet= Perhaps a good metaphor for Butler's gender theory 💻
A medium that feels like "reality" (as gender might) but is constructed/ not "real" 💻 👥 #
Taking famous stories and adding and revising them
EX: Guinevere & Lancelot story reclaiming
A way to "travel" 🗺 🛠
A way to navigate identities 👥 #🛠
The job of the narrator, writing fictional stories for others
"'Come on, this is your job. You say you write stories. Write me a story.'" (Terrible things to do to a flower)
"'Freedom for just one night, you said."" (pg. 3) #
"When I sit at my computer, I accept that the virtual worlds I find there parallel my own. I talk to people whose identity I cannot prove." (VIEW)
Though not physically traveling #
Backbone of book structure
“I keep telling this story-- different people, different places, different times-- but always me, always me, always this story, because a story is a tightrope between two worlds.”
Chapter titles #
"This is where your story starts. Here, in these long lines of laptop DNA. Here we take your chromosomes, twenty three pairs, and alter your height, eyes, teeth, sex. This is an invented world." (pg. 20)
“A stranger is a safe place, you can tell a stranger anything.” pg. 62
lower case chapters: narrator at compuuter
uppercase: fictional stories that are created
"I can't take my body through space and time, but I can send my mind, and use the stories, written and unwritten, to tumble me out in a place not yet existing--my future" pg 49
travel through time or place
“I was happy with the lightness of being in a foreign city and the relief from identity it brings” (52) EX: stories in Paris
Blurring of gender lines, exploring sexuality
switching pronouns
Tulip body parts