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The main purpose of this paper is to analyze Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, from the perspective of Judith Butler’s queer theory, particularly using Butler’s views on performativity and melancholia. According to Butler, the radical disjunction between heterosexuality and homosexuality is simply not true: there are structures of psychic homosexuality within heterosexual relations. Therefore, the abjected outside is, after all, no more than the inside of the melancholic subject as its own founding repudiation. For Butler, gender as an identity is a tenuous social construction built through a repetition of stylized acts. Consequently, the postulation of an objective gender identity turns out to be a fiction which regulates behaviors and social roles. Jeanette, the heroine, embarks on a journey of discovering her sexuality, which is in conflict with compulsory heterosexuality. The pain that Jeanette had to endure as a homosexual, as well as her methods of recovery from that pain, takes on an expansive meaning when Butler’s discussion of gender identity is applied to the work. This paper focuses on the possibility of discovering new gender identities through Jeanette, the subject of paradoxical obedience that repeatedly performs gender norms but constantly deviates from consistency in the repetition.