We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
"Sticky" Identities: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Nalo Hopkinson's The Chaos.
- Authors
Shaw, Kristen
- Abstract
This article examines the intersection of race, gender and sexuality in Nalo Hopkinson's young adult speculative novel The Chaos (2012) through a close reading of Scotch, a mixed-race teenager whose body becomes increasingly covered by black tar like patches. Scotch's bodily transformation occurs alongside a catastrophe characterized by the eruption of fantastic and supernatural elements across the globe. Weaving together the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, theories of performativity, and critical race theory, I examine how race, sexuality and gender come to signify as a result of their positioning within a socio-material and affective network of relations. Employing this framework challenges theories of race as either purely biological or entirely socially inscribed, instead, considering how one's material and social positionality determines how certain bodies materialize and become legible. Subsequently, I argue that the narrative shift signaled by the emergence of the Chaos coincides with a re-coding of the black patches to represent Scotch's deterritorialization or becoming-anomalous. The third section of my argument examines how Scotch's eventual reterritorialization at the conclusion of the novel problematizes a reading of The Chaos as promoting, without qualification, the anomalous as a means of unsettling rigid identity categories and the set of binary oppositions upon which they rely. Despite her reterritorialization, I also explore how Scotch's experience becoming-anomalous acts as a catalyst for her acceptance of other, non-normative bodies, and for her transition from a state of solipsism to community engagement. In sum, Hopkinson's novel provides an alternative and affirmative ethics of the body and a model for accepting non-normative embodiment in different social and political contexts.
- Subjects
CHAOS, The (Book : Hopkinson); HOPKINSON, Nalo, 1960-; RETERRITORIALIZATION; SOCIAL change; YOUNG adult fiction
- Publication
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 2017, Vol 28, Issue 3, p425
- ISSN
0897-0521
- Publication type
Literary Criticism