Queer potentialities and queering home in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night

Abstract

This article employs queer potentiality as a reading strategy to unpack the ways in which Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night adroitly brings forth queer voices and visions on home and belonging that have been rejected, erased, or ignored. More precisely, through the juxtaposition of Gully Queen, a real-life transgender Jamaican woman, and Tyler and Otoh, Mootoo’s transgender protagonists, I demonstrate how these gender non-conforming bodies use queer potentiality to create a necessary disruption to conventional ideas of home; such a disruption educes a re-articulation of belonging. Here, queer potentiality is understood to be a specific kind of resistance that functions as an adjuvant for envisioning and inventing home. By interjecting queer voices and experiences into various Caribbean spaces and discourses, the non-conforming bodies explored here produce “queer moments of significance” that signal not only how non-conforming bodies will exist in the nation but also the manner in which they demand legitimacy and a place to call home.