Queering history: palimpsestuous bodies and theirstories in Zen Cho’s The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water

Abstract

ABSTRACT In her fantasy novella, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water (2020), transnational Malaysian writer Zen Cho agitates and disrupts Malaysia’s heteropatriarchal and ethnocentric history as well as Eurocentric LGBT discourses with the revisionary reinscriptions of gender and sexuality to give voice to decolonial theirstories, particularly those belonging to the minority and subaltern community of queer identities. Emphasising difference and heterogeneity, these reinscriptions not only critique and rewrite – effectively queering – Malaysia’s monolithic historical past and postcolonial present, but also reveal the palimpsestuousness of queer bodies as the discursive boundaries between history and fiction, real and fantasy, self and other, are deliberately blurred, even dismantled, in the intertwined narratives of masculinity and femininity, heterosexuality and homosexuality. Drawing on the intersections of queer and palimpsest, this essay moreover examines how the queering of history involves queer retrospection through the recuperation of forgotten or erased theirstories, notably the ‘queer’ religious discourse and history represented by the gender ambiguous and fluid Buddhist figure of Guanyin. By confronting a monolithic past, the novella ultimately illuminates the path for the speculation of queer futures.