Trans Bodies and Embodiments in Shani Mootoo’sCereus Blooms at Night

Abstract

This article studies how three kinds of trans embodiment—trans-speciation, sartorial metamorphosis, and nonmedical gender transition—in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) unsettle the anthropocentric idea of nature, the genital view of sex, gender, and sexuality, and the pathological framing of trans people in colonial epistemologies. In a postcolonial novel set in the colonial Caribbean, these kinds of trans embodiment interrogate the nature-culture or human-nonhuman divide, allowing certain characters to feel at home in their trans bodies rather than, as per liberal narratives of progress, seeking a new home elsewhere. Like intersex nonhuman species (particularly the snail and the cereus), some trans embodiments also interrogate the enterprise of sex/gender dimorphism.