Transqueer Negotiations and Decolonial Space-Making in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions

Abstract

Abstract: This article intervenes in the long critical reception of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions as a postcolonial feminist novel by using a decolonial framework—one that is attuned to the history of how the cisgender heterosexual gender binary constructs patriarchy—to propose a transqueer reading of the novel. A transqueer hermeneutic serves two functions in this article: first, it foregrounds the centrality of movement in the prefix “trans”; and, second, it emphasizes how this movement queerly manipulates gender and sexual normativity. A transqueer reading of Dangarembga’s novel points to gendered and sexual subversions of the colonial gender binary by arguing that the protagonist, Tambu, queerly reorients herself to and transly negotiates with the physical spaces in which she is placed instead of simply escaping them. Thus, Nervous Conditions quietly delinks from the colonial cisgender heterosexual binary. Overall, I examine the relation between colonial physical space and Tambu’s transqueer subversions by showing how she moves, however fleetingly, within and through decolonial and liminal spaces of refusal.