“Mini Death, and a Rebirth”: Talking the Crossing in Shani Mootoo’s Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab

Abstract

Through a critical analysis of Shani Mootoo’s Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (2014), Chatterji focuses on gender crossing as a form of performance studies that inaugurates a paradigmatic shift in the political and linguistic representations of queer desires in Trinidad which need not necessarily be mapped in terms of heterosexuality, homosexuality, transgender, or cross-dresser. While most literary representation in the Caribbean queer hermeneutics have been from male to female, Chatterji analyzes how a female-to-male crossing does not necessarily confirm to a phallic structure. This new form of body—anatomically androgynous but performatively male—becomes an anti-hegemonic form that contextualizes regendering as a strategy to combat the comfort of settling to a Western issue-based identity politics. Drawing closely on race, class, and migration, the chapter addresses the need for Indo-Caribbean feminist intervention to combat the intolerance extended toward bodies that do not fit the norm of a homosexual identity nor have been politicized in regional or global feminist epistemology.