Abstract
This article explores the potentiality of queer and postcolonial theories to imagine non-violent ways of belonging. Focusing on Shani Mootoo’s novels, Cereus Blooms at Night and He Drown She in the Sea, it suggests that the process of imagining relationships beside the demands of the colonial and heterosexual nation is a politically imperative project. This work is located at the intersections of queer and postcolonial theories in an attempt to, like Mootoo’s novels, render intelligible those bodies and histories that come into being outside of existing norms. In this sense, it suggests that by existing beside norms we can begin to reformulate, revisit and recreate boundaries of existence and belonging. Moreover, it argues that these actions are constantly in process and always coming into being, thus demanding perpetual critique and responsibility as political necessities. Finally, it suggests that there is a need to work with our own vulnerabilities rather than representing the human as a contained, coherent, invincible being. Through this idea of the vulnerable, articulated in Mootoo’s texts, we begin to see non-violent belonging as becoming imaginable.