earticle

한국어

This article reads Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night as a dismantling of “naturalness” as a colonial technology and as a proposal for queer ecopolitics grounded in sensory practice. Set on the fictional island of Lantanacamara—an allegory patterned on Lantana camara, beautiful yet toxic—the novel exposes how the rhetoric of purity, hygiene, and separation underwrites racialized and gendered hierarchies in the home, church, and poorhouse. Through close readings informed by queer theory and postcolonial/ecological thought, the article argues that the text shifts ethical authority from definition to attunement and from doctrine to care. Tyler’s confessional narration reframes testimony through haptic perception: breath, tremor, odor, and mimicked birdsong function as a nonverbal archive that translates Mala’s trauma into a communal language. Repeating the gestures through which violence is ordinarily enacted, Tyler reverses their performativity so that “touch” becomes a technique of care rather than domination. Otoh’s in-between embodiment extends this reorientation from bedside care to kin-making, replacing heteronormative, reproductive futurity with a relational circuitry sustained by visits, cooking, repair, and slow accompaniment. At their intersection stands Mala’s garden, a multispecies commons where non-intervention takes the form of active hosting— yielding space, waiting, and ritual disposal of the dead—thus converting waste into nutrients and ownership into shared use. The night-blooming cereus condenses this politics into time: it privileges episodic nocturnal emergence over linear daylight chronology, modeling how memory returns through smell, touch, and sound rather than legal narrative. Bringing together Butlerian performativity with Haraway’s “making kin” and sympoiesis, the essay names these practices queer attunement: a micro-politics that unlearns colonial “naturalness” by rerouting perception and relation across human and more-than-human lives. In Mootoo’s novel, healing is not cure but technique— repeating small acts of listening, yielding, and tending that recompose community after violence.