K "Where the Mysterious and the Undefined Breathes and Lives": Kathleen Winter's Annabel as Intersex Text Paul Chafe athleen Winter's annabel (2010) tells the story of Wayne Blake, born in early March 1968 in the village of Croydon Harbour, on the southeast coast of Labrador. As revealed to Wayne later in his teenage years, piecemeal through several people, he is born a "true hermaphrodite" (236). As the doctor defining his condition informs him, "It means you have everything boys have, and girls too. An almost complete presence of each" (236). Wayne's true duality is revealed earlier when his mother, Jacinta, takes the infant Wayne to Goose Bay General Hospital, where the child is measured by a phalometer-a tiny silver ruler etched with a marking at 1.5 centimetres used to determine if the child is to be raised as a girl or a boy. As that doctor explains to Jacinta, "This baby can be raised as male" because the penis "is the necessary length.. .. It barely grazes one and a half centimetres" (52). Here, not for the only time, Wayne defies classification: stating that the child can be raised as male does nothing to deny the child's potential to be raised as female. In land as extreme as Winter's Labrador, Wayne will have a very difficult time claiming his space. He is raised as a boy, but his female self, Annabel, is always present. His body is not double but multiple, and its performance not only signifies "the emptiness of signs" but also unhinges the narratives of the people and the land that come in contact with him. 1 His body, neither male nor female nor both, but something other and something more, proves that Wayne as well as all other people and places can contain multitudes and cannot be limited, known, or claimed through a definitive story. His intersex body defies everything around him-the social norms of his parents and their societies, the linguistic parameters of self-identification, and even the supposed laws of nature by which so many of these characters live their lives at the edge of the Labrador wilderness. The presence
This article begins with an analytical itemization of several moments in recent Newfoundland and Labrador fictions in which identity, culture, and history are presented and romanticized through heteronormative sexual relationships and metaphors. Having identified such depictions as established tropes in Newfoundland and Labrador literature, this article then considers a new wave of queer representations of Newfoundland place and people in novels and stories by Jessica Grant, Kathleen Winter, Eva Crocker, Michael Winter, and others to examine how these instances contradict and complicate heteronormative images of consummation and control. Finally, this article will accept the invitation extended by Scott Lauria Morgensen in “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities” to consider how queer histories can be consumed by settler nationalism and then question if these new Newfoundland narratives are unsettling and transformative or simply more stories supporting the complexity, as well as the inevitability and finality, of an Indigenized Newfoundland settler culture.
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