“Where the Mysterious and the Undefined Breathes and Lives”: Kathleen Winter’s Annabel as Intersex Text

Abstract

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