MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Nalo Hopkinson is often praised as an author whose work crosses boundaries and transgresses norms. Indeed, Hopkinson’s characters often trespass where they are not welcome, straddling the borders between nations, between socioeconomic groups, and between the fantastic and the everyday. This paper argues, however, that Hopkinson’s 2013 novel, Sister Mine, falls far short of the author’s usual resistance and instead presents a failed transgression. In brief, Sister Mine uses fantasy and Caribbean spiritual legend to explore family, disability, and group identity, through the story of Makeda, a young woman struggling to find a balance between independence and acceptance within her family of modern-day demigods. This paper reads Makeda’s celestial family as a powerful, hegemonic social group that maintains strict codes defining the accepted and the other. Makeda subverts such divisions, marking an irrepressible presence where she is not wanted and a threat to the established order on her quest to find some divine magic—some mojo—of her own. This paper argues that the transgressive potential of Makeda’s journey is, however, undermined by the eventual fulfillment of the quest. While Sister Mine plays with the ways in which various forms of (dis)ability and embodiment can challenge the impermeability of social borders, Makeda must nevertheless overcome and even cure the accidental powerlessness of her mortal birth in order to play the heroine and save the day. Thus, despite the transgression of social boundaries promised by much of Makeda’s adventure, the journey can only reach its conclusion when disability is removed and the disabled body is made to conform. What could have been another of Hopkinson’s antinormative texts instead joins a larger conversation re-inscribing the normal body as the path to a happy life. Theorists: McRuer, Agamben, Puar, Butler.