On Becoming a Paradox:

negotiating gender and power in “Wake Up” (1993) by Shani Mootoo

Abstract

This work analyzes Shani Mootoo’s story “Wake Up” through gender studies and psychoanalysis to read a domestic scene between a mother and a daughter in the realm of an Indo-Caribbean family home. By focusing the narrative on the gaze of a teenage racialized girl in this "coming-of-age" narrative, Mootoo establishes a sharp criticism of heteronormative patriarchal codes by intertwining two different types of imagery that are strategically used in the text: the appropriation of mass culture in film and television, as well as an access to the characters’ dreams, which suggest critical responses to the social and political environments surrounding them. Such scenario invokes an analysis about the teenager's identification and the processes of subjectivity through: the feminist and psychoanalytic work of Jessica Benjamin (1980, 1988, 1995) on psychic development inside patriarchal culture and Moyano’s theory on alterplaces (2023). In conclusion, this story reflects on how gender creates a series of subjective displacements, a phenomenon that is constitutive of Mootoo’s informed queer and postcolonial gaze.