Abstract:
The traditional conceptions of gender and sexuality have always been assumed to be stable, fixed and natural. However, this
understanding has become problematized to the extent that our basic comprehension of sexuality has been challenged. Through these
new negotiated explorations, we manage to get new meanings of the assumed natural sexual categories and identities. This study
situates itself within these intellectual engagements by incorporating a literary text that chronicle the problematization of the existing
identity categories. This study will consider the literary representation of identity discourse and examine how the text blur the line
between gender and sexuality and assert its inherent instability. In doing this, the study will first show how the exclusivist regimes of
heteronormativity are challenged and disrupted within the selected text. Secondly, the study will investigate how specific
characterizations cross, transform and abandon traditional demarcations of supposed stable sexual and gender categories and insist
on a possibility of multiple sexualities. Finally, the study will interrogate the injustices inherent in heteronormativity in order to show
how they are unable to inclusively locate disparate identities and desires. This study employs the theoretical arguments of queer
studies, propagated by Sedgwick, Butler, Jagose, Fuss among others. The study utilizes library-based document analysis of the
selected text and other critical secondary works to dismantle the hegemonic position of the assumed stable identity and sexual
categories. The scope of this study is in the work of an African female author in Nigeria. The study therefore purposively picks
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun for its inherent quality to prove the instability of gender categories and therefore
queer understanding of sexual and identity affiliations.
