The Novel of Bits: Non-Normative Sexuality in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

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.