QUEERING BODIES, QUEERING BOUNDARIES: Localizing Identity in and of the Body in Hiromi Goto’s "The Kappa Child"
QUEERING BODIES, QUEERING BOUNDARIES: Localizing Identity in and of the Body in Hiromi Goto’s "The Kappa Child"

Summary/Abstract: In "The Kappa Child", Hiromi Goto attempts to engage questions of nationality, ethnicity, community and identity formation through the concrete lived experience of one unnamed narrator who is impregnated by and with a mythical Japanese kappa. As theorists like Kit Dobson and others engaged in transnational criticism propose opening borders to wider arenas of analysis to engage vast questions involving nations and identity, I propose to localize the debate and root analysis in the corporeal, embodied aspects of one fictional text. The title bodies in Canada then holds new meaning as this particular novel queers borders of geography, sexuality, and frequently race in favor of a local and localizing trend. What the reader may take from this novel when the last words have been read, is that the borders of nation cease to matter when the borders of the self and other are so intertwined, intermingled, intermeshed through intercourse and active discourse with bodies.

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