“Not that her being black had anything to do with it, for me”: Blackness in Emma Donoghue’s “The Welcome”

Abstract

The paper aims to analyze the construction of the character JJ in Emma Donoghue’s short story “The Welcome” (2006). The story portrays Luce’s sexual awakening for JJ, the new resident of the women-only cooperative living residence, The Welcome. The shyness of JJ and her supposed indifference to the attempt at a romantic approach and friendship made by Luce is a reaction to the process of transgenderism. If, as the Argentine critic Ricardo Piglia (2000) argues, all short stories narrate two stories, the first is a frustrated love story, and the second is about JJ’s revelation as a transgender person. The critical intervention undertaken in this article challenges and exposes internalized images and racial regimes of representation by demonstrating that the signs and elements which prepare the reader for JJ’s revelation represent her as an abject character. ​​From being fundamental to the theory of subjectivity (Kristeva 1988, McAfee 2004) to a signifying practice of the body and sexuality (Butler 1999), abjection is a common signifier of blackness (Scott 2010). By intersecting race, gender, and sexual identities, the short story fails to represent JJ as a complete subject because it articulates stereotypical images around blackness and transgenderism, casting, at once, both terms as abjection. Thus, the centralization of Luce’s desire and the representation of JJ as an abject character suggest the impossibility of intimacy for the black queer body within the homonormative parameters of gender, sexuality, and race.