Feeling Sideways: Shani Mootoo and Kai Cheng Thom’s Sustainable Affects

Drawing on feminist, queer, trans, and anti-racist theory, this article examines the transmission of affect between racialized queer and trans subjects as a mode of what I call feeling sideways. With this formulation, I seek to spark a discussion about the need to dislodge affect not only from gender and racial normative systems of power but also from linear understandings of growth and temporality. I here follow Kathryn Bond Stockton’s theories of sideways growth (2009) and Heather Love’s notion of backward feelings (2009) to unravel modes of feeling sideways as a potential form of what I call sustainable affect. As case studies, I put two transCanadian works beside each other: Shani Mootoo’s novel Moving Forward Sideways like a Crab (2014) and Kai Cheng Thom’s poetry collection a place called No Homeland (2017). In different but related ways, these texts illustrate how shame, anger, and empathy can become sustainable affects through touch and storytelling, with important ethical repercussions.