Queer Postnationalism in ‘Breakfast On Pluto’

Abstract

This article seeks to analyze Patrick McCabe's 1998 novel Breakfast on Pluto with regard to its representation of national and gender boundaries, arguing that the text, while not exactly fully qualifying as queer, employs similar deconstructive strategies with regard to identities constructed by discourses of nationality and gender alike, and is indeed especially successful in this project when these subversions converge. To this end, the essay establishes a theory of postnationalism, defining the term as anything that seeks to challenge the hegemony of nation-ness as an abstract concept as well as its ideological and material manifestations. As such, postnationalism clearly profits from learning from a similar project undertaken by queer theory with regard to identities of gender, sex, and sexuality. Breakfast on Pluto offers an important textual example of how these discursive and material practices of resistance against essentialist views of identity parallel each other, and how a literary imagination can work to question these boundaries.