“I’ve Connected with Them”

Abstract

In this chapter, Meghan Gilbert-Hickey interrogates Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking, a series that seems to problematize the normalized heteropatriarchal family while also critiquing the settler colonial mindset that supports this structure. However, as sympathetic as Ness’s portrayals of his indigenous characters and characters of color are, the series ultimately replicates structures of both settler colonialism and western racism. His portrayals of two major characters of color whitewash racialized histories of power imbalance, romanticize and stereotype indigenous populations and people of color, and reify the normalized centrality of the white perspective, particularly that of the liberal, white middle-class. Thus, Chaos Walking is, at best, an incomplete critique of Western power imbalances and, at worst, an insidious investigation of normativity that privileges discussion of gender and sexuality at the expense of racial discourse.