Monstrous Woman and the Decolonial Gothic Female Gaze in Nuraliah Norasid’s <i>The Gatekeeper</i>

Using decolonial Gothic and gender theories, this essay examines Nuraliah Norasid’s novel The Gatekeeper (2017), the first speculative novel to win the Singapore Book Award for Best Fiction. Gatekeeper rewrites the Greek myth of Medusa through its protagonist, Ria, to tackle the complex relationship between Malay femininity and the forces of Singapore’s state-driven modernization and global capitalism that shape how race, gender, and class are constructed in the nation. Ria’s monstrous yet resistant Gothic body and dangerous gaze are deployed to expose the colonial and patriarchal matrices of power that have continued to endure through the Singapore state, neoliberal capitalism, and globalization. Beset by multiple contesting discursive forces, the beleaguered Malay female and feminized body thus forms the fraught site of identity and belonging, memory and loss. At the same time, this essay considers how Ria’s body signifies on two distinct levels. First, Ria’s corporeality speaks to and interrogates the fear and anxiety surrounding the feminized Malay Muslim, who is often constituted as an Other within the official discourse of multiracialism in Singapore, which has a majority ethnic Chinese population. Second, Ria’s petrifying vision can be understood through the multiple meanings of the decolonial Gothic female gaze, especially when it is turned onto the colonial and patriarchal formations and systems of power and their violent and damaging effects on the subaltern subject.