Mobility, aesthetics, and sexuality: nomadic queer homing in Jen Sookfong Lee’s The Better Mother

Drawing on scholarship in emotional geography on queer mobility and Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology, this article explores the relationships between gay Chinese Canadian men’s spatial experiences, bodily desires, homing, and mobility in The Better Mother (2012), a novel by Chinese Canadian writer Jen Sookfong Lee. This article argues that gay Chinese Canadian men, in wrestling with corporeal experiences of familiarity from within the original ‘homes’ and marginalization outside of them, physically, emotionally, and aesthetically, engage in a nomadic mode of homing as a challenge to the entrenched heteronormativity and heteropatriarchy.