Abstract
This paper reads insomnia in Imogen Binnie's queer/trans novel Nevada (2013) not as a body problem to be cured but as a valuable site of resistance to hetero, able-bodied norms. Binnie, however, depicts the daily effects of capitalism on regimenting sleep routines, rendering insomnia not as a glamorous all-night adventure but as a “boring” daily struggle, akin to Maria's exhausting experience of navigating trauma. Though this novel offers generic promises of self-discovery, recovery, and trans epiphany/catharsis, it inevitably frustrates all possibilities for its heroine's self-growth, thus challenging fictions about using self-care to “overcome” disability and gender-based violence. In exposing the narrative process by which insomnia is constructed, this crip reading of Nevada reimagines the representational possibilities for bodies that fail to sleep.
