ABSTRACT
As a kind of character sketch, the Music for Chameleons story initially lures us to give more consideration to Mrs Kelly’s psychological state than to the literal significance of the cats themselves. The story prepares us to read with certain assumptions about love and identity so that literalism of frozen cats can then shock us out of those assumptions and change how we think about sexuality, sociality, hospitality, and civil rights. Suppressing the suggestion of mental illness allows the queerness of the figure of the cat-lady to shine out more clearly – a queerness that is tied partly to her existence outside the sexual and gender norms of mainstream society. Read in contexts of both her cat-lady rejection of gender norms and this further denaturalization of sexual categories, Mrs Kelly’s bond to her cats thus comes into focus as form of attachment that can only be understood in its own terms, not as a sublimation or distortion of heteronormative desires.
