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Two-Spirit Literature

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 1; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/23289252-2685705

2328-9260

T.J. Tallie,

Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

Sovereign Erotics is a powerful and provocative collection of writing by two-spirit/queer indigenous-identified authors that presents an embodied challenge on multiple fronts—an intellectual and literary call to challenge historical, colonial, and reified sexual and social formations. Sovereign Erotics traces its intellectual lineage from both Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology (1988) and This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), among other collections. In so doing, the book offers a call born from multiple identifications and subject positions in order to provide a model of queer/two-spirit indigenous existence.The collection's editors proclaim in the introduction that the book exists for “those who—like so many of us—had no role models, no one to tell us that we were valuable human beings just as we are” (1). To this end, the book utilizes the concept of “sovereign erotics,” first articulated by Qwo-Li Driskill but used similarly by other authors, to privilege the productive and profoundly dynamic potential of erotic pleasure. When combined with the idea of indigenous interpretations of sovereignty, the erotic becomes a powerful and communal site of contestation, extending from individual pleasure to encompass collective histories, goals, and events. By reinscribing individual pleasure in the pursuit of larger political and historical aims, the use of such sovereign erotics confronts the hegemonic work of settler societies to regulate indigenous bodies and sexualities as part of a colonial project. The sovereign erotics, then, are most clearly articulated in the collection's retelling of personal stories, which lay out the productive potential of daily, embodied acts of resistance and reorientation.Despite its claim to offer a collection of two-spirit literature in its subtitle, Sovereign Erotics remains somewhat ambiguous on the actual deployment of the category within the larger book. Offering a deserved if somewhat predictable critique of academia's obsession with defining terms, Sovereign Erotics describes two-spirit as an umbrella term that denotes either historical indigenous constructions of gender that exist outside colonial normative binaries or contemporary indigenous people who reclaim/enact these roles within their local communities. The collection appears to privilege the use of the term two-spirit (even though not all of the contributors identity as such) as an indigenous-derived umbrella alternative to the Western-derived queer. The stories of the individuals within the collection are organized both in a shared nonheterosexual orientation but also through a pronounced ambivalence toward nonindigenous definitions of gender and, as a result, sexuality. By organizing under the intentionally vague label of two-spiritedness, the contributors remind readers not only that constructions of gender are flexible but that they are negotiated in relation to colonially imposed gender binaries that set themselves up as neutral and universal. A purposeful fluidity, then, lies at the heart of Sovereign Erotics' organization; as the editors explain, “what brings us together as movements and individuals, regardless of what our personal choices of identity labels may be, is a commitment to decolonial movements” (6).Sovereign Erotics is organized into four general sections, each of which speaks to a different although interconnected aspect of two-spirit/queer indigenous life. The first section, “Dreams/Ancestors,” is pointedly Janus-faced, evoking the historical roots of two-spirit identities and pasts while also privileging the generative potential of new ways of imagining existence. Rather than simply rely on the idea that two-spirit identities existed before European colonization and therefore are legitimate by means of a static and unchanging indigenous past, the pieces within “Dreams/Ancestors” gesture toward the past existence of what are now nonheteronormative formations but ground these historical traces firmly in present lived experiences. In this way, the doubly viewed perspectives within this first section foreground a precolonial history but underscore its relevance in a colonized present.The first section contains a selection from Craig Womack's 2001 novel Drowning in Fire, whose protagonist, Josh Henneha, evokes the longing, alienation, and insecurity of a native teenager who falls far short of prescribed masculine roles while nursing a constant attraction to his older male friend. The piece touches on a variety of topics surrounding racial tensions within Oklahoma, from white schoolteachers to indigenous children with African ancestry, while anchoring the larger story to family mythologies shared by Josh's grandfather. The nonlinear chronologies and alienation speak to indigenous pasts and presents entangled in potentially aberrant sexualities. In “Santa Claus, Indiana,” Michael Koby discusses interracial adoption in rural Indiana, interspersing family tragedies with monster films. In these ways, the first section offers both moments of historical grounding and contemporary instability in recording the multiple voices of the collection.The second section, “Love/Medicine,” offers the power of erotic potential to salve personal and historical wounds. Maurice Kenny's “My First Book” is both a poignant and a playful reorienting of tropes surrounding literacy and civilization. Kenny's first book in this instance was a paperback copy of Tarzan: Man of the Apes, itself a reminder of themes of white civilization and native savagery. Yet as Kenny notes, the book was important, for it contained his “first naked man,” one importantto my dreamsthen and now,dreams of allthe naked menI've touched. (77)Chip Livingston's “Ghost Dance” evokes both the pan-indigenous religious movement in the late nineteenth century and the contemporary loneliness of dancing in a club while remembering a deceased partner. Spectral images of past dances echo through the present-day club as Livingston's narrator recalls the steps of his former lover. By turning to the erotic as a form of healing, the authors reject historical Christian and colonial constructions of uncontrolled sexuality as damaging and destructive. In so doing, they subvert notions of respectability and civilization, privileging the idea of personal and sexual freedom in the face of historical and present pain.The third section, “Long/Walks,” delves into darker territory, discussing the loneliness, alienation, and historical violence enacted on two-spirited people who attempt to live honestly and openly in their many contexts. Qwo-Li Driskill's “(Auto)biography of Mad” depicts the shattering violence of the Carlton Indian Insane Asylum from the clinical detachment of a hypothetical book index. Containing listings for “Abuse, Physical,” “Trauma, Sexual,” and “Memory, Historical,” Driskill's piece simultaneously depicts the past brutalities to indigenous peoples and their contemporary removal into neatly contained historical indexes. The Indians of Driskill's piece have become historical footnotes—but ones still made very present through their categories of suffering. In a similar vein, Luna Maia challenges questions of “genuine” Indian status in “authentically ethnic.” Responding to claims that fry-bread isn't genuine since it was made from federal rations, Maia discusses historical means of survival practiced by indigenous peoples and loudly declares that daily choices made to live need not fit into preconceived notions of “AUTHENTICALLY ETHNIC TRADITION” (124). This section, perhaps more than the others, brings the intersectional nature of indigenous two-spirit/queer to the fore. By situating themselves within a matrix of historical and personal claims, the authors reject the idea that two-spiritedness is just a specific flavor of queerness or trans identity. Rather, the multiple pressures brought by colonialism, indigeneity, and gender/sexuality challenge the neat divisions implied by labels of native, queer, or trans.The final section, “Wild/Flowers,” celebrates thriving and vitality in spite of historical suppression and looks toward continued futures of survival and celebration. M. Carmen Lane's “Remember: She Bought Those Panties for You” focuses on a person who straddles the categories between “being a butch Black lesbian and a Two-Spirit Indian Man.” After elaborating the contradictions and tribulations of such an existence, the narrator realizes that others are “jealous that you can walk between worlds and they cannot” (195). The final section of Sovereign Erotics ends with acknowledgments of both histories and contemporary realities, but it primarily focuses on the future of imaginative potential, of reclaiming spaces from colonization and religious judgment.Sovereign Erotics demonstrates that the stakes are ultimately very high in negotiating indigenous two-spirit/queer identities. Indigenous studies–based approaches have placed the issues of land access and settler invasion at the forefront of colonial analysis. As a result, settler colonial histories become unmoored from claims of legitimacy through law or government action. Likewise, queer theory offers a means of understanding how lines of assumed order are skewed by ideas, actions, or formations. If settler colonialism itself is presented as a form of orientation, of making a recognizable and inhabitable home space for European arrivals on indigenous land, then native peoples and their continued resistance can serve to “queer” these attempted forms of order. Such an approach is essential to decolonizing the conditions of modern sexuality that underpin both heteronormative realities in settler societies like the United States as well as queer and trans challenges to those colonially created realities. In Queer Indigenous Studies (the companion piece to Sovereign Erotics), theorist Scott L. Morgensen offers a direct challenge to nonnative queer organizers, arguing that “Two-Spirit organizing does not reduce to the work of a sexual or racial minority, or any form of multicultural diversity, but asserts an Indigenous relationship to ongoing colonization that non-Natives must meet across a national difference” (Morgensen 2011: 144). This, then, is the most provocative and powerful achievement of Sovereign Erotics: the experiential demonstration of native nonheteronormative life in its messy multiplicities. These multiplicities, with their challenges to orthodox temporal, gendered, racial, or social formations, provide a profound opportunity of rupture and creation.By “rupture,” I mean that indigenous queer/two-spirit narratives can interrupt conceptions of queer progress by pointing to the fact that the material and discursive conditions for liberation are built upon ideas of indigenous removal and assimilation. In her path-breaking book Transit of Empire, Chickasaw scholar Jodi A. Byrd has taken aim at naturalized “American” histories that “continually foreground the arrival of Europeans as the defining event within settler societies, consistently place horizontal histories of oppressions into zero-sum struggles for hegemony, and distract from the complicities of colonialism and the possibilities for anticolonial action that emerge outside and beyond Manichean allegories that define oppression” (Byrd 2011: xxxiv). Queer studies—and more immediately, transgender studies—are not immune from these colonial complicities. As the many voices of Sovereign Erotics remind us, gender and sexuality are not neutrally extracted from the spatial and embodied histories of colonialism and occupation. Their very imbrication within these larger processes requires a disruptive challenge.By “creation,” I refer to the ludic and imaginative potential of indigenous two-spirit/queer stories within Sovereign Erotics. Such a playful engagement happens directly at the intersection of indigenous and queer theorizing. This “queering” of norms created in the collisions of colonial domination allows for a praxis of joy, mockery, and freedom. The stories of Sovereign Erotics foster a form of queerness perhaps most clearly articulated by the late José Esteban Muñoz as “the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (Muñoz 2011: 1). These moments of potential are clearest when writers like Lane underscore that they can “walk between worlds,” not merely implying multiple identities but asserting that a different world, one outside the claims of the colonizer, is possible.Sovereign Erotics is, by and large, an impressive and multifaceted achievement, presenting multiple voices of indigenous queer/two-spirit–identified people pushing the boundaries of sexuality and identity. By embracing the two-spirit label, Sovereign Erotics specifically refutes the easy universalism of Western-derived categories like queer, gay, or transgender. Instead, the contributors imagine a world centered on the powerful potential of erotic pleasure that destabilizes colonially derived conceptions of gender, propriety, and belonging. Sovereign Erotics offers a series of personal glimpses into a cacophonous world of resistance, struggle, survival, and joy, one that destabilizes by its stubborn insistence on continuing to defy colonial systems of order and control.