Queerness Built on Native Dispossession (original) (raw)
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Contesting the Cartography of Sovereignty: Rifkin's Erotics of Sovereignty
Theory & Event, 2012
Mark Rifkin's Erotics of Sovereignty offers a rich and thoughtful exploration of an alternative approach to thinking about Native sovereignty in the United States. Rather than draw on the well-trodden literatures of formal legal and political theory, he explores the limits and potentialities of sovereignty through the poetry and fiction of four contemporary queer Native authors -Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee), Deborah Miranda (Esselen), Greg Sarris (Graton Ranchería), and Chrystos (Menominee). Rifkin postulates that such an approach provokes important questions about what and who counts in conversations about sovereignty. Where official US state policy centralises formal discourses of self-governance that offer a limited and stifling range of categories which Native individuals and communities are expected to conform to, Rifkin argues that queer Native writing contests those categories. This happens as these queer writers render public and collective what are consistently characterised as private and individualised legacies of colonialism. He argues that these authors illuminate the limits of settler state sanctioned 'politics' that preclude considerations of how historical and on-going practices of genocide and land appropriation are inscribed in everyday life. This poetry and fiction, Rifkin claims, reasserts the importance of individual and collective feeling in discussions and negotiations about Native sovereignty in the contemporary United States. In so doing, these authors challenge the cartography of sovereignty as laid out by the settler state.
LGBTQS 183 Queer Settler Colonial Studies: Unsettling Sex, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation
This course asks students to understand how gender, sexuality, and the socio-medical construction of sex are intimately tied to the project of settler colonialism and statecraft in the US. Our course addresses key themes and critical frameworks in the overlapping fields of Settler Colonial Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies, Indigenous Feminist Studies, Black Feminist Studies, Queer Studies, and Trans Studies. This course practices a politics of citation and privileges the work of Indigenous, Black, Trans folks of color, and Queer folks of color. Course readings draw from a variety of disciplines including history, law, economics, biology, media studies, and literary studies to highlight the diverse approaches that have helped construct (and deconstruct) sex, gender, and sexuality amongst people of color and settlers in the US. The course is sectioned into two major parts. In the first, we consider how settler colonialism shaped and continues to shape constructions of gender, sex, sexuality, and intimacy. We practice an attentiveness to how these constructions are tied to the conquest for land and territory and how scientific racism functions as a form of colonial violence. We interrogate the category of “the human” as we discuss settler colonial constructions of class, culture, and dis/ability as nation-building projects. The second section of the course examines the role of criminalization and the carceral state in forming the geographic and social “boundaries” of a settler society and how vulnerable communities have responded to and mobilized against settler state violence. This approach allows us to draw connections between contemporary forms of criminalization in units which encompass questions about citizenship/ nationalism and immigration/borders as we move towards dreaming of liberation via decolonial and abolitionist discourses.
View related articles settler colonial appropriation and epistemic violence, though rightly critical and clear in its ethical stakes, never lapses into moralism. Morgensen is upfront about his own settler positionality rather than masquerading as a transcendent critic. And because the book's stakes are ultimately political -that is, the target it addresses is the messy work of decolonizing freedom as a collective project (Brown 1995) -it routinely cites Native enjoinments on non-Natives to work for decolonization in specific and accountable ways.
The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World, 2022
The emotions associated with colonial and imperial settings are almost infinitely varied. Like emotions constituted, experienced or expressed in any other context, they are historically, geographically and contextually contingent, influenced by the emotional cultures, communities, norms and regimes of their time and place. But the particular conditions of imperialism and colonialism mean that emotions in these settings are defined by, and constitutive of, particular legal, political structures that enable the subjugation of one people by another, and the politics of difference that support such subjugation. It is this common thread that allows us to identify certain links or commonalities between emotions in imperial or colonial contexts, even as we acknowledge that different colonial or imperial structures, operating within different cultural contexts at different points in history, have undoubtedly produced (and been produced by) an enormous variety of emotional formations. The structural features of colonial and imperial rule have been found to have profound influences on emotional cultures, both now and in the past. 1 This is particularly the case in settler-colonial contexts, where colonists' investment in the structural success of colonialism is not just economic but existential. In their efforts to replace Indigenous peoples on the land, settler-colonists seek not only to occupy but to belong in a country of which, relative to Indigenous peoples, they have little knowledge or experience. 2 In recent decades, scholars have investigated a range of emotions associated with the settler-colonial project, including desire, sympathy, pity, love, anger, guilt, shame, indifference and fear. 3 Prominent amongst these explorations of settler-colonial emotions are works which investigate the nexus between settler desire and settler fear; that is, the desire to possess the land, and to be seen as worthy of possessing it, and the fear or anxiety of losing land, or being seen as unworthy of it. 4 Aileen Moreton-Robinson refers to this latter feeling as the 'anxiety of dispossession', 5 an anxiety that derives from the ontological nature of Indigenous relationships