QUEER INDIGENITIES
Colonialism imposed a new gender system that created very different arrangements for colonized males and females than for white bourgeois colonizers.
~ Marría Lugones
We will explore the power of Queer Indigeneities to disrupt fictions around Indigenous peoples imposed by western hetero-patriarchy and Christian mythologies about Indigenous sexualities. We will trace a genealogy of theorists, activists, creative writers, performance artists, and filmmakers who employ Indigenous-centered approaches to understanding gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and Two-Spirit (GLBTQ2) lives and communities. This transdisciplinary course traverses disciplines ranging from literature to anthropology, and critiques the relationship between colonialism and heteropatriarchy. We will explore this scholarship for intersections with Peace and Justice studies.
The course will foreground contemporary queer Indigenous lived experience(s). One of the central guiding questions of the course is to interrogate how Indigenous conceptions of gender changed in relation to colonization.
- Teacher: Leanne Trapedo Sims