Queer Indigenous Studies and Two-Spirit Critique

Catalog description

The structures of settler colonialism are designed to wholly dispossess, erase, and eliminate the fullness of Indigenous life. As such settler colonialism is heavily invested in both heteropatriarchy and heteronormativity as regulatory schemes oriented toward extraction and conquest. Through a series of theoretical readings, poetry, and literature, this Senior Seminar will explore the unruly “queerness” of Indigeneity. During this course students will develop a keen understanding of the ways concepts such as relationality and (in)humanness are co-constitutive of a queer Indigenous analytic, while also learning how settler colonialism has impacted contemporary understandings of gender and sexuality. Students will explore the complexities of two-spirit identity through memoirs and reflective media, while also cultivating knowledge of two-spirit organizing efforts and theoretical interventions within the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies.