Native Feminist Thought

Catalog description

This graduate seminar explores Native Feminisms as a theoretical framework that destabilizes settler colonialism’s gendered and racialized projects of dispossession. Students will trace a genealogy of Native Feminisms, exploring questions of gender variance, roles, and (interspecies) relationalities within Native and Indigenous communities. We will ask how these have been challenged and adapted under settler colonialism. This course also asks how Native Feminists differentiate and press at the limits of what has been termed “Whitestream Feminism” while also asking how Native Feminisms demand intersectional engagement with Black, Latinx, and Transnational Feminisms. In this class, we will ask: What are the anti- and decolonial possibilities of Native Feminist organizing? How do Native Feminists address gendered violence as a symptom and tool of settler colonial dispossession? And, what is the role of intersectional relationality and eroticism in cultivating otherwise worlds and temporalities?