Decolonizing Sexualized Cultural Images of Native Peoples: "Bringing Sexy Back" to Native Studies.

Abstract

Co-Chairs: Andrea Smith and Nadine Naber My dissertation analyzes how Native peoples are “queered” through the logics of sexuality and colonization by making Natives appear sexually aberrant from white settlers and therefore in need of paternalistic care by heteropatriarchy. I will critique how Native bodies are sexualized as culturally and, therefore, racially unable to conform to white heteroreproductive norms. I argue that throughout time and space, the white colonial body politic has constituted Natives as dispensable bodies and populations through the queering of indigeneity, which renders Indigenous peoples unable to participate and/or constitute democratic and civic nations. Through an investigation of the iconography of popular representations of Sacajawea and Pocahontas, I document and analyze how Native peoples have been historically and culturally sexualized through films, coins, paintings, statues, and plays. My guiding research questions for my dissertation include: How do sexualized cultural images of Native peoples work to justify colonialism and the theft of Native lands? How are Native bodies sexually imagined in popular historical representations and to what effect? How have Native communities internalized these representations and what is the impact of this internalization on contemporary struggles for Native self-determination?