“Decolonizing the Queer native Body
(and Recovering the native Bull-Dyke): Bringing “Sexy back” and Out of Native
Studies’ Closet (31-41).
Finley’s goal of this section is to
show different perspectives of “new and exciting” narratives by and about
Native GLBTQ2 relations to traditional sexualities that coexist with new
forms of gender identity and expression in Native
communities. Finley hope Native intellectuals will help decolonize
heternormativity and “Native nationalisms” that are cliché in thought and
practice.
Finley frames suggestions and
“possibilities for decolonization” within “Native studies and Native nations”
through the discourse of sexuality. He further advances examples and
suggestions in which engages and analyze for critical theory building between
Native peoples and settlers. Finley feels Queer Studies lacks
intersections of Native recognition. Additionally, although “civil rights”
has been a “main topic” amongst GLBTQ2, rethinking ways in which to empower
queer studies within U.S. nation-states would help strengthen solidarity
between two communities rather than subjectifying to simple citizenry, which
still place Native peoples under rather than alongside
sovereignship. Finley also aim to “interrogate queer colonial
discourses” that define Native people and “critique” state’ constructs of
labeling Native people as “nonheteronormative” due to “nonconformativeheteropatriarchs”,
which are models built by U.S. nation-states for
Native nations. Through Natives and queer studies, Finley hopes
this publication will serve as a tool for solidarity building to “support one
another for future studies”.
Finley also suggests “Native studies
should analyze race, gender, and sexuality as logics of colonial power without
reducing them to separate identity-based models of analysis” to bring out
truths of historical “heteronormative discourses of colonial violence directed
at Native communities”. Therefore dissecting logics of colonial
violence through educating Native communities could “end colonial domination”
amongst the colonized.
Within the construct
of sexualizing Native women and Native men, Finley argue that
through the lens of queering the other, Native women are susceptible to heteropatriarchy’s
domination of “discovery, penetration, and ownership” (34), similar to that of
lands in which “heterosexualization” are dominated by settler
“heteropatriarchical” men. In comparison, Native men also fall
within the category of ‘queer identity’ by settler heteropatriarchy men,
because of the continued settler dominion. This theory, to me,
may be true. An example is, for many years, the University
of Hawaii football team was termed “Rainbow Warriors”. However,
because the rainbow is also a symbol for the gay flag, the football team’s
gender-role paralleled with that of being gay. Therefore, when
June Jones became the UH football’s coach, the team’s name was changed to UH
Warriors, deleting rainbow, so to save the team from state
and national embarrassment.
In reflection of “Nation-Building”
Mohawk Native, Professor Taiaiake Alfred is popular
for courageously encouraging Native peoples, regardless of sexuality
and gender, to take a stand for our ancestors and our lands by reinventing the
wheel that mobilize “political and economic power to recreate some social and
physical space for freedom to re-emerge” (Finley citing Alfred,
37). Additionally, Finley introduces Jennifer Nez Denetdale as being
a rare scholar who takes the position of conflating “sexuality, gender, and
Native nationalism in her work” (38). Here Denetdale asserts herself
as a feminist who has witnessed women from taking male roles within Navajo
communities, whereas men and transwomen are “traditionally” allowed to
enter. The lack of women to take leading roles in Native societies
magnifies oppression, “that traditionalism is used in Native communities to
silence women and to disenfranchise them from possessing political power”
(38-39).
By placing “gender, sexuality, and
indigeneity” (40) at the core of theoretical frameworks to unveil “colonial
violence” (Ibid) amongst Native peoples and Native GLBTQ2, Finley draws on
collaboration with other feminism critique of social patterns to
exhibit heteropatriarchy as “colonizing logics and practices embedded in
constructing Native peoples as hypersexual and nonheteronormative”
(Ibid). Moreover, Finley endorse that “[i]t is time to bring ‘sexy
back’ to Native studies” (Ibid) through celebrating our traditional sexual
practices that were dominant before settler influences and diseases. (Although
I have accepted that I am a boring individual who is unwilling to make time to
enjoy and celebrate sex, because of my devotion to education.)
As indigenous Native peoples of Native
Americans and Native Hawaiians, Finley eloquently reminds us “[s]exuality
discourses have to be considered as methods of colonization that require
deconstruction to further decolonize Native studies and Native communities”
(41).
In continuation:
ReplyDeleteWith regard to Chris Finley’s article, I felt the need to compare and contrast traditional Native Hawaiian sexuality and gender identity to that of other Native peoples mentioned in comparison to that of “colonial power”. First, however, I want to share how historically within the U.S., the act of sodomy: a common form of sexual practice of anal penetration and falatio between two people of the same sex were illegal. An example explained below is not a case involving ‘Native peoples’, but an important time in U.S. history of how a ‘colonial power’ been enforced upon people. In the case Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), Atlanta police officer, Michael Hardwick went to Michael Bowers home to serve a bench warrant in 1982 for failing to appear at a court hearing. Without a search warrant, Hardwick entered Bowers’ home in pursuit of Bowers. When Hardwick found Bowers in one of his bedroom, Bowers was in the middle of consensual sexual engagement with someone of the same sex. Bowers was immediately taken into police custody, not for the initial purpose wherein Hardwick went to Bowers home, but for engagement in sodomy. In challenging the U.S. Constitution under the forth amendment, Bowers lawyers appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a 5-4 split decision, Bowers lost. As Supreme Court Justice Byron Raymond White states in his opinion of the Court, “Fundamental liberties…are deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition…[whereas] Sodomy [is] a criminal offence at common law [throughout] all 50 States. Additionally, “today 24 States and the District of Columbia continue to provide criminal penalties for sodomy performed in private and between consenting adults”. In addition, Chief Justice Warren Earl Burger, in his concurring opinion to Justice White, added “homosexual conduct have been subject to state intervention throughout the history of Western civilization. Condemnation of those practices is firmly rooted in Judaeo-Christian moral and ethical standards” . What I’m asserting here is that since settler-arrival to the Americas, including the Islands of Hawaii, “comprehensive measures, statistical assessments, and the interventions aimed at the entire social body or at groups taken as a whole” has reshaped indigenous peoples “sexuality, gender, and race” through “biopower”.
Additionally, I would also like to add my manaʻo in regard to Finley’s theory that the topic of gender is more open for dialouge than “Native sexualities”. Here I disagree with Finley on two grounds. One: As a Native Hawaiian person, I have been living openly as a Māhūwahine, a newly defined Hawaiian terminology to describe Native Hawaiian male-to-female transsexual/transgender people in Hawaiʻi. Raised on the streets of Downtown Honolulu alongside elderly Māhūwahine poeple in the 1980s, we have been living in this gender identity that practiced a traditional sexuality before the arrival of settlers in the Hawaiian archapelago. Two: Prior to and shortly during settlers arrival to Hawaiʻi, the practice of sexuality was highly reveered and celebrated, thus a normal way of life, whereas gender identity was religiou-wise constructed amongst Native Hawaiian people, such as roles prescribed for males and females. In sexuality practices, the saying, “moe aku, moe mai’ literally, sleep there and sleep here, referring that within Native Hawaiian communities, it was normal to have sex with whom you wanted, regardless the gender. Sexual encounters did not adhere to monogomy like settlers, nor was sexual encounters only practiced between men and woman like settlers. In fact, moe aku, moe mai was not exclusive, rather inclusive; common not only amongst heterosexuality, but more importantly amongst people of the same gender. More succicnt, bisexuality was the foundation wherein Native Hawaiians celebrated sex.
Note:
DeleteI have to say this book is more dense than I have imagined it to be. It was a very difficult reading! So, I hope that it, if at all, some of my analogy of this book makes sense. Also, please forgive my tardiness in submitting this. I had two Aunts and two Uncles whom passed away within two months. I have missed two funerals due to my kuleana with this semester's work, but couldn't miss attending this evening's funeral. Still, there's one more to come. Not that I am making excuses. Just that in circumstances like this, I have to make an effort to be there with family now that they have grown to accept my lifestyle, which once was disapproved throughout my childhood and teenager years.
I hear that this book is dense. It does tend to be focused more on theory.
DeleteTwo quick comments:
1. Chris Finley identifies as "she." (Bios are in the back of the book.
2. I donʻt think she is saying that gender is a better thing to talk about than sexuality, but rather that in Native American studies and communities (post-colonization) people have been more willing to talk about gender than about sexuality. In general, I think this is true in 20th century Hawaiian movements too. While GLBTQ2 issues and leaders are becoming more prominent within the movement and within Hawaiian Studies over the last few years, I donʻt think that was the case 20 years ago. This is not to say that mahu have not always been a part of our ohana, but rather that public discourse and the spaces of leadership have not always been opened for these members of our communities.
mahalo Kumu Noelani for clarifying the above statement above for me.
ReplyDelete