The Erotics of Sovereignty by Mark Rafkin

(Aaron) 

Dr. Mark Rifkin teaches Native American literature as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.  According to the University’s website, “He is interested in how U.S. law shapes the possibilities for representing Native political identity and the ways that Native writers have worked to inhabit, refunction, refuse, and displace dominant administrative formulations in order to open room for envisioning and enacting self-determination. More recently, he has been drawing on queer theory to rethink the role kinship systems have played in Native governance and internationalism and to address the ways U.S. imperialism can be thought of as a system of compulsory heterosexuality.” 

For Rifkin, rhetoric such as autonomy and self-determination merely function “as a catachrestic figure for the absence of a direct assault on the existence of Native nations” (172).  Therefore he argues that U.S. Indian policy is grounded more so in “self-management” than self-determination.  That being the case, Rifkin structures his essay around addressing the question: “What aspects of peoplehood remain unintelligible within U.S. policy framework” (ibid)? 

Interestingly, Rifkin chooses the structure of feeling to address that question.  The force, weight, and consequence of historical white settler violence is what the native subjectively experiences as feeling.  In this way, then, individual indigenous feeling can be tied to a shared collective memory of history, culture; and more specifically, the inseparably reciprocal relation with the land as familial.  The dual aspect of indigenous feeling gives rise to a state of desire that, as suggested in the latter part of the essay, can potentially serve as the mechanism responsible for decolonizing the self – or in Rafkin’s words, a “vehicle for escaping the past” (178).

Rafkin notes that for Qwo-Li Driskill, indigenous feeling and desire is understood as both the erotic and the queer – to the extent that everything transcends the ideological framework of colonial heteronormativity.  I interpret (sovereign) erotic, then, as the desire for Indigenous peoplehood which is anchored in a profound sense of community, culture, and (shared) experiences throughout history.  This is erotic and therefore different than the sexual norms and values of colonial culture; that is, “internalized heteronormativity,” because intimacy is no longer correlated with the sexually isolated, non public, homophobic framework upon which heteronormativity finds its stability.  Therefore the erotic is not sexuality, because sexuality “presumes the kinds of liberal individualism and distinctions between public and private realms” (186).     

This essay shows us how queer and erotic sovereignty challenges colonial heteronormativity.  In doing so, the aim is, according to Rifkin, “…to make Indigenous nations more inclusive of their queer citizens,” and “reclaiming bodily experience for Indigenous articulation of collectivity and place” (187).  Rafkin argues that it’s through an indigenous queer critique of heteronormativity that ought to lay the foundation of polity.  And I agree.