“Two-Spirit Men’s Sexual Survivance Against the Inequality of Desire”

“Two-Spirit Men’s Sexual Survivance Against the Inequality of Desire” by Brian Joseph Gilley from Queer Indigenous Studies, edited by Qwo-Li Driskill, et al. 

Brian Joseph Gilley, Cherokee/Chickasaw, is associate professor of anthropology and director of the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center at Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of Becoming Two-Spirit (University of Nebraska Press, 2006).

In an interview, the author stated that his purpose of this article was as follow;

I wanted to try to get people to begin to think about the role of sexuality in this. I think we sort of take it for granted as a by-product. I think we have been so focused on saying it is about culture that we have sort of left out the fact that there are the corporeal desires that help fuel this. I think we have avoided sexuality on purpose simply because the goal has always been to separate two-spirit from popular gay identity.(http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/06/06/on-two-spirits-and-native-identity-37871)

He asserts Native Studies scholars to look at the role of sexuality in gender-different American Indians. This is not just a cultural issue, he says, though emphasizing culture differentiates his subjects from mainstream gay identity and makes them less likely to be alienated or attacked in their communities.

In the late 1980s through the late 1990s, this study focuses mainly on nonwestern cultural examples of gender fluidity and difference, such as berdache, hijaras, fa’afaine and Mahu.

This article’s real purpose is “how sexuality was removed as an aspect of the American Indians gender-diversity conversation, while also arguing for the reincorporation of sexual desire into examinations of contemporary gender-diversity traditions” (124). And, he hopes “to reignite the conversation concerned with sexual desire and its role in personal and cultures survivability” (125).

The term Two-Spirit began to emerge among the GLBTQ Native community just as the work of Will Roscoe was reaching popularity in anthropology, American Indian studies, and gay Native social circles(126-127). The notion of Two-Spirit is a contemporary reference to the availability of mixed-gender roles among most American Indian tribes prior to European contact (127). That is, gender and gender roles were variable based on multiple societal factors such as tribal tradition (127).Contemporary Two-Spirit identity places sexuality at the center of the critical intersection of indigeneity and desire (129). He found that “the erotic is not expressed as particular desires but, rather, as discrete identities”(129).

He concluded;

Through acts of sexual survivance, Two-Spirit men extend Indian-specific meanings about conquest, race, colonialism and sovereignty to desire, whereby the Two-Spirit sexual encounter is governed by sexual historicity rendered modern (130).

Gilley argued that “sexual desire as a topic of inquiry within the ethnography of Indigenous gender difference” to study homophobia and reopen discussions around desire and survival under heteropatriarchy.