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ABSTRACT
This paper attempts to understand the marginalisation of Indigiqueer and Two Spirit people and how they write to resist heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism in the Canadian context through two texts. Two Spirit people who were respected in most Indigenous cultures before colonisation, have been marginalised by the hegemony of White society's heteropatriarchy. In A History of my Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt, who belongs to the Driftpile Cree Nation in northern Alberta, and Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead, who is an Oji-Cree member of the Peguis First Nation in Manitoba, the two authors challenge the limits imposed by Western understandings of what literature is supposed to be by foregrounding the importance of the body, their communities, the places they belong to, and subverting conventional notions of genre and aesthetics. Furthermore, their writing ruptures the power structures that oppress them by foregrounding an ethics of care and solidarity.
Disclosure Statement
The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.
Notes
1 Walter L. Williams, ‘The ‘two-spirit’ people of indigenous North Americans’, The Guardian, October 11, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/oct/11/two-spirit-people-north-america (accessed March 28, 2023).
2 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
3 Kimberle Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum no. 1 (1989): 141.
4 Gayle S. Rubin. ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’, in Culture, Society and Sexuality, ed. Peter Aggleton and Richard Parker (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 143–78.
5 Stephen Vider and David S. Byers, ‘A Half-Century of Conflict Over Attempts to ‘Cure’ Gay People’, Time, February 12, 2015, https://time.com/3705745/history-therapy-hadden/ (accessed April 26, 2023).
6 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, Lenin and philosophy and other essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 14.
7 Michel Foucalt, ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4, (The University of Chicago Press, 1982): 777–95.
8 Sandra G. Harding, The feminist standpoint theory reader: Intellectual and political controversies (London: Psychology Press, 2004).
9 Matthew Wildcat, ‘Reserves in Alberta’, The Canadian Encyclopaedia, March 5, 2020, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/reserves-in-alberta (accessed September 12, 2023).
10 Travis Klemp, ‘Peguis First Nation’, The Canadian Encyclopaedia, March 4, 2022, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/peguis-first-nation (accessed September 12, 2023).
11 Robert Irwin, "Reserves in Canada", The Canadian Encyclopaedia, May 31, 2011, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/aboriginal-reserves#:~:text=Reserves%20are%20tracts%20of%20land,do%20not%20hold%20reserve%20land (accessed September 12, 2023).
12 Caitlyn Gowriluk, ‘This First Nation was swindled out of its land — and into a flood zone Social Sharing’, CBC News, May 9, 2022, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/peguis-first-nation-history-illegal-surrender-1.6445917 (accessed September 12, 2023).
13 Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of my Brief Body (Toronto: Hamish Hamilton, 2020), 44.
14 Ibid., 14.
15 Ibid., 23.
16 Ibid., 21.
17 Joshua Whitehead, Making Love with the Land: Essays (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2022), 10–3.
18 Ibid., 16–7.
19 Belcourt, A History of my Brief Body, 19.
20 Whitehead, Making Love with the Land: Essays, 35.
21 Belcourt, A History of my Brief Body, 14.
22 Émilie Kneifel, ‘Un.-un.-un.-:on Billy-Ray Belcourt’s 'NDN coping mechanisms’, The Adroit Journal, January 7, 2020, https://theadroitjournal.org/2020/01/07/un-un-un-on-billy-ray-belcourts-ndn-coping-mechanisms/# (accessed April 26, 2023).
23 Nyarai Tawenga, ‘Reclaiming Indigenous matriarchy with Sandy Ward’, Canadian Geographic, June 25, 2021, https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/reclaiming-indigenous-matriarchy-with-sandy-ward/ (accessed April 26, 2023).
24 Belcourt, A History of my Brief Body, 38.
25 bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (United Kingdom: Atria Books, 2004), 110.
26 Belcourt, A History of my Brief Body, 27.
27 Ibid., 27.
28 Hélène Cixous, Cohen Keith, and Paula Cohen, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs 1, no. 4, The University of Chicago Press, (1976): 875–93.
29 Belcourt, A History of my Brief Body, 31.
30 Ibid., 38.
31 Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 1.
32 Belcourt, A History of my Brief Body, 55.
33 Rubin, ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’, 151.
34 Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, 141.
35 Whitehead, Making Love with the Land: Essays, 43.
36 Belcourt, A History of my Brief Body, 63.
37 Ibid., 82.
38 Whitehead, Making Love with the Land: Essays, 46.
39 Shreya Shah, ‘The Doctrine of Discovery and Terra Nullius’, The Indigenous Foundation, October 25, 2021, https://www.theindigenousfoundation.org/articles/the-doctrine-of-discovery-and-terra-nullius#:~:text=The%20doctrine%20gave%20them%20the,and%20jurisdiction%20could%20be%20claimed (accessed April 26, 2023).
40 Whitehead, Making Love with the Land: Essays, 99.
41 Ibid., 99.
42 BIPOC is an acronym that stands for ‘Black, Indigenous and People of Colour’.
43 William B. Spaulding, and Maia Foster-Sanchez, ‘Smallpox in Canada’, The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2006, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/smallpox#:~:text=In%201732%E2%80%9333%2C%20a%20smallpox,worst%20epidemic%20in%20New%20France (accessed November 1, 2022).
44 Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, 14.
45 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
46 J.R. Miller, “Residential Schools in Canada”, The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2012, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/residential-schools (accessed April 26, 2023).
47 Whitehead, Making Love with the Land: Essays, 79.
48 Ibid., 81.
49 Belcourt, A History of my Brief Body, 26.
50 Joanne Saul, Writing the Roaming Subject: The Biotext in Canadian Literature (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006).
51 Belcourt, A History of my Brief Body, 50.
52 Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010).
53 Belcourt, A History of my Brief Body, 83.
54 Cora Kaplan, ‘Pandora’s Box: Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism’, Making a difference (United Kingdom: Routledge, 2020).
55 Amartya Sen, ‘Well-Being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures’, The Journal of Philosophy, New York (1985): 191.
56 Whitehead, Making Love with the Land: Essays, 63.
57 Ibid., 64.
58 Ibid., 71.
59 Elissa Washuta, and Theresa Warburton, Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers (Seattle: U of Washington P, 2019).
60 Lee Maracle, Memory Serves: Oratories, Ed. Smaro Kamboureli (Edmonton: NEWest Press, 2015).
61 Daniel Heath Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2018).
62 Whitehead, Making Love with the Land: Essays, 81.
63 Ibid., 84.
64 Ibid., 84.
65 Ibid., 40.
66 bell hooks, ‘The oppositional gaze: Black female spectators’, Black American Cinema. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).
67 P. S. Li, ‘Race and Ethnicity’, Race and Ethnic Relations in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990).
68 Whitehead, Making Love with the Land: Essays, 67.
69 Belcourt, A History of my Brief Body, 112.
70 Ibid., 117.
71 Whitehead, Making Love with the Land: Essays, 72.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sourashmi Basu
Sourashmi Basu has pursued her Master of Arts in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. She was awarded the University Medal for her performance in the Bachelor of Arts Examination in Comparative Literature from the same institution. Some of her research interests include feminist and queer criticism, the idea of masculinity, South Asian and Canadian literary and cultural texts, and archiving the social history of people who are marginalised.