American Studies without America: Native Feminisms and the Nation-State

Writings on Native women and feminism often rely on essentializing claims that Native women cannot be feminists, thus erasing the diversity of thought that exists within both scholarly and activist circles. ^{1, 2} To the extent that Native women's writings on feminism are cited, their use is often limited to demonstrating the racism of "white" feminism. Such rhetorical strategies limit Native women to a politics of inclusion—let us include Native women in feminist theory (or if we do not think that they can be included, let us reject feminist theory completely). This politics of inclusion inevitably presumes that feminism is in fact defined by white women.

Instead, I would contend that the theorizing produced by Native women scholars and activists makes critical and transformative interventions into not only feminist theory, but also into a wide variety of theoretical formations. In this essay, I am not seeking to make representative claims about what Native women think about feminism. Rather, its purpose is to share some of the theoretical insights of Native women organizers currently engaged in social justice struggles.

Beyond the Nation-State

Post 9/11, Bush's evocation of sovereignty has prompted Judith Butler to define sovereignty as "providing legitimacy of the rule of law and offering a guarantor for the presentational claims of state power."³ According to Butler, the resurgence of sovereignty happens in a context of "suspension of law,"⁴ whereby the nation can, in the name of "sovereignty," act against "existing legal frameworks, civil, military, and international . . . Under this mantle of sovereignty, the state proceeds to extend its own power to imprison indefinitely a group of people without trial."⁵ Amy Kaplan similarly describes Bush's policies as rendering increasing numbers of people under U.S. jurisdiction as "less deserving of . . . constitutional rights."⁶ Thus, Bush's strategies are deemed a suspension of the law. It is said that his administration is unconstitutional, thus eroding civil liberties and U.S. democracy. From this perspective, progressives are called to uphold the law, defend the U.S. constitution, and protect civil liberties.

The question, then arises, what are we to do with the fact that, as Native scholar Luana Ross notes, genocide has never been against the law in the United States?⁷ On the contrary, Native genocide has been expressly sanctioned as the law. And, as legal scholar Sora Han points out, none of these post-9/11 practices is actually extraconstitutional or extralegal. In fact, the U.S. Constitution confers on the State the right to maintain itself over and above the rights of its citizenry.⁸

Butler may be arguing that post-9/11 rule of law through sovereignty (seemingly displaced, in Foucault's analysis, during the rise of capitalism) has made a comeback as a legitimizing notion that works to extend state power. But this argument, as the work of Joy James and Rey Chow demonstrates, fails to consider how the state has always operated through sovereign power exacted through racial and colonial violence.⁹ Thus the argument that we are currently under a resurgence of sovereignty itself normalizes the history of U.S. sovereign power exacted against the bodies of indigenous peoples and peoples of color. In fact, a Native feminist analysis could be used to read Butler's Gender Trouble against her analysis of sovereignty. In Gender Trouble, she critiques theorists such as Lacan, Irigaray, and Wittig, who posit a naturalized, prediscursive, gendered body as the foundation by which to critique contemporary heteropatriarchal practices. She argues that the very process of theorizing a prediscursive body demonstrates that the body cannot be prediscursive and hence it cannot be represented outside of prevailing power relations. But positing the body as prediscursive, according to Butler, allows the theorist to disavow her or his political investments because the theorist is supposedly rendering an account of the body prior to power relations. Butler's critique could then be more broadly applied to a critique of "origin stories." That is, when we critique a contemporary context through an appeal to a prior state before "the fall," we are necessarily masking...