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  • Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization by Scott Lauria Morgensen
  • Leah Sneider (bio)
Scott Lauria Morgensen. Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. ISBN: 978-08166-56332-5. 292pp.

Responding to the need for theoretical mining of modern queer theory’s relationship to settler colonialism and Native studies, Scott Lauria Morgensen offers a critical understanding of the ongoing relations between queer settler colonialism and Indigenous decolonization. Morgensen, an associate professor of gender studies at Queen’s University in Ontario, is also a coeditor of the recently published Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (U of Arizona P, 2011). In the preface of this monograph, Morgensen clearly lays out his three claims: 1) modern queer culture and politics are compatible with white settler society because they do not challenge colonization of Native peoples; 2) Native queer modernities “denaturalize settler colonialism and disrupt its conditioning of queer projects”; and 3) conversations between non-Native and Native queer politics lead the [End Page 127] way to transformation (ix–x). His methodology allies Native and non-Native queer politics, Indigenous feminism, critical race studies, and Two-Spirit critiques. In response to Andrea Smith’s call for such work, Morgensen attends to the ways in which white settler colonialism and a heteropatriarchal power system defines Natives and non-Natives as queer. He also explores the ways that non-Native queer modernities and politics perpetuate settler homonationalism, which relies on replacing Natives. Native queer modernities respond to such biopolitics by “asserting Indigenous methods of national survival, traditional renewal, and decolonization, including within Two-Spirit identity” (3).

The book consists of two interrelated parts, “Genealogies” and “Movements,” with part 1 tracing the histories and conversations and part 2 tracing the corresponding activism in the late twentieth century and focusing on “Native communities, settlers states, and the global arena” as a means to demonstrate how Two-Spirit and Native queer activism can alter their relationships to settler colonialism (xiii).

Chapter 1 develops the primary premise that settler colonization maintains the relationship with modern sexuality and queer modernities and attempts to show how the biopolitics of settler colonialism thus queered and subjugated all racialized Americans (31). Morgensen defines settler sexuality as “a white and national heteronormativity formed by regulating Native sexuality and gender while appearing to supplant them with the sexual modernity of settlers” (31). Central to this chapter and the book as a whole is the history of berdache, a figure understood as representing “immoral male desire” but here reconceived and invoked to refer to “a logic of sexual primitivity and civilization” informing the relationships between colonists and Natives (36–37). Thus, he claims that the conflict over desire and expressions of gender shaped colonization and Native resistance to it. Furthermore, he explores how queer modernities reinforce and perpetuate settler colonialism by failing to critically reflect upon their discursive and practical relationships to settler sexuality and Native history.

Morgensen continues to recount the origin and significance of berdache as a symbol of colonial and settler subjects that offers a “context of conversation” (56). Chapter 2 traces the trajectory of such context beginning in the 1970s in anthropology and claims that these conversations made Native culture “crucial to gender and sexual liberation” through their popularization of berdache as nonnormative (66–67). In [End Page 128] other words, predominantly white gay organizations appropriated berdache as a means to resist straight settler society. Morgensen further troubles these conversations and histories on berdache to show how they are both “synchronic and diachronic” (77). Two-Spirit terminology emerged in the 1990s in opposition to berdache and as an ongoing legacy of Indigenous critique of settler colonialism and the enactment of “a new Native politics” (78). Therefore, he asserts that Two-Spirit genealogies are of utmost significance to queer studies because they shed light on the intellectual and practical impact of settler colonialism on Native and non-Native queers. Finally, he argues that Two-Spirit epistemologies reflect Indigenous tradition that “challenges colonial knowledges, alters power relations with non-Natives, and incites new registers through which Native people can join and hold non-Natives accountable to work for...

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