Abstract

This special issue proposes that dialogue between Native studies and queer studies can contribute to our understanding of the U.S. nation-state, Native polities and peoplehood, and the complex role of culture(s) in political expression and identification. Native and queer studies have, together and separately, worked to theorize and defend various kinds of diversity as well as individual and collective self-representation in the face of totalizing state legalities and ideologies, and this special issue is devoted to the intersections of those sometimes consonant, sometimes dissonant, interventions. In the introduction, each of the issue's three editors writes about his or her own "take" on the import of the collection. Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee) places the collection in the context of Native lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and two-spirit activism, and the scholarship that has grown out of that activism. He warns that times may well be getting worse rather than better for this kind of scholarship and activism, and encourages readers to understand the collection as a rallying call to further and more complex and critical work. Bethany Schneider places the collection in the context of the history of U.S. Indian policy, arguing that readers may well need a primer in how the state has furthered the project of genocide through the violent control of Native genders and sexualities. Mark Rifkin explains why the collection, with its particular focus on the state, seemed so important at this particular moment, and discusses the excitements and troubles of the interface between Native and queer studies. He introduces the essays and asks readers to imagine what it might look like to indigenize queer studies.

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