Two-Spirit Acts: Queer Indigenous Performances ed. by Jean O’Hara (review)

The cover of Jean O’Hara’s Two-Spirit Acts features the eye-catching artwork of Adrian Stimson: a photograph of the artist’s anti-colonial gender-bending “Buffalo Boy” persona, who sports a bison G-string, buffalo corset, fishnets and a cowboy hat. This wonderfully campy image encapsulates the playful yet critical spirit of the artists and plays collected within this small anthology. The main aim of the collection is to highlight the cultural work of Indigenous artists who identify as lesbian, gay, and two-spirit, and who explicitly address issues of sexuality and gender in their respective performance contexts. The collection comprises the scripts of three artists from different nations and generations: Muriel Miguel (Kuna and Rappahannock), Kent Monkman (Cree/Irish), and Waawaate Fobister (Grassy Narrows). These works engage forms of storytelling, identity, desire, spirituality, and the harmful legacies of colonialism for contemporary Indigenous peoples.

O’Hara contextualizes the scripts in a way that is introductory and accessible to those unfamiliar with two-spirit cultural production. The collection is geared to intellectually challenge, inform, and entertain a scholarly and lay audience, as well as a Native and non-Native readership. In addition to the editor’s straightforward introduction, short essays written by Indigenous scholars and activists introduce each of the anthologized artists in the collection. O’Hara’s introduction is a good resource for casual researchers in that it cites some of the major scholarship working at the intersection of Indigenous Studies and Queer Studies, such as the collection of essays, Queer Indigenous Studies (2011). The collection also boasts a foreword by Tomson Highway (Cree)—Where is God’s Wife? Or is He Gay?—which humorously outlines the entanglements in many Native cultures between spirituality, language and sexuality. Highway describes the sacred and indispensable role of two-spirit individuals in cultivating the spiritual and emotional well-being of their communities. And how fabulous they look doing it.

Hot ‘n’ Soft is a one-woman play, written, directed, and performed by Muriel Miguel. The performance smoothly shifts between emotional states and modes of storytelling, alternating between autobiographical monologues and trickster tales, between the loneliness of romantic failure and the affectionate quirkiness of her love for her partner’s body hair. In one of the monologues, Miguel relates her sexual awakening as a Native lesbian woman by reenacting an erotic encounter she had with a European woman while traveling abroad. The play is meant to be auditory, with its moans and climaxes, and thus in written form, it teases; in performance, however, one can imagine that the materiality of these pleasure-sounds drowns out the white supremacist, heteromasculinist economy of the gaze, shifting women of color from the position of visual object to that of speaking, desiring subject. The dialectic between visibility and invisibility is also at play here, however, as she recalls her lover, Miguel indicates the white woman’s absent “presence” by following her invisible movements on stage with her eyes and head.

Trickster figures appear throughout this collection to trouble rigid categories, evoking the cultural role and gender/sexual fluidity of two-spirit folks. Hot ‘n’ Soft includes a story within a story about a female coyote in drag that gets seduced into having sex with a cute lesbian fox. Miguel encourages the audience to make connections between the different stories she tells, but also mocks them for making facile assumptions about the meaning of her work as a Native artist. Like Monkman and Fobister, she teases her audience and refuses to provide a straightforward explanation for identity or desire. Using the trickster tale—with its transformational and instructional qualities—along with oral practices of repetition, demonstrative gesture, humor, and dramatic voices throughout the performance, Miguel indexes Indigenous storytelling practices within the context of the Eurocentric space of the theater.

Each of the performances critiques Western spaces at some level. Kent Monkman performs many of his works in galleries and museums as...