Written by the Body: Gender Expansiveness and Indigenous Non-Cis Masculinities by Lisa Tatonetti (review)

Lisa Tatonetti argues that expansive Indigenous understandings of gender identity, expression, and performance advance the well-being of Native communities, chart Indigenous futures, and refute settler binaries. She explicates wide-ranging illustrations to support this argument, addressing female-embodied warriors, “big moms,” female-identified Apache firefighters, HIV/AIDS activists, and Two-Spirit peoples who resist “gendercide” (per Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen/Chumash writer and scholar Deborah Miranda’s theorization of the term). Working across genres and time periods, Tatonetti demonstrates how Native gender expansiveness and its inclusion of non-cis masculinities benefit not just non-cishet peoples but Indigenous communities generally. She notes, for instance, how hypermasculinization of Indigenous men has aligned them with destructive stereotypes of the savage warrior and severed many from family, community, and spiritual traditions.

Foundational to this study is the deployment of felt theory, with frequent reference to Tanana Athabascan theorist Dian Million’s seminal work, to argue that gender is a form of embodied knowledge forged through the interplay between bodies. As Tatonetti writes, “Written by the Body turns on these rich intersections in which the body serves as text, archive, and action, considering stories and spaces where the body holds a deep affective resonance” (3).

Chapter 1 addresses female-identified and gender-variant warriors described in early tribal and settler accounts, alongside those in Muscogee Creek writer S. Alice Callahan’s Wynema: A Child of the Forest and Yankton Dakota writer and activist Zitkala-Ša’s “A Warrior’s Daughter.” Tatonetti’s interpretations of these narratives deftly illustrate women warriors’ adoption of masculine roles in battle—often embodying these roles better than their male-identified counterparts. She underscores that the settler gaze attempts, unsuccessfully, to contain female-identified and gender-variant warriors within their binary male/female lens, while noting how internalized colonialist norms limit Callahan’s representation of Indigenous women warriors.

Chapter 2’s analysis of Cherokee writer and scholar Daniel Heath Justice’s The Way of Thorn and Thunder highlights the role of the erotic in linking Indigenous peoples to the vitality of their bodies and community responsibility, and propelling bodily and tribal sovereignty. Tatonetti argues that Justice “allows for a recovery of the place of the erotic in a warrior ethos” (64, emphasis in original). Her reading of “A Warrior’s Daughter,” in turn, addresses Pawnee-Otoe Missouri author Anna Lee Walters’s acknowledgment of how Indigenous cishet men have suffered under colonization from erosion of their traditional places within their communities while demonstrating how warrior identities— once unbound from male sex markers— hold promise for the futurity of Indigenous peoples.

In chapter 3 Tatonetti turns to “big moms” in Spokane–Coeur d’Alene author Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues and Muscogee Creek/Cherokee writer and scholar Craig Womack’s Drowning in Fire: “Indigenous women who consciously use their bodies to forward dynamic, affective relationships in the service of their nations” (75). These big moms model this capacity but also experience rejection by cismen influenced by colonialist gender narratives that strip power from femininity. While the physical size of the big moms’ bodies is critical to Tatonetti’s reading of their power, including in subverting settler expectations that women be thin and comparatively weak, their size speaks also to their bodies’ capacity as “a somatic archive of Indigenous knowledge” (78, emphasis original).

Chapter 4 centers on Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin’s 2014 Trick or Treaty? and Sande Zeig’s 2011 Apache 8 documentaries. For Tatonetti, Trick or Treaty? testifies to the affective power of the body with its focus on Idle No More activism: Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike and the 990 mile walk of six James Bay Cree men to support her. Apache 8 features Apache female-identified firefighters whose commitment to land and tribe is articulated through their physical strength and willingness to confront danger while “working with rather than against that land as they attempt to eradicate the...