- Written by the Body: Gender Expansiveness and Indigenous Non-Cis Masculinities by Lisa Tatonetti
Written by the Body advances historical, literary, and cultural studies of gender and indigeneity by examining enduring and resurgent "gender expansiveness" in North American Indigenous creative works from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Lisa Tatonetti portrays Indigenous practitioners of what she describes as "non-cis masculinities," who testify to the interdependence of all genders within Indigenous epistemologies and to their leadership within Indigenous resurgence. Her title signals the [End Page 400] agency of noncis masculine embodiment within Indigenous creative works. Referencing Dian Million's Indigenous-feminist "felt theory," Tatonetti shows how Indigenous creatives traverse and transform the coloniality of trauma and healing with gender-expansive critical theory and action.1 This book thus joins academic and community-based efforts to center Indigenous feminist and Indigiqueer perspectives within ongoing work to decolonize Indigenous masculinity and gender.
Readers may experience this book as an extended honoring of efforts by Indigenous writers and filmmakers to portray and uplift Indigenous women leaders, such as warrior women and Big Moms, and diverse Indigiqueer and Two-Spirit people. Yet Tatonetti innovatively threads this text with an argument directed toward Indigenous masculinity studies: that noncis masculinities offer evidence of multiplicity and interdependence within Indigenous masculinities. Historical and contemporary case studies illustrate that manhood among Indigenous cis men has depended on enduring relations with Indigenous practitioners of noncis masculinities. Tatonetti's first substantive chapter, "Warrior Women in History and Early Indigenous Literatures," resituates Indigenous ethnographic and literary accounts of "warrior women" within masculinity studies and shows that creative writers recall collective recognition of Indigenous women who practice noncis masculinities as figures in relation to whom all Indigenous manhood comes to be known. Written by the Body thus intercedes profoundly within studies of the historical formation and contemporary expression of Indigenous masculinities. In the wake of the works Tatonetti examines, the subject of Indigenous masculinity must not be presumed to be cis, much less heterosexual; and when cis men are subjects, their interdependence with noncis masculinities must be recognized as foundational to imaginings of Indigenous manhood.
Tatonetti makes her case through close readings of Indigenous stories that show gender-expansive masculinities to be multiple, unfixed to particular bodies, and productive of one another, thereby grounding Indigenous community in internal diversity and interrelationship. After revisiting the figure of the warrior woman, the middle chapters consider how creative works offer related portrayals: warriors (women and/or Two-Spirit) as relatives, familial and erotic; "Big Moms," who shoulder communities' traditions and memory; and women protecting the people, land, and water from harm, as in recent documentary films depicting Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence and the Apache 8 women firefighters. Reexamining the literary figure of Big Mom in the work of Sherman Alexie, Tatonetti directly confronts revelations of Alexie's history of sexual harassment of women and innovatively reads this figure as potentially anticipating and challenging Alexie's own character. [End Page 401]
Written by the Body achieves particular depth and reach in chapters that theorize Indigenous erotics while tracing synergies among Indigenous Two-Spirit and HIV/AIDS activisms. Chapter 5 gathers Tatonetti's longstanding engagement with the life and work of Ojibwe writer and activist Carole laFavor, whom she portrays as a leading contributor to Ojibwe intellectual history, international Indigenous activism, and early literary representations of Indigenous gender expansiveness. Informed by interviews with Theresa laFavor, Carole's daughter, and elder Ojibwe HIV/ AIDS organizer Sharon Day, Tatonetti portrays laFavor as a defender of Indigenous peoples and of Two-Spirit people in her activism and writing and notably in her detective novels that Tatonetti recently helped return to print.2 This chapter ties Indigenous literary studies to broader studies of gender, sexuality, HIV/AIDS, and social movements by highlighting Two-Spirit activists' multilayered contributions to resurgence. Chapter 6 sustains these themes with compelling close readings of Indigiqueer and Two-Spirit creative writers and filmmakers who model what Tatonetti calls an "erotics of responsibility...