"Bringing Native Studies Out of the Cupboard, Not the Closet: Decolonizing Sexualized Images of Native Peoples."
Histories of biopower deeply affected Native peoples’ relationship to their bodies and to sexuality. In an effort to protect Indigenous nations and communities from the violence and genocide of biopower, some Native nations have: worked to discursively to desexualize their communities; enforced a structured silence around sex; and passed anti-gay marriage laws to avoid the violence of settler-colonialism by conforming to heteronormativity. This response has failed and has often led to the exclusion of queer Native peoples from Indigenous nations and has not allowed Native peoples to take sexuality seriously in order to decolonize our communities. In her book ‘Bringing Sexy Back’ To Native Studies, Dr. Finley argues that the study of sexualities and queer theory is not decadent, nor is it too theoretical. Heteropatriarchy remains an intricate component of the history of the colonization of Native America. This lack of attention to the study of sexualities does not allow for a full analysis of settler colonialism and the genocidal logics of biopower. As an alternative to heteronormative and desexualized readings of representations of Native peoples in popular culture, Dr. Finley uses sex positivity as a framework and explore queer and Indigenous feminist possibilities for articulating Indigenous nationhood, sovereignty, self-determination, and Indigenous futurity.
Dr. Chris Finley is currently a Postdoctoral fellow in Race and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in American Culture at the University of Michigan. She is a member of the Colville Confederated tribes and is originally from Washington State.
