Semester:
Offered:
Instructor: Morgan Ridgway
Meeting time: Monday, 3:00-5:00 pm
How do gender and sexuality shape Indigenous life? What does it mean for the body to be a site for both colonial violence and imaginative futures? How have constructions, ideas, and aesthetics of gender and sexuality morphed across time and to what consequences for Native people? This course grapples with these questions through an examination of literature and cultural production by Indigenous peoples in North America. Students will be introduced to some of the foundations of settler colonialism, what it is and how it functions. The class will engage with poetry, memoir, speculative fiction, paintings, and media to develop an awareness of how and why the genders and sexualities of Native people are central in understanding the work of settler colonialism and resistance to it. Through this class, students will critically engage works by poets such as M. Carmen Lane and Jake Skeets, fiction by Joshua Whitehead and Billy-Ray Belcourt, essays by Alan Pelaez Lopez and Erica Violet Lee, and more. Students will interrogate these works in conjunction with legal, performance, and cultural sources produced by settler states across time to understand the anxieties, joys, and power that arise when Indigenous people embrace their bodies. In the process, students will become more familiar with gender, sexuality, settler colonialism, and embodiment as key terms and develop skills and methodological approaches with which to engage ideas of power. Ultimately, this course is an opportunity to engage ideas of gender and sexuality as processes and witness the vibrancy and urgency of Indigenous literatures and cultural production.