‘Spring’ in Minnesota is most definitely the best time to have one’s mind blown. And to write write write as an act of conjuring in this state of expansion. Thus I share below an excerpt from an interview that is changing the ways I think, relate, research, love, and create. I haven’t yet artfully expressed the gratitude I feel for all folx expanding existing ideas of sexuality, relationality, pleasure, and body autonomy. It’s coming. And in the meantime, biggest of Big shout outs to Dr. Kim TallBear, her work around decolonizing sexuality, and the website Strippers and Sages.
Excerpt from 2020 interview:
Lianne: Well, that's a good segue, you know, I'd love to read Scott Morgensen's definition of settler sexuality, and then maybe have you unpack it for us, because it's a mouthful. And we can get into that history that we're talking about. So he defines it as “a white national hetero- and homo-normativity that regulates Indigenous sexuality and gender by supplanting them with the sexual modernity of settler subjects. And his abridged version would be, it's essentially the heteropatriarchal and sexual modernity, exemplary of white settler civilization. So, help us understand this idea, and especially, I'd love you to comment on the sexual modernity part, because I think that there's a history there that that points to, of course, which is to say that monogamy, which is now the status quo, really became the status quo at a particular moment in this nation’s shaping.
Dr. Tallbear: Yeah, there are multiple scholars, if people are so inclined to read on this, Scott Morgensen is an anthropologist at Queen's University in Ontario. And he's got a book called The Spaces Between Us, and he's also got some articles where he, for example, in his book has a chapter on the Radical Fairies in Oregon and California, and he looks at different gay communities or queer communities, and the work that they do that is in part, I mean, is in part radical, but it's also in part kind of scripted by their desire to either uphold or reform the state. It's scripted by histories of settler colonialism, the theft of Indigenous land, Indigenous eraser. So he's really good about looking at the rise of both normative and non-normative sexualities within the settler colonial state of the US, and how that's entangled with state-making, right? So it's... so yes, we might have natural inclinations to relate in a certain way. But the ways in which we have romantic or sexual relationships, room for that is made within an ongoing narrative about the state. I don't know how to put that more simply, I'd have to give you an example. I think when he's talking about the Radical Fairies, for example, so men leaving these urban areas to go back to the land, you know, to try to find some kind of queer mode of life in the country. He's like, well, what makes that possible? The theft of Indigenous land, the emptying of this land of indigenous people, right? And so then people aren't even thinking about that. And then those narratives of the vanishing Indian, the vanishing Native, allow those same queer subjects to appropriate these kinds of representations of Indigeneity to help themselves belong to the land. And you can have sympathy in part for what they're doing because they're pushing back against a severely oppressive heteronormative culture. On the other hand, in order to build their own alternative way of living and their own space, they are also relying on cultural and actual appropriation of land. And so he has this really rich chapter on that. And that's in part what he's talking about when he's talking about pushing back against settler sexuality. There have also been a couple of feminist historians who have looked at, Sarah Carter in Canada and Nancy Cod in the US, who have looked at the role of compulsory monogamy in building the US and Canada, and the imposition of monogamy not only on Indigenous peoples, but all other kinds of cultures that were immigrating to the US. So also on people from certain parts of Asia or Africa, Mormons, you know, and the role that that played in controlling women, controlling children, and controlling land, and facilitating the inheritance of property according to a heteropatriarchal system. There's also Angela Willie, who I mentioned, who has some really great chapters on the history of sexology to get to the science part. And so at the turn of the 20th century, or the late 19th century, you've got sexologists, especially in Europe, where they're going through this transition from arranged marriage to love marriage, and they're advocating that love marriage is a sign of a more evolved people. So that's a very classist and racist argument that's happening among sexological scientists at the turn of the 20th century where they're promoting love marriages. They're portraying arranged marriages as backwards, which in a sense, is helping dismantle the extended family. Foucault’s written about how homosexuality becomes an object or an idea before heterosexuality, and the rise of the state after the fall of the monarchies, they're trying to control the population. Well, without the king, one of the ways the state controls the population is through these kinds of techniques of management, right? The imposition of new norms, of what's normal, right? How should we live? What's a more evolved citizen supposed to do? So there's all kinds of scholars you can read to look at the different aspects of how monogamy becomes the norm, how heterosexuality becomes the norm, when in many places across time and space, humans have been relating in much more multiple ways, right? Not only Indigenous people.