AMIN5412

This course will critically and closely engage with indigenous feminisms in the Americas. What does it mean to be an intersectional indigenous feminist? How are indigenous womyn activists, cultural workers, and intellectuals throughout the Americas theorizing and critiquing the production of gender, gender roles, heterosexualism, patriarchy, and anti-Indigenous racism? How are rape and conquest tied to the emergence of patriarchy and the sexualization and violence committed against indigenous womyn’s bodies and queer bodies? This course will consider these questions from indigenous queer and feminist perspectives. Initially, we will set out to understand how the colonization of indigenous peoples in the Americas influenced past and contemporary understandings of race and otherness on the continent. We will analyze how European explorers codified indigenous bodies as different and drew binaries between themselves and indigenous peoples as racial others. We will explore how violence committed against indigenous bodies solidified ideas about indigeneity and how exploitation in colonial institutions turned indigenous bodies into commodities. Additionally, we will consider how colonization and colonial institutions racialized indigenous bodies through sexual violence and rape. Furthermore, we will consider how the imposition of patriarchy and the importation of capitalism established a Eurocentric colonial gender system, which disrupted broader pre-colonial indigenous ideas about gender and sexuality. On the one hand, the gender binary stripped indigenous womyn of their political power and voice by relegating them to the domestic sphere, and, on the other, the new system negated indigenous genders and gender roles, which fell outside of the binary, consequentially erasing the existence and validity of queer indigenous people. We will engage with decolonial feminist voices to further our understanding of the impact of pre-colonial conceptualizations of gender and sexuality.
The course will examine the relationship between Western feminism and indigenous feminism, as well as the interconnections between womyn of color feminism and indigenous feminism. In addition to exploring how indigenous feminists have theorized from "the flesh" of their embodied experience of colonialism, the course will also consider how indigenous womyn are articulating decolonization and the embodiment of autonomy through scholarship, cultural revitalization, and activism.

02631

Global Perspectives

Periodic Fall & Spring