#asegi udanto

[madinscurianmermaid]

For this Native American History Month, I wanna send a special shout out to intersex Native and Indigenous folks, to gender non-conforming Native and Indigenous folks, to nonbinary Native and Indigenous folks, to genderfluid Native and Indigenous folks, and especially to intersex Black Native and Afro-Indigenous folks, to gender non-conforming Black Native and Afro-Indigenous folks, to nonbinary Black Native and Afro-Indigenous folks, to genderfluid Black Native and Afro Indigenous folks.

I'm Black Native and Afro-Indigenous; I'm nonbinary and genderfluid, and in context with me discovering and reclaiming gender identities and gender expression descriptors from my Native/Indigenous culture and especially from specific Indigenous groups in my blood, I'm nadleehi (Navajo/Diné), asegi udanto (Tsalagi), sxints (Nuxalk) and dilbaa (Navajo/Diné again). (I also have extensive heritage from Algonquin, Lakota, Blackfoot, Métis, Iroquois, Seminole, Nêhiyaw, Mi'kmaw, etc. and many, many, many, many other tribes.)

Then on top of that, I found out I was born intersex which I found out later in life, which along with me learning the history of how Native Americans have often held intersex folks, androgynous folks, feminine males and masculine females in high respect has been a very healing and enlightening part of my journey, culturally and expression wise.

In fact, I've been thinking about how American western culture fixates on sex and gender way too much and mainly in context of forcing colonialist eurowestern gender boxes on folks, especially black and indigenous folks, forcing labels or labelessness on us too often. And as an Afro-indigenous woman/femme, I've already been in the process of deprogramming from colonialist gender norms and reconnecting with my blackness and my Native/Indigenous American and Indigenous/Aboriginal roots, and at times my gender expression and identity intersects with that. Lily Gladstone (who uses she and singular they pronouns) worded it perfectly as decolonizing gender and that's the journey I've been on, and a journey that I'm still on as it's ever evolving and increasingly more nuanced and complex.

Anyways, I just wanna say that I love you guys, I see you and I wanna send out as much love, light and warmth to many of you as possible. 💕💕

[galliproof]

(awesome art by @antlered-pluto​ ✨)

today’s pride recommendations are:

fiction: alice isn’t dead by joseph fink

“keisha lewis lived a quiet life with her wife, alice, until the day that alice disappeared. after months of searching, presuming she was dead, keisha held a funeral, mourned, and gradually tried to get on with her life. but that was before keisha started to see her wife, again and again, in the background of news reports from all over america. alice isn’t dead, and she is showing up at every major tragedy and accident in the country. following a line of clues, keisha takes a job as a long-haul truck driver and begins searching for alice. she eventually stumbles on an otherworldly conflict being waged in the quiet corners of our nation’s highway system—uncovering a conspiracy that goes way beyond one missing woman.” - description taken from goodreads  

non-fiction: asegi stories: cherokee queer and two-spirit memory by qwo-li driskill

“qwo-li driskill’s book provides a much needed indigenization of queer history. in cherokee, the phrase asegi udanto means a person who falls outside the roles of men and women, or who mixes women’s and men’s roles; the word asegi on its own today is used by some cherokees in a similar way to the word queer. driskill rereads cherokee history from this asegi perspective, listening for the stories that have been erased by colonial heteropatriarchal history making. using oral histories and archival materials, the book examines gender and sexuality in cherokee cultural memory. the unique style of the book is as innovative as the content.” - description taken from autostraddle.com   

send in your art and book recommendations if you wanna see them on one of our daily posts!

[anniekoh]

Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory by Qwo-Li Driskill (2016)

In Cherokee Asegi udanto refers to people who either fall outside of men’s and women’s roles or who mix men’s and women’s roles. Asegi, which translates as “strange,” is also used by some Cherokees as a term similar to “queer.” For author Qwo-Li Driskill, asegi provides a means by which to reread Cherokee history in order to listen for those stories rendered “strange” by colonial heteropatriarchy.

As the first full-length work of scholarship to develop a tribally specific Indigenous Queer or Two-Spirit critique, Asegi Stories examines gender and sexuality in Cherokee cultural memory, how they shape the present, and how they can influence the future.The theoretical and methodological underpinnings of Asegi Stories derive from activist, artistic, and intellectual genealogies, referred to as “dissent lines” by Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith. Driskill intertwines Cherokee and other Indigenous traditions, women of color feminisms, grassroots activisms, queer and Trans studies and politics, rhetoric, Native studies, and decolonial politics. Drawing from oral histories and archival documents in order to articulate Cherokee-centered Two-Spirit critiques, Driskill contributes to the larger intertribal movements for social justice.

Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora by Gayatri Gopinath (2018)

In Unruly Visions Gayatri Gopinath brings queer studies to bear on investigations of diaspora and visuality, tracing the interrelation of affect, archive, region, and aesthetics through an examination of a wide range of contemporary queer visual culture. Spanning film, fine art, poetry, and photography, these cultural forms—which Gopinath conceptualizes as aesthetic practices of queer diaspora—reveal the intimacies of seemingly disparate histories of (post)colonial dwelling and displacement and are a product of diasporic trajectories. Countering standard formulations of diaspora that inevitably foreground the nation-state, as well as familiar formulations of queerness that ignore regional gender and sexual formations, she stages unexpected encounters between works by South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Australian, and Latinx artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Akram Zaatari, and Allan deSouza. Gopinath shows how their art functions as regional queer archives that express alternative understandings of time, space, and relationality. The queer optics produced by these visual practices creates South-to-South, region-to-region, and diaspora-to-region cartographies that profoundly challenge disciplinary and area studies rubrics. Gopinath thereby provides new critical perspectives on settler colonialism, empire, military occupation, racialization, and diasporic dislocation as they indelibly mark both bodies and landscapes.

Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain Zeb Tortorici (2018)

In Sins against Nature Zeb Tortorici explores the prosecution of sex acts in colonial New Spain (present-day Mexico, Guatemala, the US Southwest, and the Philippines) to examine the multiple ways bodies and desires come to be textually recorded and archived. Drawing on the records from over three hundred criminal and Inquisition cases between 1530 and 1821, Tortorici shows how the secular and ecclesiastical courts deployed the term contra natura —against nature—to try those accused of sodomy, bestiality, masturbation, erotic religious visions, priestly solicitation of sex during confession, and other forms of "unnatural" sex. Archival traces of the visceral reactions of witnesses, the accused, colonial authorities, notaries, translators, and others in these records demonstrate the primacy of affect and its importance to the Spanish documentation and regulation of these sins against nature. In foregrounding the logic that dictated which crimes were recorded and how they are mediated through the colonial archive, Tortorici recasts Iberian Atlantic history through the prism of the unnatural while showing how archives destabilize the bodies, desires, and social categories on which the history of sexuality is based.

[victim-on-main]

Oh fwi your native American game character would probably be considered two spirit. Its a pretty cool term

Yes, they would definitely qualify! As a Cherokee, they may also be called an asegi udanto, which is the term for a person who either mixes male and female or falls outside of the spectrum.