_UNIV 3088: Transformation Now

Article: The relationship between violence and patriarchal gender systems is structural and coconstitutive; yet structural analyses that account for gender in explanations and conceptualizations of violence are often absent from violence scholarship. Additionally, there are numerous underassessed areas in more gender-nuanced, “gender-based” violence paradigms. We address the shortcomings of both types of research and propose a cohesive theoretical framework that captures the ways in which violence is patriarchy-enhancing and patriarchy-facilitated. Violence shapes and influences gender performances and structures and, concomitantly, the gender order shapes and influences violence in given contexts.

Article: The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a surge in patriarchal repression for women worldwide, with marked increases in gender violence, gendered job loss and deterioration in labor conditions, regression in health care access and reproductive rights, and backlash against feminist consciousness. Beyond intensifying chronic rights gaps and the preexisting conditions of patriarchy, the global health crisis has increased the gendered impact of interdependence across the social-civil-security rights domains, the public-private divide, and intersecting identities of gender, race, and class. The cumulation of these shifts constitutes a new phase of pandemic patriarchy that sets new parameters for the fulfillment of women's rights in the international rights regime. The uneven rights regime response to the panoply of rights challenges under conditions of pandemic patriarchy shows that an adequate global response must move beyond the recognition of women's rights as human rights to incorporate feminism as an ethic of care, struggle for systematic gender equity, and feminist reconstruction of global governance.

This article reflects upon the centrality of Indigenous Sovereignty within the broader struggle for human rights and democracy in their most inclusive and substantive senses, especially in societies whose development has been built upon the violence of colonial expansion, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. The article also situates Indigenous rights within regimes of multiple articulated alterities in which the subjugation and dispossession of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples have been historically differentiated yet intertwined in the Americas. The article offers a multi-sited framework for understanding the convergent and divergent points of reference in the logics of Indigenous and Afro-descendant identity, the relationship with the State and Market, and connections to the material and spiritual resources of land.

According to Sylvia Wynter, we are "a storytelling species": The capacity to narrate the world might be what we hold most in common as "humans" across diverse geographies. In this article, we weave together Black, Indigenous, and third world and women of color feminist scholarship to ask this question: How can storytelling, as an alternate mode of theorization, help us resituate contemporary planetary crises within longer histories and plural understandings of our relations with earth? We closely read three anticolonial (feminist) scholars whose theories illuminate the relationship of race, gender, and nature: Wynter's genealogy of humans as storytellers; Lorena Cabnal's elaboration of cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) and ancestral patriarchy; and Mishuana Goeman's conceptualization of the body as a meeting place. Anticolonial feminist storytelling alters the spatiotemporal scales through which planetary crises are understood by centering the relationship between body and land. We elaborate how the White, cis male, bourgeois and propertied figure of the human reproduces a story that normalizes the racialization of people and ecologies, gendered domination, and extractivism. Revealing this dominant story to be a fiction of modernity, these scholars open a space of possibility, to tell stories otherwise that reimagine what it means to be human on earth. Storytelling as anticolonial praxis troubles the fixity of racial-colonial violence and reconceives the human, not as a liberal subject or fixed object within colonial capitalism, but as a node within a relational network of human and nonhuman kin.

Our goal in this article is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization. Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, non-white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. In this article, we analyze multiple settler moves towards innocence in order to forward “an ethic of incommensurability” that recognizes what is distinct and what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. We also point to unsettling themes within transnational/Third World decolonizations, abolition, and critical space-place pedagogies, which challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors, making room for more meaningful potential alliances.

This essay offers a critical analysis of the metaphysical and methodological presuppositions of Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”. While Tuck and Yang position settler colonial spatiality as structured by a settler‐native‐slave triad, we argue that their critique of metaphor entails the collapse of the triad into a settler‐native dyad, the reduction of slavery to forced labour, and a division between the material and the symbolic that forecloses not only an analysis of slavery, but also the constitution of settler colonialism itself. Through an immanent critique of “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” we identify what animates their critique of metaphor, and drawing on scholarship in Black studies, we offer an alternative theorisation of slavery and settler colonialism.

An interdisciplinary, peer reviewed journal "established to respond to a growing demand for reflection and critical scholarship on settler colonialism as a distinct social and historical formation."

A journal article using setter-colonial racial capitalism theories to explore inequality in housing.

Joey Criddle, a Native American gay man, recounts the story of how he underwent a transformation from a closeted Pentecostalist in Mississippi to the co-director of the Two Spirit Society of Denver.

Father of three, successful TV actor and artist and proud member of the First Nations two-spirited gay community, Byron Chief-Moon is a fascinating mesh of dynamic personae. But when he dances alone in the forest, the complexity of the real world washes away, and we can see his spiritual self take hold. Interviews combine with mesmerizing footage of his performances to capture the essence of this cutting-edge artist who founded the Coyote Arts Percussive Performance Association. By melding the history and art of his Canadian Blackfoot Confederacy tribe with issues of contemporary life, Chief-Moon's work makes profound statements about identity and tradition.

This article explores the difficulties of presenting two-spirited individuals in textual form due to the amount of political, social, and spiritual complexity associated with this particular identity category. Utilizing personal statements from aboriginal and two-spirit-identified individuals as well as secondary sources from well-known academics, this essay interrogates two novels in its focus on the deconstruction of identity categories to better understand the two-spirit identity within each text.

Indigenous sexual and gender minority people have been identifying as two-spirit since 1990 and are reclaiming traditional Indigenous gender terms such as nádleehí or agokwe. At the same time, Settler-dominated communities are undergoing a cultural shift toward challenging binary categories of sex and gender, causing some Settler governments to adopt a multi-gender framework reminiscent of the Indigenous systems they aimed to erase through colonial systems and practices. This article examines how shifts in Settler gender frameworks relate to traditional and contemporary understandings of gender in Indigenous nations and how Indigenous gender systems support resistance to ongoing colonization.

As settler colonialism has forcibly constricted vast expanses of Indigenous lands, criss-crossing them with superimposed borders, it has sought to redraw the boundaries of Indigenous identity by imposing definitions and categories that invariably lead to Indigenous diminishment. Strategic and eliminatory categorization is essential to the settler-colonial imperative. This essay explores settler-colonial exercises of rhetorical imperialism that deploy language, connotation, and categorization to dismantle Indigenous cultural systems. The author discusses the political stake in who is designated Indigenous, the drive to remake Indigenous nations in the image of the settler-state, the enforcement of cis-heteropatriarchal capitalist norms, and assimilationist strategies aiming to disrupt Indigenous formations of gender and kinship. The author argues that Indigenous assertions of peoplehood as a definitional and unifying framework and Two-Spirit as a self-identifier are acts of resistance that they term “oppositional identification” and “contrast mechanisms.” They are exercises of rhetorical and radical sovereignty, tantamount to everyday decolonization.