Ever wondered what the 2S inLGBTQIA2S+* stands for? Then this is the episode for you. Two-Spirit is an umbrella term that some native people in Canada and the US use to describe something that may look like non-binary gender on the outside but, like a rainbow cake of gender expansiveness, is filled with entirely different contexts and rich histories. In this first part of a double feature on queer Indigenous literatures, we hear from Lisa Tatonetti, a settler scholar who has been working on Two-Spirit writing and activism for many years and shares some of her favourite Two-Spirit reads and writers.

One highlight of the episode: Lisa’s foster cat Pippin! For more cats and books, follow @lisatatonetti on Twitter and @queerlitpodcast on Twitter and Instagram.

Texts, people, and terms mentioned:

Kaw Nation
Santa Fe Trail
Lisa Tatonetti’s Written by the Body: Gender Expansiveness and Indigenous Non-Cis Masculinities
Carole laFavor’s Along the Journey River and Evil Dead Center
Anishinaabe
Ojibwe
Vasco Núñez de Balboa
Mekadebinesikwe Kai Minosh Pyle
https://mekadebinesikwe.com/
Phillip J. Deloria
Herero Genocide
Joshua Whitehead’s Johnny Appleseed
Jas Morgan
Ocean Vuong
Beth Brant’s Writing as Witness
Billy-Ray Belcourt
Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction (ed. Joshua Whitehead) (Tatonetti references an earlier collection, Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time, also excellent, when intending to refer to the Whitehead collection.)
Audre Lorde’s theory of the Erotic
Link to Lorde’s foundational piece: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e7cf4825b02c00b6a142f0c/t/5f4bee98ceb27e4afe99bd7c/1598811800640/audre_lorde_cool-beans.pdf
Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem
Kumeyaay Nation
Jonathan Van Ness
HIV taskforce—the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS created by U.S. president Bill Clinton
Craig Womack’s Drowning in Fire (2001) and Red on Red (2009)
Mvskokee (Creek)
Muscogee (Creek) Nation

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1.What can Two-Spirit mean and how did the term originate?
2.What is a land acknowledgement? What is potentially problematic about them?
3.What role does masculinity play in the context of Two-Spirit and Indigenous history more broadly? How was masculinity instrumentalised by settler colonialists?
4.What does Lisa mean when she talks about the Erotic? Please look up Audre Lorde’s source text and read at least a few pages.
5.Do you know which people have lived on the land you live on? Why do you (not) know?