Straight Talk: Two Spirit Erasure as the Price of Sovereignty in James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk
Articles » Scholarly, peer reviewed
Author/Creator
Lydia R. Cooper
Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 30, no. 3-4, Fall-Winter, 2018, pp. 96-120
Description
Discusses the absence of positive representations of gay men in contemporary Indigenous novels generally, and Welch’s novel specifically. Speculates that the editing out of non-heteronormative or queer identities is a result of colonial social structures in which the price of personhood is the performance of straight masculinity.