Two Spirit Indigenous Feminism : Complementary and Reciprocal Relationships in Native Literature

This book pairs an Indigenous Two Spirit and Indigenous feminist theoretical lens to analyze Native American literature from the nineteenth century to the present, exploring how Native authors have negotiated and destabilized colonial constructions of gender and patriarchal nation-building projects.

Two Spirit Indigenous Feminism: Complementary and Reciprocal Relationships in Native Literature creates and employs a combined Two Spirit with Indigenous feminist intersectional literary analysis to understand gender-based violence and to add to the ongoing effort to decolonize and realize autonomy and sovereignty. Two guiding principles of social balance - complementarity and reciprocity - help to uncover how the authorial use of these concepts in relation to gender performances attempts to create a balanced relationship between reader and text/author that simultaneously decolonizes readers’ minds and opens the possibility for a more equitable society free from ongoing gender and race-based violence. This analysis explores how Native authors from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries navigate heteropatriarchal ideologies and practices through producing subtle and ironic critique, balancing identity constructions and relationships across cultures, adapting healing traditions and gender roles, transcending borders and binaries, and connecting race and gender ideologies to national identity to decolonize and maintain sovereignty.