Written by the Body

Lisa Tatonetti is professor in the Department of English at Kansas State University. She is author of The Queerness of Native American Literature (Minnesota, 2014) and coeditor of Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Contemporary Two-Spirit Literature.

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Text, Archive, and Action: The Body in Motion1. Warrior Women in History and Early Indigenous Literatures2. Warriors, Indigenous Futures, and the Erotic: Anna Lee Walters and DanielHeath Justice 3. Big Moms, or The Body as Archive4. Body as Shield and Shelter: Indigenous Documentary Film5. HIV/AIDS Activism and the Indigenous Erotic: Carole laFavor6. An Erotics of Responsibility: Non-Cis Identities and Community AccountabilityCoda: “The Body as Conversation, The Body as Transformation”NotesBibliographyIndex

"‘Masculinity’ is a loaded word; it has become linked with violence, cruelty, and the hetero-normative male body. Lisa Tatonetti’s Written by the Body, however, unpacks the ways Indigenous peoples negotiate and refuse settler-colonial definitions of masculinity in texts, films, and lived experience-and in doing so, engage in the creation of life-affirming strategies for survival and thrivance. Tatonetti’s specific focus on the expression of Indigenous masculinities, in particular, is a breath of hope for those of us working to heal from damage inflicted by histories of colonial policing of gender alternatives. As she notes, ‘Indigenous gender articulations are expansive; held in variously gendered bodies rather than tethered to settler binaries, they shift in mode and meaning and hold real creative potential.’ It is this transformational creativity which Tatonetti’s work notices and celebrates, bringing into focus the ways that Indigenous concepts of masculinity manifest their own sovereignty and serve to nurture Indigenous identities."-Deborah A. Miranda, author of Altar for Broken Things and Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir"The book refreshes the scholarly conversation around familiar texts and sheds light on underappreciated works. This makes Written by the Body a highly citable resource for academic research in Indigenous studies, women’s and gender studies, queer studies, history, and literature  and media studies."-Resources for Gender and Women’s Studies: A Feminist Review