Refusing (Mis)Recognition: Navigating Multiple Marginalization in the U.S. Two Spirit Movement
Refusing (Mis)Recognition: Navigating Multiple Marginalization in the U.S. Two Spirit Movement

Summary/Abstract: I focus on the discursive strategies within Two Spirit events and groups that center the definition of ‘Two Spirit’ first and foremost as an Indigenous identity by using both unifying/mass terms (Native American, glbtiq)and culturally & community specific terms (specific tribe names, Two Spirit). Rather than selecting a ‘right’ term, such conversations highlight the constant, simultaneous positionings negotiated by Two Spirit people in their daily lives, and the tensions between recognizability and accuracy, communality and specificity, indigeneity and settler culture, and the burden multiply marginalized people carry in negotiating between all of these metaphorical and literal spaces. Drawing on Audra Simpson’s (2007, 2014)concept of the politics of refusal, I demonstrate how Two Spirit individuals utilize available categories of identity, not as either/or binaries but rather as overlapping concepts—differentiated along micro- and macro-scales—to refuse attempts to both reduce the Two Spirit identity to one that is based either in gender or sexuality, and the appropriation of the identity and movement by non-Indigenous individuals and groups within broader national and global queer movements.

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