Gender and Sexuality Studies

Abstract

In the realm of Indigenous erotics, re-imagining encompasses acts of nonconformity, resistance, and subversion. These are alternative ways of envisioning the past, present and future. Indigenous writers and artists are generating new landscapes, and new possibilities of “Indigenous subjectivity, sociality, and spatiality … a process of creating newness from existing materials, seemingly out of nowhere” (Rifkin 99). While Rifkin states these new possibilities come from seemingly ‘nowhere’, there is in fact, a rich Indigenous archive from which to draw from and these landscapes are the collective Indigenous identity stemming from individual and collective experiences of Indigenous people. Re-imaginings do not conform to the current logics of settler colonial power; they resist the colonial ‘managing’ of Indians by the Indian Act and avoid impositions of legal definitions of our selves. Re-imaginings are also subversive actions taken up by Indigenous authors to disrupt colonial stereotypes. This talk presents Indigenous erotics as a state of re-imagining the corporeal coalescence of our sexualities, genders, histories, memories and emotions, and functions as a powerful decolonizing mechanism.

Biography

Savage Bear is a rabble-rouser, Nehiyaw’iskwew (Cree woman) and member of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation in northern Saskatchewan. She is the Director for the McMaster Indigenous Research Institute (MIRI) and is an Assistant Professor within the Indigenous Studies Department. Savage is also the National Director of Walls to Bridges; an education program bringing post-secondary education to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated folks. Prior to arriving at McMaster in 2021, Bear worked at the University of Alberta, where she was the Director of the Indigenous Women & Youth Resilience Project and the academic lead on ‘Indigenous Canada,’ a highly successful online course boasting over 540,000 learners; she was also an assistant professor of Native Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies.

An accomplished academic, Bear has made significant contributions to Indigenous scholarship and the national Indigenous education landscape since earning her PhD from the University of Alberta in 2016. Her dissertation, ‘Power in My Blood: Corporeal Sovereignty through the Praxis of an Indigenous Eroticanalysis’ won the highly coveted Governor General Gold Medal . Her current research includes social justice, prison abolition, body sovereignty, sexuality, gender and reproductive justice, contemporary Indigenous art, and Indigenous literature. When she is not marking, teaching or enjoying her new role as Kookum (grandmother) you will find her literally chasing waterfalls around Hamilton’s amazing trails with her dog, Odin.