Content area
Full text
Mark Rifkin. When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the Hhtory of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 440 pp. Paper, $35.00.
Mark Rifkin's When Did Indians Become Straight? adds to the burgeoning field of queer Native studies an incisive critique of the ways sexual discourses have participated in eroding Native self-determination. Rifkin rewrites the cultural history of the United States by focusing on sexuality as a technology of colonization. Using scholarly literatures, captivity narratives, novels, popular discourses, law, and archival documents, Rifkin traces how the settler colonial project relied on and was simultaneously constituted by the heterosexualizing of Native America.
When Did Indians Become Straight? is a theoretically rich text with complex renderings of what is at stake in the way kinship, sexuality, tradition, and sovereignty are thought of. It is an expansive study that works through the early years of the United States as a republic, tracing historical representations of Native peoples to present-day configurations. Stylistically, Rifkin challenges readers with nuanced critiques and deep readings of literature. He weaves together queer theory and Native studies to critique the heteronormativity of settler colonialism using literary and cultural analysis. Unlike previous studies that focused on "two-spirit," "Joyas," "Nadle," or other "third-gender" Native people, Rifkin's book focuses on intellectual and political formations that rendered Indians as either aberrations or celebratory exceptions. By being either aberrations or exceptions, indigenous social practices continue to be judged against a European American hetero referent. Privileging that referent as the naturalized elemental of sociality was the excuse...