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Scott Lauria Morgensen. Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. isbn: 978-08166-56332-5. 292 pp.
Responding to the need for theoretical mining of modern queer theory's relationship to settler colonialism and Native studies, Scott Lauria Morgensen offers a critical understanding of the ongoing relations between queer settler colonialism and Indigenous decolonization. Morgensen, an associate professor of gender studies at Queen's University in Ontario, is also a coeditor of the recently published Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (U of Arizona P, 2011). In the preface of this monograph, Morgensen clearly lays out his three claims: 1) modern queer culture and politics are compatible with white settler society because they do not challenge colonization of Native peoples; 2) Native queer modernities "denaturalize settler colonialism and disrupt its conditioning of queer projects"; and 3) conversations between non-Native and Native queer politics lead the way to transformation (ix-x). His methodology allies Native and nonNative queer politics, Indigenous feminism, critical race studies, and Two-Spirit critiques. In response to Andrea Smiths call for such work, Morgensen attends to the ways in which white settler colonialism and a heteropatriarchal power system defines Natives and non-Natives as queer. He also explores the ways that non-Native queer modernities and politics perpetuate settler homonationalism, which relies on replacing Natives. Native queer modernities respond to such biopolitics by "asserting Indigenous methods of national survival, traditional renewal, and decolonization, including within Two-Spirit identity" (3).
The book consists of two interrelated parts, "Genealogies" and "Movements," with part 1 tracing the histories and conversations and part 2 tracing the corresponding activism in the late twentieth century and focusing on "Native communities, settlers states, and the global arena" as a means to demonstrate how Two-Spirit and Native queer activism can alter their relationships to settler colonialism (xiii).
Chapter 1 develops the primary premise that settler colonization maintains the relationship with modern sexuality and queer modernities and attempts to show how the biopolitics of settler colonialism thus queered and subjugated all racialized Americans (31). Morgensen defines settler sexuality as "a white and national heteronormativity formed by regulating Native sexuality and gender while appearing to supplant them with the sexual modernity of settlers" (31). Central to this chapter and the...