Red Roots of Solidarity

Paula Gunn Allen and the Queer Audiences of Intellectual Sovereignty

Bibliographic Data

ID2229302
AuthorsElena Gambino (0000-0002-3635-9141, Rutgers Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume48
Issue3
Pages635-658
Publication date2023-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSigns: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/723266
OpenAlexW4372049350
LanguageEN
References cited24

This article argues for understanding intellectual sovereignty—a framework that centers Native contexts as an ethical and political first frame—as a mode for understanding (and as an invitation into) the coalitional possibilities for feminist, queer, and Native audiences. I follow queer scholars in arguing that theorizing sexuality’s role in the settler state is an urgent and necessary task, but I also suggest that when queer theorists attempt to engage Native histories through the lens of queer critique, they risk marking queerness as an exemplary critique that transforms Native studies, and not the other way around. In contrast to critiques that theorize Native peoples as “structurally queer,” I turn to intellectual sovereignty to argue that the frameworks we use to theorize the coalitional aims of feminist, queer, and Native entanglements matter deeply. I trace the work of Paula Gunn Allen, a Native feminist credited as one of the founders of intellectual sovereignty, to demonstrate that privileging the specificity of Native contexts invites a solidarity grounded in responsibility and repair. Because Allen was active in both the Native and lesbian feminist projects, her many engagements with settler lesbian feminists reveal how intellectual sovereignty both centers Native knowledges and transforms non-Native audiences. Following Allen’s example, I argue that grounding queer/Native studies in intellectual sovereignty shifts the task of settler queers by reversing recognition and transforming the processes of authority and meaning making. Allen’s exercise of intellectual sovereignty thus performs on an intimate scale the work of solidarity building that is required, still, as a condition of coalitional politics

Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Sociology · Solidarity · Sovereignty · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society

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