Decolonizing Queer Advocacy: Two-Spirit Futurisms and the Importance of Indigenous Speculative Fiction

This thesis seeks provide queer scholarship with first steps to take toward decolonizing its current conceptions of queerness, including what queer advocates stand to gain from reading the works of Indigiqueer and Two-Spirit authors. I revisit Indigenous history and the longstanding relationship Indigenous communities, queer communities, and modern systems have with colonialism to convey why the queer community needs to concern itself with Indigenous issues. With an emphasis on Indigenous speculative fiction, I analyze select stories from Joshua Whitehead’s Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction (2021) and Qwo-Li Driskill et al.’s Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature (2011). Using Grace Dillon’s theory from Walking the Clouds (2012), I make clear how these pieces decolonize gender, sexuality, and queer identity and demonstrate that these anthologies are important for the advancement of queer scholarship. I then present takeaways from each piece for queer advocates and scholars to begin to apply within the real world. This thesis concludes that it is time for queer scholarship to merge itself with Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer speculative fiction.