Interpenetrations: Re-encoding the Queer Indian in Sherman Alexie’s <span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;">The Business of Fancydancing</span>

Abstract

InterpenetrationsRe-encoding the Queer Indian in Sherman Alexie’s The Business of Fancydancing Quentin Youngberg (bio) In a 1997 interview with John Purdy, Sherman Alexie asserts that the problem with Native American literature is that it has been stymied for the past few decades around a fixed idea of traditionalism. Moreover, this fixation on tradition entails a representation of the modern Indian that focuses on what Alexie calls “the expected idea” (8)—an academic project in which Native American literature (and its criticism) becomes tautological, exerting violence on the lived experience of the Indian by limiting it to “traditional” themes such as the Native American’s intimate relation to the landscape and an emphasis on ceremonial spirituality. This phenomenon plays itself out not only in the sphere of literary production but also in criticism when academic readings of Native texts, perhaps following the cues of the literature itself, largely focus on the familiar themes of the mixed-blood Indian and his fragmented identity, alcoholism, and the return to the reservation, all infused with a healthy dose of ceremonial songs and a spiritual love for the land. Alexie is interested in unfixing such representations, which give way all too easily to rigid stereotypes of Native people. He sees promise, in fact, in a new generation of writers who are turning away from these more traditional representations and are beginning to write against the expectations of the reading public in an attempt to represent the full, fluid, and complex realities of their own experiences as American Indians. In his own words: I’m starting to see it. A lot of younger writers are starting to write like me—writing like I do, in a way, not copying me, [End Page 55] but writing about what happens to them, not about what they wish was happening. They aren’t writing wish fulfillment books, they’re writing books about reality. How they live, and who they are, and what they think about. Not about who they wish they were. The kind of Indian they wish they were. They are writing about the kind of Indian they are. (Purdy 9) This new kind of writing that Alexie and others are engaging embodies an attempt to break out of representations that feed American culture’s fanciful stereotypes of the Indian. Given the intensified consumption of Native literature by non-Native audiences, this project of representing other realities of contemporary Native Americans’ experience is necessary in order to disrupt the tendency for outside audiences to essentialize cultures other than their own. Given Alexie’s impulse toward de-representing the “expected idea” in Native American letters, the presence of homosexuality as a thematic undercurrent to much of his work is particularly interesting. Partially as a result of the burgeoning popularity of feminist criticism, and partially as a result of the popularity of women writers such as Louise Erdrich and Leslie Marmon Silko, more and more Native American literary criticism is focusing on sexuality. While this certainly represents a positive critical direction, it is interesting that very little, if anything at all, has been written about homosexuality within that same body of analytical texts. Indeed, little has been written at all about homosexuality in the broader field of Native American studies outside those authored by white anthropologists and historians who tended to romanticize or otherwise misrepresent the experience of Natives who were not heterosexual. In their introduction to the anthropological text Two-Spirit People, Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang refer to an idealizing view [that] has led to a relatively recent romanticization of purported positively sanctioned pan-Indian gender or sexual categories that do not fit the reality of experiences [End Page 56] faced by many contemporary gay, lesbian, third-gender, transgender, and otherwise two-spirit Native Americans who have had to leave their reservation or other communities because of the effects of homophobia. (5) What they are referring to is the anthropological notion that Native American cultures have always made space—institutionally, communally, and spiritually—for the nonheterosexual subject. Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang note that the danger in conceptualizing sexuality on such terms lies in the temptation to “seek the primordial bliss of the...