Intersecting Discourses on Race and Sexuality: Compounded Colonization Among LGBTTQ American Indians/Alaska Natives

Abstract

This article examines discourses on race and sexuality in scientific literature during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in context of U.S. settler colonialism. It uses a theoretical and methodological intersectional perspective to identify rhetorical strategies deployed in discursive representations salient to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, Two-Spirit, and queer American Indians and Alaska Natives. These representations reflect a context of compounded colonization, a historical configuration of co-constituting discourses based on cultural and ideological assumptions that invidiously marked a social group with consequential, continued effects. Hence, language is a vector of power and a critical vehicle in the project of decolonization.