Writing as Rupture in A History of my Brief Body and Making Love with the Land

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper attempts to understand the marginalisation of Indigiqueer and Two Spirit people and how they write to resist heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism in the Canadian context through two texts. Two Spirit people who were respected in most Indigenous cultures before colonisation, have been marginalised by the hegemony of White society's heteropatriarchy. In A History of my Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt, who belongs to the Driftpile Cree Nation in northern Alberta, and Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead, who is an Oji-Cree member of the Peguis First Nation in Manitoba, the two authors challenge the limits imposed by Western understandings of what literature is supposed to be by foregrounding the importance of the body, their communities, the places they belong to, and subverting conventional notions of genre and aesthetics. Furthermore, their writing ruptures the power structures that oppress them by foregrounding an ethics of care and solidarity.