Suchergebnisse

In 1998, the American anthropologist Will Roscoe referred to pre-colonial North America as "the queerest continent on the planet" (Roscoe 1998, 4), expressing a more universally accepted idea that before settlers arrived in North America, Indigenous peoples embraced and celebrated queer and trans people. Building on this anachronistic assumption, this article investigates the historical and anthropological constructions of the 'Sacred Queer Native' trope and argues that its attendant discourses perpetuate an idea of the 'Sacred Queer Native' figure as a mythological Noble Savage doomed to perish. The anthropological accounts therefore serve as settler colonial tools of elimination, relegating (queer) Indigenous peoples to the past, while emulating their 'queerness' in order to legitimize modern Lesbian and gay identities. At the same time, Indigenous poets celebrate(d) the same figuration as a strategy for empowerment, reclaiming historical positions of power and sovereignty through celebratory and often erotic poetries that directly and indirectly critique settler colonial heteropatriarchy. The article concludes that the contentions over the figure of the Sacred Queer Native and its anti-colonial, Indigenouscounter-construction, Two-Spirit, illustrates both the constructedness of gender and sexualities and the need for continued critique in the field.

Literary and cultural texts by southern poor whites in the hills of the Ozarks and Appalachia and southern migrants in Rustbelt Ohio explode with feelings such as hatred, desperation, and anger, resulting from the continual precaritization and marginalization of the mountain communities. In (auto)biographical texts as well as in literary fiction, the "hillbilly" community is represented as self-segregated, proud, and independent, with special notions of honor and loyalty. Exploring the (dis)connections between the literary emotions of the people of the Mountain South and the code of southern honor that has produced and sustained them, this article argues that the anxious and angry emotions that Donald Trump taps into as a political strategy are not new, but rather have been building throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries. The first manifestations that this precarious affective structure was forming can be seen in this regional literature, illustrating the potential in explorations of literary ugly feelings (Ngai, 2005) of marginalized southerners. Thus, the article uncovers how poor whites position their precarious existences in Trump's USA and how they employ various affective strategies to articulate their whiteness and their anxiety.

Literary and cultural texts by southern poor whites in the hills of the Ozarks and Appalachia and southern migrants in Rustbelt Ohio explode with feelings such as hatred, desperation, and anger, resulting from the continual precaritization and marginalization of the mountain communities. In (auto)biographical texts as well as in literary fiction, the "hillbilly" community is represented as self-segregated, proud, and independent, with special notions of honor and loyalty. Exploring the (dis)connections between the literary emotions of the people of the Mountain South and the code of southern honor that has produced and sustained them, this article argues that the anxious and angry emotions that Donald Trump taps into as a political strategy are not new, but rather have been building throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries. The first manifestations that this precarious affective structure was forming can be seen in this regional literature, illustrating the potential in explorations of literary ugly feelings (Ngai, 2005) of marginalized southerners. Thus, the article uncovers how poor whites position their precarious existences in Trump's USA and how they employ various affective strategies to articulate their whiteness and their anxiety.