#scott morgensen

[pumpacti0n]

The policing of indigenous genders and sexualities as a means to further the larger settler-colonial project led to the development of a “settler sexuality.” Scott Morgensen (settler scholar) defines settler sexuality as “a white national heteronormativity that regulates Indigenous sexuality and gender by supplanting them with the sexual modernity of settler subjects.” In non-academic speak, settler sexuality can be described as an “exceptional” form of sexual expression enforced by the settler-state. The setter-state deems heterosexual monogamy as “exceptional” and “normal,” and anything beyond those confines as “primitive” and “unexceptional.”

...

"Indigenous womxn, “queer,” transgender, and non-binary people endure unspeakable violence at the hands of non-native settlers and even their own community members, however they continue to resist and pave a path toward brighter tomorrows. Indigenous womxn, trans folk, queers stand at the forefront of the larger decolonial movement to reclaim previous subjectivities and to build bright collective futures.

Decolonization is often mistaken as an effort to “go back” to precolonial ways, but the active process of such carries much more gravity than that. Indigenous people not only demand the total repatriation of land, but we continually envision and push for a world void of structures such as settler-colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, racism, fascism, and heteropatriarchy.

Decolonization involves reclaiming previous ways of living — horizontal leadership, collectivism, and recognition of universal relations — and pushing such lifeways into practice and action in order to develop a sustainable future. It’s not all about the past, it’s about what we want for our communities in the years to come. Indigenous womxn and queers lead the larger movement for such futures despite the violence they experience under settler-colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy."

[Settler Sexuality - Resistance to State-Sanctioned Violence, Reclamation of Anti-Colonial Knowledges & Liberation for All K’é Infoshop Collective]

[notesonresistance-blog]

Like visionaries before him whom he echoed, including Magnus Hirschfeld, Edward Carpenter, and Arthur Evans, [Harry] Hay invoked anthropology in order to claim that a gender-transitive male homosexual role tied to spiritual practice existed among indigenous people throughout the world and all time. This role was an object constructed in nineteenth century colonial ethnology and twentieth century metropolitan sexology and sexual minority politics. Yet for many faeries, it resembled claims by contemporary Native lesbians and gays just enough to secure a crucial belief: that gayness authorized even white gay men to identify with, if not *as* the social roles practiced among certain indigenous people. Thus from the start, Hay and his followers racialized radical faerie culture as a normatively white imaginary of indigeneity, whose participants could become more like indigenous people than the inheritors of settlement most otherwise were destined to be. Such claims offered gay men and, in masculinist extrapolations, all lesbian, bi, and trans people authentic cultural roots as well as belonging to all nations born on stolen land.

Scott Morgensen, "Rooting for Queers"

[notesonresistance-blog]

Steve Niva has described how the emergence of the U.S. as a sole superpower meshed Bush Sr.'s "kinder, gentler" conservatism with the gendering of the Gulf War to produce what he called a "New World Order masculinity." Sensitive and inclusive manhood became the new face of the state at the very moment of the technological elaboration and unchallenged deployment of American military power. Hegemonic masculinity here incorporated qualities feminists once argued men should adopt--crying in public, letting women serve their country, caring for the conditions of women abroad--as proof that expanding empire and renewed conservatism could rescue American men from an emasculating "Vietnam syndrome" while standing as an answer to feminism.

Scott Morgensen, "Rooting for Queers"

[notesonresistance-blog]

Historiographers and cultural critics have traced how reconsolidations of hegemonic manhood among the white ruling classes of the U.S. have linked civilized men's salvation to incorporating primitive origins. Under certain historical conditions, colonial masculinist claims on the difference of modern gender have invented, disavowed, and reclaimed a dangerously primitive manhood in order to complete white ruling class men's journey to supremacy. Philip Deloria suggested that revolutionary and early Republican manhood initiated a definition of citizenship in terms of oscillations between primitive rebellion and civilizational advancement. Gail Bederman has argued that in a late-nineteenth century moment of Darwininian evolutionism and imperialism--including threats posed by Euro-ethnic immigration, worker organizing, and decolonizing movements at home and abroad--U.S. white ruling class definitions began shifting from superceding primitivity, to strategically incorporating it as part of claims on civilized authority. In these contexts, primitivist practices--from protesters' charades and fraternal initiations, to Boy Scout survivalism and U.S. imperial ventures--enabled reconnecting to primitive roots through retreat from the space and time of modernity. Crossing urban-rural and metropolitan-colonial divides served as physical, mental, and spiritual pedagogies that sought to virilize modern manhood. Scholars of contemporary culture have argued that such legacies inform claims on citizenship in recent political mobilizations of men. Susan Jeffords and Linda Bose have noted how cultural work and community organizing after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam articulated defensive responses by straight white men to a loss of stable manhood based on military heroism. Men blamed this loss not on military leadership but on certain vagaries of modern life, such as disruptions of industrial and Cold War economies by globalization, or a generation of anti-war, civil rights, feminist, and lesbian and gay movements, including critiques of U.S. military racism in east, southeast, and west Asia. Thus across all their discrepancies, Vietnam War media, the mythopoetic men's movement, and the Gulf War can be read to have converged as projects to reinvigorate modern men by engaging, controlling, and incorporating the violent potency of savage Others. ... Within quite distinct projects, a related logic moved: return to the space and time of primitivity invigorates manhood for modern men and reconstitutes their social position in face of threat.

Scott Morgensen, "Rooting for Queers"

[aabita-giizhig]

so, remember that time i was awarded the most funding i've ever received for a project to potentially bring in this amazing dude (among others) who inspired every facet of the work i do / organize a conference for the simone de beauvoir institute around issues of indigenous feminisms and queer indigeneity. yup, that actually happened to me today. honestly wouldn't have happened without mentoring from ed lee. i've seriously learned more from the people i organize with than through my formal education. fuck grad school i'm just going to get all the funding for iw2shrc!! wut wut.

[lasmaracuyas]

Ongoing reaction to the U.S. Patriot Act or the war on terror by many white Europeans and white settlers suggests that their potential exposure to bare life comes as an unwelcome surprise. Produced by the securitisation of liberal modernity, white liberal subjects might think that the Act or the war abrogate freedoms promised by a law that should protect them – the very law that they invite racialised and colonised peoples to affirm, as if extending its rule leads to liberation rather than subjection. Yet if we situate the Patriot Act or the war on terror in context of settler colonialism, as does Indigenous feminist theorist Andrea Smith, we can ask what shifts ‘if we understand the Bush regime not as the erosion of U.S. democracy but as its fulfillment? If we understand American democracy as premised on the genocide of indigenous peoples?’ Such a perspective informs alliances by Palestinians and Indigenous Americans who critique the war on terror for having linked white supremacy, Orientalism, and racial nationalism to reinforce the United States and Israel as settler colonial states. In such a light, Agamben’s assertion might suggest that ‘we’ are all exposed to bare life to the extent that the colonial exception and its universalisation within Western law now mark all peoples for elimination just as Indigenous peoples always were and still are marked. Yet, conversely, if Agamben names an exception that settlers assigned to others now being potentially assigned to them, then for all of us to be exposed to bare life is to potentially position us all as settlers. I write provocatively here to suggest that a normative relationality between ‘Indigenous’ and ‘settler’ structures all logics of inclusion and exclusion in settler law and, therefore, in its universalisation as Western law. Scholars must interrogate how this power-laden distinction imbues not only settler societies, but also their conditioning of liberal modernity along global scales. We must theorise settler colonialism as historical grounds for the globalisation of biopower, and as an activity producing biopower in the present that requires denaturalising critique.

Scott Morgensen, "The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism"

[phdstress]

When Scott Morgensen follows me on twitter

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On the inside I'm like: