Carole laFavor’s Health Sovereignty Activism and Two-Spirit Traces

• Main Author: Tatonetti, Lisa
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: New Prairie Press 2016
• Subjects: HIV/AIDS Activism; Two-Spirit; Native American; Ethnic Studies; Indigenous Studies; Other Feminist; Gender; and Sexuality Studies; Indian; Ramirez; anishina*
• Online Access: https://newprairiepress.org/isla/conference/2016/11

I propose a poster submission on my recent scholarly work recovering Anishinaabe lesbian Carole laFavor’s writing and activism. The abstract offers an overview of the project. We live in a moment of abundance. Queer Indigenous literature, theory, and erotics are everywhere and Two-Spirit peoples are not only here and queer, but are taking over the universe. Queer Native artists and activists are writing, beading, loving, painting, making films, making out, and making space for their work and words in the world. As is always the case, such moments of intense visibility--of Two-Spirit powwows, of special issues on queer Indigenous literature and critiques, of Indigenous erotic art installations--arise from many years in which folks loved and created in less welcoming periods and less visible spaces. These various pasts and presents are, of course, bound together by friendships, by literary archives, by kinship networks, by tribal affiliations, by reserve and reservation geographies, and by relationships built within urban Indian hubs that, as Ho-Chunk scholar Renya K. Ramirez explains, enable a “Native social body that has been torn apart by colonialism†to “bring[] back together or re-member[]†community by “sharing their past and contemporary experiences†(9). This research functions as one such “re-membering†by returning the writing and health sovereignty work of Anishinaabe lesbian fiction writer, wood carver, and HIV/AIDS activist Carole laFavor to the public eye. laFavor was a powerful voice for social justice and Indigenous health sovereignty during a time when speaking out about lesbian sexuality and HIV/AIDS activism were far from common topics. In addition, while large-scale movements about missing and murdered Indigenous women would come into being in the twenty-first century, laFavor spoke out about violence against Indigenous women in 1983 by publicly sharing the story of her brutal rape at the hands of two white man in the Minneapolis proceedings of the Pornography Civil Rights ...