Native Americans, other "primitive" cultures, and homosexuality

Factual Questions
41

Johanna, I think you are missing part of my point. Gender idendity/sexual orientation is not something that exists in some sort of absolute shape and is twisted by society. It is always defined within a cultural context: it doesn’t have any independent, “true” form. We always define ourselves within our social context–trying to define someone outside of their social context is like trying to get someone to talk in “real” English, without the accent that has been imposed on them by society. It’s all accented, just in different ways.

The reason we don’t have wapetokecas isn’t that they exist and are being supressed, it’s that the people who would have been wapetokecas, had they been raised Lakota, are gay or transexual. And they really are gay or transexual. Either expression of sexual orientation/gender identity is as “real” as the other. There is no truth that transcends cultural context.

42

I think it necessary to reiterate that every different Native American people “construct” sexual orientation and gender identity in its own way, and this interacted in very complex ways with colonization and with the 20th-century Queer rights movement.

A trans acquaintance of mine who’s Iñupiaq told me that if you go to the next village over from his, they construct sexuality completely differently.