INDIGENOUS EROTICA: TWO-SPIRITS IN SELECTED WORKS OF KENT MONKMAN

Recently queer and Native people rights activism has become widely debatable subject within Canadian borders. Numerous artists have aimed to engage their artwork in order to empower Native people and enable them to reclaim their identity. Within last four decades both writers and artists worked in order to change attitudes towards traditional Native values and their social status by retelling their personal experience through visual media and life-writing. Numerous scholars believe that the historical accounts dealing with Indigenous erotica under the influence of the Western worldview distorted the image of sexual diversity amongst the Natives and deprived them of understanding their own heritage. Native people identify same-sex eroticism and non-dualistic concepts of gender by numerous names and perceive sexuality as a continuum. Different communities used different terms which could not have been easily translated into Eurowestern concepts of sexuality and gender. For decades scholars referred to those individuals as berdache, a term that rather collapses cultural differences into a binary and do not respect spirituality and social status of those people in Native circles. Artists such as Kent Monkman engage the viewer into Native issues and show that notions such as history and sexuality may be fluid constructs. The author of this paper would like to concentrate on the queer alter-ego of the artist, his approach towards non-normative sexuality and Native mythological symbols inhis selected artworks.