Written by the Body: Gender Expansiveness and Indigenous Non-Cis Masculinities by Lisa Tatonetti (review)

Reviewed by: Written by the Body: Gender Expansiveness and Indigenous Non-Cis Masculinities by Lisa Tatonetti Sam McKegney (bio) Written by the Body: Gender Expansiveness and Indigenous Non-Cis Masculinities by Lisa Tatonetti University of Minnesota Press, 2021 the utility of indigenous masculinities as rubrics of study has been a tough sell in recent years. Breaches of trust by prominent writers and the persistence of toxic masculinities in a field ostensibly oriented toward heteropatriarchy's elimination have led scholars like Dene theorist Glen Coulthard to insist that "critical indigenous masculinities should vacate not occupy space that indigenous feminist, queer and trans voices should occupy" (@denerevenge January 27, 2016). In Written by the Body: Gender Expansiveness and Indigenous Non-Cis Masculinities, settler scholar Lisa Tatonetti does not simply tend to as-yet-unstudied materials and thereby resuscitate Indigenous masculinities studies; rather, by untethering Indigenous masculinities from the cis-male body and examining the masculinities experienced, imagined, and performed by Indigenous female-identified, gender-variant, and/or Two-Spirit persons, Tatonetti alters the terms of engagement altogether. She reaches to the very voices Coulthard champions to reconsider what masculinities can (and ought to) mean. Written by the Body pursues gender knowledges that complicate and expand the meaning of masculinities. In so doing, Tatonetti challenges Indigenous masculinities studies to do better, arguing along with the artists and activists at the center of her study that "if there is to be masculinity, let it arise from the reciprocal relationships inherent in an erotics of responsibility" (225). Written by the Body engages with representations of gender-nonconforming visioners that cut across centuries, territories, and cultural traditions, analyzing historical archives, early novels, contemporary fantasy, full-length films, documentary shorts, memoirs, interviews, poetry, and activism. One worries the enterprise might prove unwieldy. However, the ethic of care with which Tatonetti approaches the voices she analyzes ensures they are woven into an argumentative fabric of integrity. The book's most unique chapter, concerning the life and legacy of Ojibwe HIV/ AIDS activist Carole LaFavor, provides an illustrative example. Unlike other chapters, which offer comparative discussions of themes like warriorhood, embodiment, and erotics, this chapter presents an intimate case study of [End Page 153] a single historical figure. Despite such structural divergence, the chapter remains captivating and relevant to the others in the monograph. Tatonetti traces LaFavor's struggles for queer liberation, HIV rights, and Indigenous health sovereignty, in the process illuminating how Indigenous gender-nonconforming activists threaten settler power while continuing to inhabit Indigenous ways of knowing. Here Tatonetti reaches for methods that exceed her disciplinary training in literary studies, interviewing LaFavor's daughter, coworkers, and fellow activists because that's what needs to be done to assemble a multidimensional understanding of this extraordinary figure whose voice rightfully belongs at the heart of conversations about Indigenous gender, sovereignty, and continuance. LaFavor's voice appears boldly in Written by the Body, as in her refusal to accept Indigenous exclusion at the 1989 International AIDS conference in Montreal: "How many Indian people does it take for them to be counted?" she asks. "A hundred? A thousand? How many Indian people make up one white person?" (qtd. 149). Unlike settler knowledges of gender, which are conditioned to fix and constrain, the Indigenous gender knowledges raised up in Written by the Body are multiple and expansive. They circulate, Tatonetti insists, via the affective circuitry among Indigenous bodies. When Tatonetti reads against the settler archive to retrieve representations of Indigenous warrior women, she does so not to identify a fixed archetype to which she can return in later chapters but rather to consider the ethical and embodied teachings of "female-identified and gender-variant warriors" whose "masculinities … center kinship narratives that privilege familial and tribal responsibilities" (26). In other words, she is less concerned with who these warriors are than with what their actions tell us about ways of being in the world. As such, Tatonetti's cadence that the body is "a somatic archive of Indigenous knowledges" (17, 20, 100, 148, 221) is not designed, as one might misinterpret, to fix bodies as stable knowledge containers. Tatonetti's point is that bodies generate knowledge, share emotional intelligence, and engage in the intergenerational...

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