Siddons, Louise (2022) The visual politics of queerness on the Navajo nation. In, Moriuchi, Mey-Yen and Shipley, Lesley (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Art and Activism in the Twenty-First Century. Routledge, pp. 125-139. (doi:10.4324/9781003159698).
Abstract
Lesbian invisibility pervades academic writing on Native cultures despite many alternatives to the Euro-American gender binary across Native North America. The Navajo (Diné) figure of the nádleeh was thoroughly discussed by anthropologists throughout the twentieth century—and according to the Diné Creation Story they have always existed. As gay liberation prompted a search for queer history, nádleehí were increasingly interpreted as gay. In this essay, I start with Diné Pride as the most visible manifestation of contemporary queer culture in the Navajo Nation and then consider the work of contemporary Diné artist and photojournalist Jolene Nenibah Yazzie (b. 1978) as a counterpoint to the gendered homogeneity of Diné Pride’s visual rhetoric. Representing others so as to recognize herself, Yazzie’s project of portraiture is fluid, blurring the line between artist and subject and making space within the visual culture of the Navajo Nation for the full range of queerness inside it.
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