Abstract
Anishinaabe writer Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm states in her short essay “Erotica, Indigenous Style” that she was struck in the late 1990s by “sex and sexuality and the utter lack of it in Indigenous writing […] A person could reach puberty, live her entire adult life, go through menopause and still not have stumbled across a single erotic poem or story by [an Indigenous] writer.”1 Akiwenzie-Damm may be here a touch hyperbolic: certainly the lovemaking between T’soh and Tayo in Ceremony or the multiple sexual acts, including bestiality, in Gerald Vizenor’s Darkness in St Louis Bearheart spring to mind as well-known counterexamples of texts with powerfully erotic elements.2 Nonetheless, it is worth acknowledging, as Robert Warrior does, that “the connection between the erotic, bodies, and Native survival is vital,” and that this vitality is constantly under threat from external colonial forces.3 Warrior draws from Audre Lorde to argue for the revolutionary potential of Native erotica, and seems to accept Lorde’s loose moralizing distinction between the erotic (that which nourishes) and the pornographic (that which subjugates).4 The erotic stories and poems that Akiwenzie-Damm collects in Without Reservation (2003) can thus be seen as acts of resistance against an encroaching pornographic sexuality that privileges mechanical repetition and physical act over intimacy and meaning.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm. “Erotica, Indigenous Style.” In Without Reservation. Wiarton, ON: Kegedonce Press, 2003. xi.
Leslie Marmon Silko. Ceremony. New York: Viking Press, 1977. 180–181;
Gerald Vizenor. The Darkness in St Louis Bearheart, repub. as Bearheart, repub. Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
Robert Warrior. “Your Skin Is the Map: The Theoretical Challenge of Joy Harjo’s Erotic Poetics.” In Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton eds. Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. 343.
Audre Lorde. “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. 53–54.
Laura Kipnis. Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. New York: Grove Press, 1996. 161–206;
Linda Williams. “Introduction.” In Porn Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 1–21.
Linda Williams. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Katalin Svoverfy Milter and Joseph W. Slade. “Global Traffic in Pornography: The Hungarian Example.” In Lisa Z. Sigel ed. International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800–2000. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.
Joan DeJean. “The Politics of Pornography: L’Ecole Des Filles.” In Lisa Z. Sigel ed. International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800–2000. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 109–123.
Linda Williams ed. Porn Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 271.
Lisa Z. Sigel ed.International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800–2000. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 210.
Edward Buscombe. “Generic Overspill: A Dirty Western.” In Pamela Church Gibson ed. More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power. London: British Film Institute, 2004. 27–30.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality in Mankind. 1755.2 P. D. Jimack. London: Everyman, 1993. 59
James Boswell. Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD. Boston: Andrews, 1807., 455.
Robert F. Berkhofer. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Knopf, 1978. 79.
Gerald Vizenor. Hotline Healers: An Almost Browne Novel. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan, 1997.
Martha Warren Beckwith. Hawaiian Mythology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940.
Serge Tcherkézoff. “A Reconsideration of the Role of Polynesian Women in Early Encounters with Europeans: Supplement to Marshall Sahlins’ Voyage around the Islands of History.” In Margaret Jolly, Serge Tcherkézoff, and Darrell T. Tryon eds. Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence. Canberra: ANU E Press, 2009. 113–160.
Alexander H. Bolyanatz. Pacific Romanticism: Tahiti and the European Imagination. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004, 32
Qtd in Roy Porter. “The Exotic as Erotic: Captain Cook at Tahiti.” In G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter eds. Exoticism in the Enlightenment. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. 119
Margaret C. Jacob. The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. 188.monstrous bodies and ignoble savages / 153
Stephen Werner significantly complicates this standard reading, arguing that it misses Diderot’s sophisticated use of irony (Stephen Werner. The Comic Diderot: A Reading of the Fictions. Birmingham, AL: Summa, 2000. 113).
Matt K. Matsuda. Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 3.
Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins. Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 104.
Peter Mason. Deconstructing America: Representations of the Other. London: Routledge, 1990. 104.
Debra L. Merskin, “What Does One Look Like?” In Elizabeth S. Bird ed. Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. 283
Gerald Vizenor. Literary Chance: Essays on Native American Survivance. València: Universitat De València, 2007. 12.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2013 James Mackay and David Stirrup
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mackay, J. (2013). Monstrous Bodies and Ignoble Savages: Depictions of Indigenous Peoples in European Hardcore. In: Mackay, J., Stirrup, D. (eds) Tribal Fantasies. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318817_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318817_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44997-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31881-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)