Queer Mimicry: Re-Presenting the Primitive in the Works of Zitkala Sa, Mourning Dove, John Joseph Mathews, and Woody Crumbo

Abstract

I argue that addressing early 20th century representation of Native performance reveals potential colonial resistance. I look at Mourning Dove Cogewea, Woody Crumbo's Eagle Dancer Paintings, John Joseph Mathews Sundown, and Zitkala Sa's The Sun Dance Opera to explore the ways native people performed their own racial identities in early 20th century America, demonstrating that performance undermines colonial imaginings of Indigenous American peoples, drawing on performative theory by Judith Butler and Homi Babha's notion of mimicry. Performance and mimicry of Native stereotypes undermine static notions of Native identity by revealing that performance instead of some obscure racial biology "in the blood" determines identity. I look at four textual examples of Native performance and its intersections with gender to reach such a conclusion. In each example, I address how "queerness" challenges representations of Native Americans, especially static notions of gender performance and identity. Historically, gender was thought of as representative of biological sex in similar ways that culture and identity have been conceptualized in relation to an individual's race. Queerness disrupts such stable sexual identifiers, and in this dissertation, I suggest that queer performance challenges sexual and racial policing. That queerness extends beyond simply gendered bodies to include critiques about racial expectations. My analysis suggests ways that individuals subvert taxonomies of race and gender and sustain identities outside hegemonic normative categories, sometimes by their very ability to perform highly stylized notions of race and gender roles, a resistant act I call queer mimicry. I propose that queer mimicry functions as anti-colonial resistance in opposition to larger frames of American aesthetics, opening up discussions of activism within these texts that too often have simply been categorized as playing into white constructions of otherness.