An Analysis Of Daniel David Moses's 'Sovereign Erotics'

As a collection, Sovereign Erotics centers on the voices of indigenous, non-binary, two-spirit artists in an attempt to fill a gap in currently available works of trans, queer, and indigenous literature. "Collaboritively, the pieces of Sovereign Erotics demonstrate not only the radical diversity between and among today 's GLBTQ2 writers, but also the beauty, strength, and pride of GLBTQ2 people in the twenty-first century" (14). This collection, to simply exist, is an act of resistance against the centuries of violence, genocide, humiliation and dehumanization that generations of Indigenous LGBTQ and Two-Spirit people have experienced, and, sadly, continue to experience. Modern sexuality can be and often is a colonizing force. Each piece

The first lines establishes an emphasis on the idea of peer pressure. "Come on, the big kid laughed, Come on and try" (115). The "little boy in you" juxtaposed against the "young man in your head" look to the narrator, both past and present, while dealing with conformity and contemplating what one must give up to belong. The repetition of color in the description of "blue black hair" and "the blue black current" brings to mind the tension between self and social expectations in a way where the narrator becomes difficult to separate from the "characters" of the poem. They exist in duality as a representation of the part of his psyche that continues to police his masculine identity, shaped by those early impressions about what makes a man. Part of the growing up process involves the ways that kids police identity for each other, such as emphasis on strength, being the strongest, and a desire not to be the

“Josh couldn’t find the right words for his rage. He felt all the words flaming up before his eyes and burning away like stubble before he could use them. In church he had heard Jesus’ words to the centurion: Speak the Word and you shall be healed. He no longer believed" (45). Both of their attitude and responses result from those societal pressures that internally police their actions and impulses. "For Native people, terms like 'lesbian ' and 'queer ' are seen as a part of dominant Euro-American constructions of sexuality that have little to do with the more complicated gender systems in many Native traditions" (5-6). Queer indigenous people face the challenges of breaking through the confining social constructions of settler religious values, as well as overcoming settler control over history and even indivdiuality. Yet, settler and colonizer narratives are an integral part of Native American stories. Thus, there is an intrinsic struggle with how to face those challenges in a manner that is authentic, reflecting the facticity of their individual life but not allowing that facticity to determine