Queer Indigenous Entropy: Sexual Circulation and the Conquest Narrative

Abstract

a b s t r a c tTwo-Spirit men's sexual conquest stories-or what I am calling sexual coup stories-narrated more than just the sexual encounter. In fact, actual sexual acts are often secondary to the circumstances producing the sexual encounter. In this study, coup stories serve as a form of data revealing the ways in which sexual conquest is a sociosexual practice thoroughly embedded in broader Native community values and cultural patterns for the movement of bodily desire across landscapes predating humanist intellectual and moral intervention. Thus, the intra-acting agencies of Native sexual circulation provide the opportunity to enact a culturally specific form of materialdiscursive order that when viewed from the epistemological metropole look highly entropic (chaotic). Yet, Native sexual ontology realizes itself in the phenomena of a sexual circulation whose material-discursive practices appear to be disordered from the highly ordered humanistic center. k e y w o r d s : queer, Two-Spirit, entropy, sexuality, Native American "Oh-Mylanta, it's hot out here," Ben, 1 a Two-Spirit Osage, said as we walked up to the campsite mess hall. It was hot, around 95°, and the wind was completely still. Seven or so other Two-Spirit men were gathered under the shade of the mess hall awning letting an industrial sized fan blow on them. Ben and I could hear their laughter as we approached, and the signature Two-Spirit "aahhwww." We walked up to the circle as Sheila, a male-to-female transgender Lakota, was telling a story, "When I was living out here in Cherokee Country I hooked up with this little Creek cowboy. Poor little thing, he didn't know what to do with me. It started with me asking him to pull up