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subrosa OP wrote

Reply to comment by Gwen_Isilith in Politics by subrosa

Might need to revisit A! and Baedan for that. I'm curious about how you would go about connecting the threads. No pressure tho.

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Gwen_Isilith wrote

I see it in a few ways, the first would be a historical and function connection. For A! (And Vizenor) being Indigenous is being post-genocidal both physically after mass killings but also culturally. And so being Indigenous is not a birth right; blood quantum is a purely legal structure and what instead matters is the ties to place or culture.

Perhaps this is a controversial connection but similarly queer identity has faced a similar killing in the forms of the aids crisis and cultural destruction (which I would point to the text Anal Terror from Baedan 3 for the history of this) in terms of anal castration which is both a function of schooling and homo-nationalism (though perhaps nationalism is simply an outcome of the castration).

Queer identity's connection to blood is much different from that of Indigenous identity however but both in the formation and continuance of culture rely on elders or mentors (the aids crisis has especially left such a generational gap for queer folk that a lot of queer identity is ahistorical). And so for both in terms of post-genocide find oneself in a hostile world with little to no guidance.

My other connection is that the formation of queerness in Baedan is not a sexual identity, but instead is an attempt to negate sexuality and gender. And so too it would seem to me that A!'s conception of Indigeneity has nothing to do with race (A! Has stated that even white people can be Indigenous anarchists) but is instead a position that aims to negate this racial category. A good example of this I think is especially the rejection of the past, or at least the understanding that one can not simply return to old ways, but one must find their own way (this is especially prevelant in Nihlist Animism). And it seems to me that a similar question is posed to queers of "what does a post-aids queerness look like?" For those who reject the homonationalist movement, while there are lessons one can take from the past and ones predecessors (I would point to the text "The Faggots and Their Friends") ultimately it is about living with a future. And so if Indigeneity is about living in relation to the land without a land, queerness is living in relation to a time without a temporality (without a past and without a future (both I'm terms of its erasure and in terms of genetics)).

Finally I might posit a third part of this relationality as a hypothesis; hopefully others more familiar with the topic could contribute their thoughts to it. That Blackness then may be about living culturally without a culture. (I posit this mainly in relation to the slave trade which largely has erased black culture which has been replaced by a slave/post-slavery culture (to my knowledge the mixing of white culture such as Christianity has affected both black and Indigenous culture to a large extent).

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