I wish to thank the AIW organizers, especially James Mackay, for their hard work, and I want to thank those who attended the panel on "Theorizing the Erotic" for their attendance, patience, and insightful comments. You can view the full program here.
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This is a word not commonly associated with First
Nations/American Indian literature, but I wish it were. Belcourt insists it is
part of the Native experience, that it must be.
Belcourt is a member of the Driftpile Cree Nation, and he does
not deny the pain and grief that comes with living as a queer Indigenous person
in a settler colonial state. Nor does he deny the anger and resentment. He
discusses these topics in his collection of essays.
Joy is key to overcoming those things, and pleasure in its
various expressions (physical, emotional, intellectual) is an important element
of Native life. It always has been. It is part of a Native person’s inheritance
from their ancestors, and it must continue to guarantee a Native future.
I did not count them, but the words “future,” “futurity,” and “utopia” also appear frequently in the book. They are made possible (or at least desirable) by joy.
I encountered the word so often as I read his book that I wanted a new word: jouissistance.
This would be a combination of the jouissance and resistance.
Why combine those words? Because the new word echoes “survivance,” which is a very popular word in American Indian Literary Studies. That word was introduced into our field by Anishinaabe theorist and writer Gerald Vizenor, and now it is ubiquitous.
This would be a combination of the jouissance and resistance.
Why combine those words? Because the new word echoes “survivance,” which is a very popular word in American Indian Literary Studies. That word was introduced into our field by Anishinaabe theorist and writer Gerald Vizenor, and now it is ubiquitous.
Frequently, it is understood (perhaps misunderstood) as a combination of the words “survival” and “resistance.” The settler colonial cultures of the United States and Canada want Native people to disappear, and they expend great efforts to make that happen. Therefore, any act of survival is an act of resistance for Native people.
However, Vizenor means more than “survival + resistance” with the word. Survivance is originally a French word that is similar to the concept of inheritance, “the right of such succession in case of survival” (19). In a chapter titled “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice,” Vizenor describes examples of Native people claiming their cultural inheritances, evoking the presence of ancestors through their actions (telling old stories, speaking their language, etc.) and claiming their personal and Native sovereignty from colonizers.
A Native person’s act of survivance is not merely personal; by surviving they keep more than themselves alive; their survival is a continuance of their ancestors and their community.
For Billy-Ray Belcourt, feeling joy can be an act of survivance. Joy – and with it love, hope, and optimism -- is an inheritance, a birthright. He states this clearly in his preface, when he thanks his grandmother, his nôhkom, who taught him to be “a practitioner of the utopian.” He writes, “This book, then, is as much an ode to you as it is to the world-to-come” (3).
Thanks to her gifts he can write himself “into a narrative of joy that troubles the horrid fiction of race,” which he says stalks her and her family. He hopes she can see in his book his affection for her: “That affection is joy, and it started with you. Now, I see it everywhere” (6).
As for jouissance, this is a word used by theorists in several fields, but I am borrowing it from French feminist writer Hélène Cixous. She used the word to describe, among other things, female sexual and emotional pleasure, and it can be understood as pleasure that is excessive and ungovernable – and therefore transgressive in a male-dominated society that seeks to confine and control women and their sexuality.
Cixous writes about this in “Sorties,” which originally appeared in 1975 in French. Its English translation can be found in The Newly Born Woman (1986), and the glossary of that book defines jouissance as “sexual ecstasy.”
The glossary states, “At the simplest level of meaning – metaphorical – woman’s capacity for multiple orgasm indicates that she has the potential to attain something more than Total, something extra… Real and unrepresentable.” The glossary also states that the word can have “sexual, political, and economic overtones. Total access, total participation, as well as total ecstasy are implied” (165).
I find this concept of pleasure useful for discussing Belcourt’s book. Native pleasure subverts the settler colonial state that tries to make Native existence miserable and therefore untenable.
The settler states of Canada and the United States attack Native bodies quickly with violence and slowly with degraded living conditions. Celebrating and enlivening Native bodies with sexual pleasure resists that erasure.
Native jouissance resists the power of the state to observe and control Native bodies. Quite literally, some Native orgasms resist that erasure by producing more Native bodies.
At about the time I was preparing this presentation, this tweet appeared to make my point:
The queer Native body is targeted for erasure in multiple ways. The dominant culture targets the queer Native body for being brown and for being queer; so the pleasure of the queer Native body is overcoming a double-negation.
This negation can also come from within a Native community that has adopted the dominant culture’s prejudices against queerness (and other expressions of sexuality).
We could say some queer Native people must overcome yet another negation, a self-negation, since, as a result of society's disapproval, they may resent their body for its queerness.
Therefore, queer Native jouissance can be easily understood as subversive or transgressive, as it resists negation from without. It is sustaining because it resists negation from within.
This joy makes life more desirable, makes imagining a bright future more possible.
Jouissistance is useful for the futurity that Belcourt writes to create.
With A History of My Brief Body (2020), Belcourt seeks to “keep brown queer joy in the world… a world-to-come imbued with brown queer possibility” (126-127).
My presentation thus far has been drawn from a blog entry written about my reaction to Belcourt’s book. What I would like to do with my remaining time is explore this concept of jouissistance further. I would like to try sharpening its definition, and I would like to see how it might help appreciate other texts.
What seems to be the fundamental elements of jouissistance?
Its appearance suggests the concept combines jouissance (joy) and resistance. I think that basic combination is useful both practically and aesthetically or critically.
Jouissance + Resistance = Jouissistance?
However, the definition of jouissance from Cixous’s book provides sexual associations for jouissance. Therefore, the concept of jouissistance might be most useful for referring to sexual pleasure as an act of resistance.
To better refine the concept I am test-driving here, I could ask: Is all consensual Native sex an act of resistance?
Can consensual sex with a non-Native partner be an act of resistance?
Is sexual sovereignty the same thing as jouissistance?
Finally, as I suggested above: does this concept of jouissistance include elements of survivance? Is survivance embedded in the neologism although it is not visible? Should the word be jouissivance?
To test-drive this concept, I looked at a couple of recent works by Native authors.
I looked at Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed (2018) and Tenille K. Campbell’s #IndianLovePoems (2017).
As I considered these texts, I noticed three distinctions among the sexual encounters narrated by Whitehead and Campbell.
1. Subversive sexual activity
2. Sexual sovereignty
3. Sexual survivance
These categories are inter-related. You can exercise your sexual sovereignty in order to subvert colonialism. You can be sexually subversive and yet not be fully sovereign in that action. Also, some acts could be perceived as sexually subversive, but in actuality they could be examples of false consciousness.
However, the fullest expression of the concept I am playing with – jouissistance – is the third: sexual joy that enacts continuity with one’s ancestors, one’s descendants, and, many times, the land.
I looked at Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed (2018) and Tenille K. Campbell’s #IndianLovePoems (2017).
1. Subversive sexual activity
2. Sexual sovereignty
3. Sexual survivance
These categories are inter-related. You can exercise your sexual sovereignty in order to subvert colonialism. You can be sexually subversive and yet not be fully sovereign in that action. Also, some acts could be perceived as sexually subversive, but in actuality they could be examples of false consciousness.
However, the fullest expression of the concept I am playing with – jouissistance – is the third: sexual joy that enacts continuity with one’s ancestors, one’s descendants, and, many times, the land.
What makes these sexual encounters acts subversive rather than merely commodifications? This is an important question, since, during the brief time period of the novel’s events, all of his customers are non-Native.
The narrator views his sexual encounters as reversals of typical power dynamics. Much like those imagined in Kent Monkman’s parodic North American landscape paintings.
Daniel Boone's First View of Kentucky
Additionally, the money he is raising from these customers will be used to travel home to his reserve for his stepfather’s funeral. He does not care much about his stepfather, but he is eager to reconnect with his mother and grandmother.
In this sense, his sexual encounters help maintain his connections to home, family, and community. The dominant culture that fetishizes his Native body also seeks to destroy it, but he is exploiting that contradictory desire to maintain his Native self.
His narrator states: “I may be the sexual fantasy, but I’m also the one in the driver’s seat” (8).
But do these monetized sexual encounters count as “pleasure” in the way Belcourt discusses in A History of My Brief Body or as I suggest by discussing Cixous’s meaning of jouissance?
He enjoys having this sense of power over his customers, but I wonder if this counts as joy. Should all pleasure count as joy? I do not know.
An interesting aspect of sexual sovereignty, of sexual self-determination, is that it can be asserted within the Native community and not only against settler community.
Jonny describes sexual encounters with straight Native young men when he was in high school. Despite the public homophobia of his Native community, he enjoys the private gay encounters with the young men. He states, "… I found my own sustenance from making straight NDN boys love me like their pow wow trail hook ups” (81).
When I wrote about A History of My Brief Body, I described the negation of gay Native bodies by settler society and by Native communities that have assumed many settler values. That attempted negation of his queer Native self is countered several times in Jonny Appleseed. For instance, when describing those high school seductions, Jonny writes, “And I always left a red mark on their bodies somewhere, as if to say: I was here” (187).
His transactional encounters with non-Native clients are understood as acts of revenge, as a temporary reversal of conquest. However, his encounters with the straight Native men in high school are described as mutually beneficial, as healing for both parties.
He writes, “I loved seeing the blood throb in their veins, popping like earthworms on their forearms and wrists – blood that said I’m surviving and you can too” (81).
Their sexual pleasure were manifestations of Native survival and continuity.
For Jonny these are acts of sexual sovereignty within his Native community. For both parties they were acts of sexual subversion, as they resisted settler attempts to negate all Native bodies, queer and otherwise.
This dynamic of public heterosexuality and private homosexuality is manifested most clearly in Jonny’s relationship to Tias, a young man from his community.
With Tias he has an emotional rather than transactional relationship. Their bond is based on sexual attraction and shared experiences.
The narrator recalls their first physical encounter, when they surveyed each other’s naked bodies, observing wounds from their childhood on the Reserve. Jonny states, “I knew then that I loved him. Funny how an NDN 'love you' sounds more like, 'I’m in pain with you' " (88).
While Jonny’s clients provide income to sustain him, his relationship with Tias sustains him emotionally. Rather than fetishize Jonny’s body, Tias loves it; therefore, I think, their sexual relationship can more readily fit the notion of “joy” that my little neologism suggests.
However, Tias’ attraction to Jonny is conflicted because Tias is bisexual. When he gets his girlfriend pregnant, he feels he must choose her and his child over Jonny.
But do these monetized sexual encounters count as “pleasure” in the way Belcourt discusses in A History of My Brief Body or as I suggest by discussing Cixous’s meaning of jouissance?
He enjoys having this sense of power over his customers, but I wonder if this counts as joy. Should all pleasure count as joy? I do not know.
An interesting aspect of sexual sovereignty, of sexual self-determination, is that it can be asserted within the Native community and not only against settler community.
Jonny describes sexual encounters with straight Native young men when he was in high school. Despite the public homophobia of his Native community, he enjoys the private gay encounters with the young men. He states, "… I found my own sustenance from making straight NDN boys love me like their pow wow trail hook ups” (81).
When I wrote about A History of My Brief Body, I described the negation of gay Native bodies by settler society and by Native communities that have assumed many settler values. That attempted negation of his queer Native self is countered several times in Jonny Appleseed. For instance, when describing those high school seductions, Jonny writes, “And I always left a red mark on their bodies somewhere, as if to say: I was here” (187).
His transactional encounters with non-Native clients are understood as acts of revenge, as a temporary reversal of conquest. However, his encounters with the straight Native men in high school are described as mutually beneficial, as healing for both parties.
He writes, “I loved seeing the blood throb in their veins, popping like earthworms on their forearms and wrists – blood that said I’m surviving and you can too” (81).
Their sexual pleasure were manifestations of Native survival and continuity.
For Jonny these are acts of sexual sovereignty within his Native community. For both parties they were acts of sexual subversion, as they resisted settler attempts to negate all Native bodies, queer and otherwise.
This dynamic of public heterosexuality and private homosexuality is manifested most clearly in Jonny’s relationship to Tias, a young man from his community.
With Tias he has an emotional rather than transactional relationship. Their bond is based on sexual attraction and shared experiences.
The narrator recalls their first physical encounter, when they surveyed each other’s naked bodies, observing wounds from their childhood on the Reserve. Jonny states, “I knew then that I loved him. Funny how an NDN 'love you' sounds more like, 'I’m in pain with you' " (88).
While Jonny’s clients provide income to sustain him, his relationship with Tias sustains him emotionally. Rather than fetishize Jonny’s body, Tias loves it; therefore, I think, their sexual relationship can more readily fit the notion of “joy” that my little neologism suggests.
However, Tias’ attraction to Jonny is conflicted because Tias is bisexual. When he gets his girlfriend pregnant, he feels he must choose her and his child over Jonny.
Vizenor describes survivance as “an active resistance and repudiation of dominance, obtrusive themes of tragedy, nihilism, and victimry.” I think it is easy to see how joy is a powerful counter to these things.
To illustrate this concept, Vizenor tells three stories of Native people telling stories that evoke the presence of ancestors, of relatives, or a community and its vitality. For me, this is a key concept to survivance. It is about not merely the presence or survival of a Native person but the active presence of ancestors with and through that Native person.
Therefore, my understanding of survivance involves an element of transcendence. That is, it involves something greater than an individual subjectivity. And it involves a kind of temporal transcendence: something considered to be “past” is demonstrated as “present.”
If we can think of survivance as a kind of transcendence, we can perhaps consider it an example of excess, of something that exceeds the limits of one person. As an act of resistance, we could think of it as exceeding settler control.
This notion of transcendence brings me to jouissance in the way I described it earlier from the glossary for Cixous’ book The Newly Born Woman. Recall that she associates jouissance with sexual ecstasy that is “more than Total, something extra.” Cixous is discussing female orgasms (in particular multiple orgasms) as exceeding patriarchal control and therefore threatening patriarchy.
I find it tempting to extend her notions of the transcendent, excessive, subversive qualities of female orgasms to Native orgasms, whether they are male, female, or otherwise. Straight, gay, or otherwise.
All of this is to say that jouissistance in its ultimate or maximum expression involves jouissance and survivance. This is illustrated in Whitehead’s novel in a dream sequence in which he is the bottom to a bear’s top.
While Jonny is ravished in the mud, he hears a round dance (a communal dance) and the presence of other non-human people, rabbit and beaver. His body and mind are penetrated in multiple ways. His body is penetrated in search for his “tapwewin,” which I believe means “truth” or “something that tells the truth” in Cree.
As the bear withdraws from Jonny’s body, the young man ejaculates into the mud. He writes, “… all this treaty land is filled with me” (71).
This scene illustrates a sexual ecstasy that exceeds Jonny’s body and mind. He surrenders to something stronger than himself, something older than himself. He becomes one with the land, which we can think of as the ultimate signifier of his Oji-Cree community, history, belief, life, etc. Jonny’s survival is more than his own presence; it is part of the presence of all those things.
To close, I will turn briefly to similar examples of jouissistance in Tenille Campbell’s #IndianLovePoems. In her short, sexy free verse poems, Campbell describes sexual pleasure as subversive sexual activity, sexual sovereignty, and sexual survivance.
To illustrate this concept, Vizenor tells three stories of Native people telling stories that evoke the presence of ancestors, of relatives, or a community and its vitality. For me, this is a key concept to survivance. It is about not merely the presence or survival of a Native person but the active presence of ancestors with and through that Native person.
Therefore, my understanding of survivance involves an element of transcendence. That is, it involves something greater than an individual subjectivity. And it involves a kind of temporal transcendence: something considered to be “past” is demonstrated as “present.”
If we can think of survivance as a kind of transcendence, we can perhaps consider it an example of excess, of something that exceeds the limits of one person. As an act of resistance, we could think of it as exceeding settler control.
This notion of transcendence brings me to jouissance in the way I described it earlier from the glossary for Cixous’ book The Newly Born Woman. Recall that she associates jouissance with sexual ecstasy that is “more than Total, something extra.” Cixous is discussing female orgasms (in particular multiple orgasms) as exceeding patriarchal control and therefore threatening patriarchy.
I find it tempting to extend her notions of the transcendent, excessive, subversive qualities of female orgasms to Native orgasms, whether they are male, female, or otherwise. Straight, gay, or otherwise.
All of this is to say that jouissistance in its ultimate or maximum expression involves jouissance and survivance. This is illustrated in Whitehead’s novel in a dream sequence in which he is the bottom to a bear’s top.
While Jonny is ravished in the mud, he hears a round dance (a communal dance) and the presence of other non-human people, rabbit and beaver. His body and mind are penetrated in multiple ways. His body is penetrated in search for his “tapwewin,” which I believe means “truth” or “something that tells the truth” in Cree.
As the bear withdraws from Jonny’s body, the young man ejaculates into the mud. He writes, “… all this treaty land is filled with me” (71).
This scene illustrates a sexual ecstasy that exceeds Jonny’s body and mind. He surrenders to something stronger than himself, something older than himself. He becomes one with the land, which we can think of as the ultimate signifier of his Oji-Cree community, history, belief, life, etc. Jonny’s survival is more than his own presence; it is part of the presence of all those things.
To close, I will turn briefly to similar examples of jouissistance in Tenille Campbell’s #IndianLovePoems. In her short, sexy free verse poems, Campbell describes sexual pleasure as subversive sexual activity, sexual sovereignty, and sexual survivance.
Whitehead’s narrator describes sex with non-Natives as reversals of conquest. Campbell does the same. In #1608 the speaker describes her first intercourse with a white man, her “first john smith” who tries to claim “me and mine.” She ends the act on top of him, “gazing down at conquered goods” (46).
The speaker in #47 describes herself as Christopher Columbus claiming the body of a white man with “my lips and tongue and taste, claiming it as mine, mine, mine” (36). His skin is figured as a treaty signed with hickeys.
Like Jonny fulfilling the savage fantasies of settler customers, Campbell’s speaker plays to similar fantasies in order to gain temporary sexual pleasure, but without losing self-determination. In #782 the speaker tells of a white man’s desire to act upon his “white guilt and privilege” and encourage her to perform like an actress in a pornographic film. However, he never understands “that my power is beyond your control” (84).
Some of her poems also express acts of sexual sovereignty, sometimes as resistance against colonization and sometimes resisting definition or control by her Native community.
Poem #608 declares the speaker’s refusal to be defined by the desires or fantasies of her white lovers. She writes, “I define my sexuality/ I define my boundaries/ I decide/ who I take into my bed/ into my mouth/ into my body/ into my heart” (94).
The speaker in #47 describes herself as Christopher Columbus claiming the body of a white man with “my lips and tongue and taste, claiming it as mine, mine, mine” (36). His skin is figured as a treaty signed with hickeys.
Like Jonny fulfilling the savage fantasies of settler customers, Campbell’s speaker plays to similar fantasies in order to gain temporary sexual pleasure, but without losing self-determination. In #782 the speaker tells of a white man’s desire to act upon his “white guilt and privilege” and encourage her to perform like an actress in a pornographic film. However, he never understands “that my power is beyond your control” (84).
Some of her poems also express acts of sexual sovereignty, sometimes as resistance against colonization and sometimes resisting definition or control by her Native community.
Poem #608 declares the speaker’s refusal to be defined by the desires or fantasies of her white lovers. She writes, “I define my sexuality/ I define my boundaries/ I decide/ who I take into my bed/ into my mouth/ into my body/ into my heart” (94).
Tribal traditions can be normative, and Native communities can be controlling. Campbell’s poems express a sexual sovereignty when the speaker refuses to be defined by “traditions,” even when those are described positively in other poems. Poem #96 acknowledges her Cree lover’s desire for her to believe in “his indigenizing dreams,” but “he’s the marrying kind… looking for forever kind of romance” and she’s “just looking for tonight’s feast” (53).
In several poems of the collection, we can find the third kind of sexual joy as resistance that I described above. We can find jouissance and survivance combined.
Finally, Campbell expresses the combination of jouissance and survivance in a few of the poems. In discussing survivance, Vizenor describes the evocation of ancestors through language, which Campbell does in #254. At the moment of climax, the speaker swallows the names of her ancestors “in the sweet rush of release” when she wants to “moan out loud/ my victory/ and his” (14).
Tanja Grubnic [who also presented at the conference] understood this swallowing the names of ancestors as an act of protection, keeping them from the male lover, whom Grubnic understood as white. One clue for the racial identity of the male lover for Grubnic was the poet saying that sometimes she forgets his name. This could be understood as an act of erasure (reversing the colonial power relationship that I have discussed earlier), and swallowing the names of her ancestors could be the speaker protecting them from the danger of erasure by the settlers.
That is an interesting reading, and I cannot say it is wrong. However, the poet also describes the desire to celebrate her “victory” – her orgasm – but his as well. The desire to celebrate the male lover’s victory could trouble the inference that he is a settler.
An imagistic or formal tension in the poem is the simultaneous swallowing and releasing. Regardless of one’s ultimate interpretation of the poem, we can acknowledge the presence of the speaker's ancestors in the moment of her sexual pleasure. In this moment of jouissance, the presence of ancestors and community is evoked.
In #2001, the speaker imagines her sexual pride and pleasure echoing experiences of her ancestors. The poem describes another kind of oral tradition, one that revives an indigenous language and instills indigenous joy: "broken Cree words/ whisper down my body/ between my legs/ into my universe/ where you tell me stories/ with tongue and lips/ and I take/ tradition into me/ until I burst." The speaker's pleasure helps her feel connected to previous generations: "this is what my ancestors/ must have felt like" (42).
In #903, while describing her lover “lapping up the sugar between my legs,” the speaker moans for “ancestral strength” as she “crested waves filled with visions/ of lust and love and/ pleasure” (98).
We could understand this call for ancestral strength to be satirical. Someone might make a similar call for strength to avoid the temptation of ordering dessert. It could be ironic humor.
But it is not necessarily that. Or necessarily only that. This moment fits a pattern in other poems of jouissance and survivance. For some, these moments may seem uncanny. It may seem like an odd juxtaposition: do many of us think of our grandparents while getting our groove on? For others, such as Belcourt, Whitehead, and Campbell, the connection is familiar.
In their work we can see the potential of sexuality to be a conduit of transcendent strength. Sexual pleasure can be understood as a method of evoking Native presence, of enabling resistance and continuity.
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