Since 1973, The ArQuives has been acquiring and preserving material documenting Canadian LGBTQ2+ history. [Their] mandate is to acquire, preserve, organize, and provide public access to information and materials, in any medium, by and about LGBTQ2+ people, primarily produced in or concerning Canada.
Defining Gender provides access to a vast body of original British source material that will enrich the teaching and research experience of those studying history, literature, sociology and education from a gendered perspective. Help Guide
Feminae covers journal articles, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages. Because of the explosion of research in Women's Studies during the past two decades, scholars and students interested in women during the Middle Ages find an ever-growing flood of publications.
Identifying relevant works in this mass of material is further complicated by the interdisciplinary nature of much of the scholarship. In order to help researchers find current articles and essays quickly and easily, librarians and scholars began compiling the Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index in July 1996.
The glbtq project was founded in 2000 [...] to create the world's largest encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture and history and to deliver it online.
Use keyword search for extensive coverage of biographies, as well as themes and history of LGBTQ culture. Includes "Arts" and "Literature" pages with information listed by topic.
An open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBTQ activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
Independent Voices is made possible by the funding support received from these libraries and donors across the U.S., Canada and the U.K. Through their funding, these libraries and donors are demonstrating their commitment to open access digital collections.
Content for the Independent Voices collection was selected through recommendations by scholars, librarians, publishers, and selected bibliographies. The copyrighted periodicals that are included in the Independent Voices collection are being made available by the explicit permission of the copyright holder, assignee, or transferee; which were obtained in writing by Reveal Digital home page.
A cinematic survey of the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as well as the cultural and political evolution of the LGBT community. This first-of-its-kind collection features award-winning documentaries, interviews, archival footage, and select feature films exploring LGBT history, gay culture and subcultures, civil rights, marriage equality, LGBT families, AIDS, transgender issues, religious perspectives on homosexuality, global comparative experiences, and other topics.
This collection has cross-disciplinary relevance beyond LGBT courses, serving research and teaching needs in sociology, anthropology, psychology, counseling, history, political science, gender studies, cultural studies, and religious studies.
The Rise Up! project aims to create a digital archive of original publications, documents, flyers, posters, and many other materials representing feminist activism from the 1970s to 1990s.
In Cherokee Asegi udanto refers to people who either fall outside of men's and women's roles or who mix men's and women's roles. Asegi, which translates as "strange," is also used by some Cherokees as a term similar to "queer." For author Qwo-Li Driskill, asegi provides a means by which to reread Cherokee history in order to listen for those stories rendered "strange" by colonial heteropatriarchy. As the first full-length work of scholarship to develop a tribally specific Indigenous Queer or Two-Spirit critique, Asegi Stories examines gender and sexuality in Cherokee cultural memory, how they shape the present, and how they can influence the future. The theoretical and methodological underpinnings of Asegi Stories derive from activist, artistic, and intellectual genealogies, referred to as "dissent lines" by Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith. Driskill intertwines Cherokee and other Indigenous traditions, women of color feminisms, grassroots activisms, queer and Trans studies and politics, rhetoric, Native studies, and decolonial politics. Drawing from oral histories and archival documents in order to articulate Cherokee-centered Two-Spirit critiques, Driskill contributes to the larger intertribal movements for social justice.
Miikwan and Dez are best friends. Miikwan is Anishinaabe; Dez is Inninew. Together, the teens navigate the challenges of growing up in an urban landscape - they're so close, they even completed their Berry Fast together. However, when Dez's grandmother becomes too sick, Dez is told she can't stay with her anymore. With the threat of a group home looming, Dez can't bring herself to go home and disappears. Miikwan is devastated, and the wound of her missing mother resurfaces. Will Dez's community find her before it's too late? Will Miikwan be able to cope if they don't?
Dez's grandmother has passed away. Grieving, and with nowhere else to go, she's living in a group home. On top of everything else, Dez is navigating a new relationship and coming into her identity as a Two-Spirit person. Miikwan is crushing on the school's new kid Riel, but doesn't really understand what Dez is going through. Will she learn how to be a supportive ally to her best friend? Elder Geraldine is doing her best to be supportive, but she doesn't know how to respond when the gendered protocols she's grown up with that are being thrown into question. Will Dez be comfortable expressing her full identity? And will her community relearn the teachings and overcome prejudice to celebrate her for who she is?
This book is a collection of indigenous science fiction and urban fantasy focusing on LGBT and two-spirit characters. These stories range from a transgender woman undergoing an experimental transition process to young lovers separated through decades and meeting in their own far future. These are stories of machines and magic, love and self-love.
A bold and breathtaking anthology of queer Indigenous speculative fiction, edited by the author of Jonny Appleseed. This exciting and groundbreaking fiction collection showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer) Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism's histories. Here, readers will discover bioengineered AI rats, transplanted trees in space, the rise of a 2SQ resistance camp, a primer on how to survive Indigiqueerly, virtual reality applications, mother ships at sea, and the very bending of space-time continuums queered through NDN time. Love after the End demonstrates the imaginatively queer Two-Spirit futurisms we have all been dreaming of since 1492. Contributors include Nathan Adler, Darcie Little Badger, Gabriel Castilloux Calderon, Adam Garnet Jones, Mari Kurisato, Kai Minosh Pyle, David Alexander Robertson, jaye simpson, and Nazbah Tom.
"Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound is a World is an invitation to 'cut a hole in the sky to world inside.' Billy-Ray Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder sadness and pain like theirs without giving up on the future. His poems and essays upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where 'everyone is at least a little gay.'"
Jas M. Morgan's nîtisânak honours blood and chosen kin with equal care. A groundbreaking memoir spanning nations, prairie punk scenes, and queer love stories, it is woven around grief over the loss of their mother. It also explores despair and healing through community and family, and being torn apart by the same. Using cyclical narrative techniques and drawing on their Cree, Saulteaux, and Métis ancestral teachings, this work offers a compelling perspective on the connections that must be broken and the ones that heal. Winner of the 2019 Quebec Writers' Federation Concordia University First Book Prize
Using binary code and texts from classics of the English language such as Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Joshua Whitehead unravels the coded "I" to trace the formation of a colonized self and reclaim representations of Indigenous texts. Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit member of the Peguis First Nation.
Winner of the 2023 Prose Award in Cultural Anthropology and SociologyFinalist for the 2023 Publishing Triangle Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction A sweeping history of Indigenous traditions of gender, sexuality, and resistance that reveals how, despite centuries of colonialism, Two-Spirit people are reclaiming their place in Native nations. Reclaiming Two-Spirits decolonizes the history of gender and sexuality in Native North America. It honors the generations of Indigenous people who had the foresight to take essential aspects of their cultural life and spiritual beliefs underground in order to save them. Before 1492, hundreds of Indigenous communities across North America included people who identified as neither male nor female, but both. They went by aakíí'skassi, miati, okitcitakwe or one of hundreds of other tribally specific identities. After European colonizers invaded Indian Country, centuries of violence and systematic persecution followed, imperiling the existence of people who today call themselves Two-Spirits, an umbrella term denoting feminine and masculine qualities in one person. Drawing on written sources, archaeological evidence, art, and oral storytelling, Reclaiming Two-Spirits spans the centuries from Spanish invasion to the present, tracing massacres and inquisitions and revealing how the authors of colonialism's written archives used language to both denigrate and erase Two-Spirit people from history. But as Gregory Smithers shows, the colonizers failed--and Indigenous resistance is core to this story. Reclaiming Two-Spirits amplifies their voices, reconnecting their history to Native nations in the 21st century.
In two co-related studies about Two-spirit people in Atlantic Canada, the coming out stories share critical cultural perspectives about gender identity and sexuality from a L'nuwey (Mi'kmaw) perspective. This qualitative research implemented Etuaptmumk or Two-Eyed Seeing, a co-learning methodology using Indigenous and western perspectives for data collection and analysis. The findings surface stories about resiliency among Two-spirit people who face distress and anxiety, with supports mainly coming from family and community. According to their narratives, coming out is part of their cultural awakening process. The paper shares that Two-spirited people come out in intervals or phases, especially trans people. Sexuality and gender identity development are in flux until they reach a balanced and spiritual state. The Two-spirit identity process is non-linear that may evolve in a life cycle. The study captures the ongoing resurgence of regional Indigenous perspectives of gender identity and sexuality. The narratives share the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual states of Two-spirit people during their coming out process. The stories are a source of hope and empowerment for the Two-spirit community relating to gender and sexuality. This study is the only current community-based evidence about coming out experiences of Two-spirit people in Atlantic Canada.
Sylliboy, John R. “Coming Out Is Part of the Life Cycle: A Qualitative Study Using Two-Eyed Seeing to Understand A Two-Spirits Coming Out Process.” Global public health 17.10 (2022): 2428–2446. Web.
Assessing the impact that colonization has had on the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, class, culture, and spirituality, Two Spirit people face unique health concerns. Considering the intersections of identity and structural barriers in place for this community, more research led by and in collaboration with the Two Spirit community is needed.
Dykhuizen, Melissa et al. “Holistic Health of Two Spirit People in Canada: A Call for Nursing Action.” Journal of Holistic Nursing 40.4 (2022): 383–396. Web.
An exploratory, community-based research project examined the paths of migration and mobility of Canadian Indigenous people who identify as Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer (LGBTQ). A total of 50 participants in Winnipeg, Manitoba and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada were interviewed, many of them telling stories about the multiple layers of domestic violence, violence in communities, state and structural violence that they experienced. In order to better respond to relationship violence experienced by Indigenous Two-Spirit/LGBTQ people it is necessary to understand the specific and historical context of colonization in which relationship violence occurs. We further need to align our efforts to end relationship violence with broader anti-violence struggles.
Ristock, Janice et al. “Impacts of Colonization on Indigenous Two-Spirit/LGBTQ Canadians’ Experiences of Migration, Mobility and Relationship Violence.” Sexualities 22.5-6 (2019): 767–784. Web.
As settler colonialism has forcibly constricted vast expanses of Indigenous lands, criss-crossing them with superimposed borders, it has sought to redraw the boundaries of Indigenous identity by imposing definitions and categories that invariably lead to Indigenous diminishment. Strategic and eliminatory categorization is essential to the settler-colonial imperative. This essay explores settler-colonial exercises of rhetorical imperialism that deploy language, connotation, and categorization to dismantle Indigenous cultural systems. The author discusses the political stake in who is designated Indigenous, the drive to remake Indigenous nations in the image of the settler-state, the enforcement of cis-heteropatriarchal capitalist norms, and assimilationist strategies aiming to disrupt Indigenous formations of gender and kinship. The author argues that Indigenous assertions of peoplehood as a definitional and unifying framework and Two-Spirit as a self-identifier are acts of resistance that they term "oppositional identification" and "contrast mechanisms." They are exercises of rhetorical and radical sovereignty, tantamount to everyday decolonization.
Ellasante, Ian Khara. “Radical Sovereignty, Rhetorical Borders, and the Everyday Decolonial Praxis of Indigenous Peoplehood and Two-Spirit Reclamation.” Ethnic and racial studies 44.9 (2021): 1507–1526. Web.
This article focuses on the imaginative geographies depicted in Joshua Whitehead’s (2018), which recounts the story of a young Two-Spirit man who searches for his identity in-between the reserve and the city. The objective of the analysis is to tie the representation of the contemporary queer Indigenous condition with the alternative mappings emerging from Whitehead’s novel. In order to address the contemporary Two-Spirit condition in Canada, the article applies current theories proposed by the field of queer Indigenous studies, including the concept of , which further allows the presentation of the potential of Two-Spirit bodies to transgress colonial cartographies.
Siepak, Julia. “Two-Spirit Identities in Canada: Mapping Sovereign Erotic in Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed.” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 55.1 (2020): 495–515. Web.
Indigenous sexual and gender minority people have been identifying as two-spirit since 1990 and are reclaiming traditional Indigenous gender terms such as nádleehí or agokwe. At the same time, Settler-dominated communities are undergoing a cultural shift toward challenging binary categories of sex and gender, causing some Settler governments to adopt a multi-gender framework reminiscent of the Indigenous systems they aimed to erase through colonial systems and practices. This article examines how shifts in Settler gender frameworks relate to traditional and contemporary understandings of gender in Indigenous nations and how Indigenous gender systems support resistance to ongoing colonization.
The Wabanaki Two-Spirit Alliance (W2SA), a regional Two-Spirit organization, administered an online survey in May of 2020 to identify priorities and concerns of Two-Spirit (2S) individuals and Indigenous 2SLGBTQQIA+ people in Atlantic Canada during the novel COVID-19 pandemic. The respondents shared health concerns including deterioration(s) of mental health (56.32%) and described mental health supports (68.42%), health supports for 2S individuals (57.89%), healing gatherings (46.05%) and trans-specific supports (44.74%) as critical interventions in fostering 2S health. The Alliance’s immediate response was to develop community-led responses to address urgent concerns. Our key promising practice has been hosting 2S gatherings as community-based health/cultural supports; the gatherings also serve as an opportunity for the Alliance to consult the 2S community about priorities and concerns. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Alliance explored ways to keep the 2S community safe while maintaining critical social support(s) and gaining invaluable knowledge from the 2S community. We designed a survey that provided critical feedback resulting in the Alliance shifting priorities towards developing ways to bring 2S people together safely by virtual means, seeking sustainable resources to address emerging health concerns, and increasing capacity development of the Alliance.
Sylliboy, John R et al. “Two-Spirits’ Response to COVID-19: Survey Findings in Atlantic Canada Identify Priorities and Developing Practices.” International Journal of Indigenous Health 17.1 (2022): 14–25. Web.
Improving Campus and Community Climate and Safety Students ask that the provincial government establish a Committee on Two Spirit and LGBTQ+ Students that is responsible for advising and supporting the Ministry of Colleges and Universities on Two Spirit and LGBTQ+ student issues and priority areas. [...] Student also ask that the MCU work with the Ministry of Health to: provide mandatory training for on- campus practitioners on the history and current experiences of Two Spirit and LGBTQ+ students with specific awareness to the needs of asexual and intersex students; ensure that all Two Spirit and LGBTQ+ students, physicians, and practitioners, have access to Ontario Telemedicine Network services; [...] Recommendation: Prior to the creation of the Advisory Committee on Two Spirit and LGBTQ+ Students, the provincial government should conduct comprehensive consultation and engagement with Two Spirit and LGBTQ+ students and advocate on policy decisions that would have an impact on Two Spirit and LGTBQ+ communities. [...] Recommendation: The provincial government should establish a Committee on Two Spirit and LGBTQ+ Students that is responsible for advising and supporting the Ministry of Colleges and Universities on Two Spirit and LGBTQ+ student issues and priority areas. [...] Recommendation: The Advisory Committee on Two Spirit and LGBTQ+ Students should be utilized by the Ministry of Colleges and Universities to provide consultation and feedback on relevant metrics and performance criteria as they relate to the assessment of Two Spirit and LGBTQ+ inclusivity and awareness on post-secondary campuses.