Playing the Colony: Queer Indigenous Masculinities vs the Colonial Project of Gender
The colonial project of gender (and everything else) (O’Sullivan, 2021) insists upon an unchanging masculinity signifying domination, control, rigidity, physical force, and violence. In this article, we challenge the reliability of these colonial impositions, and the fixedness of masculinities and f...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Centre for Global Indigenous Futures
2025-04-01
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| Series: | Journal of Global Indigeneity |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.journalofglobalindigeneity.com/article/133916-playing-the-colony-queer-indigenous-masculinities-vs-the-colonial-project-of-gender |
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| Summary: | The colonial project of gender (and everything else) (O’Sullivan, 2021) insists upon an unchanging masculinity signifying domination, control, rigidity, physical force, and violence. In this article, we challenge the reliability of these colonial impositions, and the fixedness of masculinities and femininities, by considering the fluidity and changeability of masculinities expressed in the work of queer Indigenous creative artists from the Lands claimed by Australia. We explore how these works intersect with a broader public imaginary and how they challenge masculinities and femininities as reliable, solid, and fixed, when there is constant evidence of their stretchy fluidity.
We take as a starting point the knitted sculptures of Jawoyn artist Troy-Anthony Baylis, and place these works in conversation with Mununjali Yugambeh writer Ellen van Neerven’s book Personal Score (2023) and play swim (2024), exploring the ways in which each engages and challenges ideas of masculinity, Indigeneity, culture, and identity. Baylis’ works at once evoke feminised crafting and labour, using simulacra of condoms, softness, football beanies, pride flags, the dillybag, the penis sheath and its association with coloniser morals and modesties, as well as captured Indigenous artefacts on display in museums. These are scribed with quippy one-liners that show up the artifices of the colonial project, a humour inspired by the genderless trickster spirits: Mimi. In both Personal Score and swim, van Neerven details the ways in which they have come up against the colonial project through sport and gender, culture and identity. They unpack and interrogate these frictions and blockages, and the weight of their affective residues—what it means to build sporting stadiums atop ceremonial grounds, cities atop swamps and rainforests, colonial gendered normativities and expectations atop a body.
These and other works of queer Indigenous creativity and resistance reveal the Survivance (Vizenor, 1999) of Indigenous masculinities and anti-masculinities that are vibrant, curious, playful, powerful, living, and queer. |
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| ISSN: | 2651-9585 |