Kent Monkman is a Cree multidisciplinary artist whose work challenges Eurocentric representations of an Indian world and masculinist conceptions of both European and Indigenous men. In her essay on Kent Monkman, Kerry Swanson notes the way in which "colonial artists" created landscapes featuring their versions of American Indian manhood and masculinity. According to Swanson, these paintings contributed to an "imaginary Indian – the highly masculinized noble savage – that became the popular model for authenticity, challenging the identities of all those who did not fit into this limiting construct.[i]
Monkman's performances as Miss Chief Eagle Testickle posit the use of traditional, new, and stereotypical materials for a contemporary Native drag performance: a Louis Vuitton quiver, highly stylized Plains-style headdresses, and platform heels with 'Native print' details and decoration. Miss Chief's irreverent dress asks questions not only about popular notions of Indigenous masculinity, but also, ingeniously, about the ways in which Indigenous cultural materials are appropriated. Who makes those appropriations? What does it mean for a Native artist to appropriate so-called Indigenous materials for a radically different consumer audience than that of the "Native Art market:" that of drag performance? How are these materials applied to a decidedly queer performance of masculinity and femininity? Miss Chief's performances are highly parodic; her appropriations actually function as re-appropriations of such stereotypically Indian materials as dream catchers (repurposed as Miss Chief's bra) and animal pelts (worn as a jockstrap). Monkman's use of these stereotypic materials points to the way in which they have been falsified, largely by an American or European 'Indigenous Art' market, as relevant cultural objects of Indigenous peoples in general. The dream catcher proliferates the 'Indian Art' marketplace as a traditional object of many or all Native tribes. Western markets for so-called Indian Art tend to overlook the fact that the dream-catcher is a traditional object mainly for the Ojibwe tribe, and its widespread popularity is actually a product of Pan-Indian and American Indian movements of the 1960's and 70's. Monkman parodies this logic of misinformation-for-profit in his hypersexualized repurposing of an object which Western markets claim to revere and admire, while perpetuating misinformation about the object's actual history, relevance, and use. The parody of gender Judith Butler defines gender parody in drag performance in a foundational queer theory text, Gender Trouble. She writes in a chapter titled "Subversive Bodily Acts:" gender parody...does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original;...a fantasy of a fantasy,...an Other who is always already a “figure” in that double sense, so gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin.[ii] |
Like the drag performers that Butler takes up in Gender Trouble, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle parodies the notion of an original, inherent gender through use of contradictory gender identifications, presentations, and objects. Certain aspects of Miss Chief's gender presentation may be thought of as masculine accoutrements: the war bonnet being reserved for distinguished male members of Plains Indian tribes, the quiver of arrows being of use for hunters, whom Western art almost always depicts as male, though this characterization may not be accurate of all tribes. If her audience has seen many drag performances, then it is familiar with the myth of essential gender based on sex and the static gender expressions that must correlate directly to one's sex. In addition, Miss Chief's performances have the potential to point out another myth. Presented with a specifically 'Native' expression of gender play, her audience can ask: 'If we understand this performance to be, like other drag performances, a parody of the myth of essential gender, what else might this performance parody?'
The joke about Indians The answer lies in the carefully concocted visual signifiers of indigeneity that Miss Chief uses in her performance of a stereotypical Indian femininity. In positing a particularly Native American feminine presentation, Miss Chief parodies the notion of an essential Indian womanhood (and her sexualization) as well as the notion of an essential Nativeness as constructed by a Western popular imagination. Mixing these variously feminine and masculine signifiers results in a gender performance that parodies first the notion of discrete genders and second the often inaccurate collection of signifiers that Westerners use to depict "the figure of the Native" in Andrea Smith's words. In doing so, Miss Chief "imitates the myth of originality itself."[iii] In this way, Miss Chief also succeeds at another of Butler's drag requirements. She cites the critique of feminists that drag queens and their performance run the risk of simply reinforcing old ideas of womanhood and femininity. Men performing as women and using traditional female signifiers to project that womanliness do little to change the heteropatriarchy's notions of womanhood and instead affirm its fundamental ideas about women, femininity, and feminine behavior. Butler responds that drag queens and kings may re-use the "gender meanings...of hegemonic, misogynistic culture" but that in their performances, these supposedly natural and normal gender meanings are "nevertheless denaturalized and mobilized through their parodic recontextualization.[iv] |