full-metal indigiqueer

By Joshua Whitehead

This poetry collection focuses on a hybridized Indigiqueer trickster character named Zoa who brings together the organic (the protozoan) and the technologic (the binaric) to re-beautify re-member queer Indigeneity.  A Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer invention, Zoa infects, invades, and infests as a virus inside canonical and popular works in order to re-centre the lives of Two-Spirit individuals.  In their fierce defence, Zoa takes on the likes of Shakespeare, Spenser, Dickens, and Milton, romps through the fields of cyberpunks and biopunks, takes notes from popularized horror icons, and emulates contemporary pop-culture phenomenons like Lana Del Rey, RuPaul's Drag Race, X-Men, Grindr, and Peter Pan—all to build new territories in literature, pop culture, and oral storytelling.  full-metal indigiqueer works tirelessly to create coalition among Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer folk who have been ghosted in policy, page, tradition, and history—the very lives of Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer youth and rarely mentioned; they find themselves made spectral in settler and neocolonial Indigenous nationalisms.  For those who have, as Donna Haraway once noted, "been injured, profoundly," full-metal indigiqueer is a sex-positive project that sparks resurgence.