Qwo-Li Driskill is a Cherokee Two-Spirit and queer scholar, writer, and activist whose work centers Indigenous frameworks for understanding gender and sexuality that precede and exceed the categories imposed through colonization. Their scholarship challenges queer theory to confront its complicity with settler colonialism and to engage with Indigenous knowledge systems rather than treating them as ethnographic data.
Core ideas
- Two-Spirit critique: Driskill and other Two-Spirit scholars argue that the imposition of the European gender binary on Indigenous nations was a central technology of colonization — disrupting Indigenous governance, kinship, and spiritual practice. The recovery and practice of Two-Spirit identities is therefore not merely a matter of sexual or gender identity but a practice of decolonization and Indigenous resurgence.
- Sovereign erotics: in Queer Indigenous Studies (2011, co-edited) and other work, Driskill develops the concept of “sovereign erotics” — centering Indigenous understandings of body, desire, and relation that are grounded in specific lands, languages, and nations rather than in Western identity categories.
Notable works
- Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (2011, co-edited)
- Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory (2016)
Related
- Queer-of-color critique — the broader tradition their work intersects with
- Decolonization — the political project Two-Spirit critique is part of
- Indigenous resurgence — the framework for understanding Two-Spirit recovery
- Settler colonialism — the structure that imposed the gender binary on Indigenous nations