Preston Taylor Stone

“Queer/Indigenous/Horror” catalogs literary and cinematic media by (queer) Indigenous creatives who reclaim and refashion the horror genre to unsettle cis-heteronormative settler colonial representations of embodiment, temporality, and justice. Queer/Indigenous intersectional narratives reveal the speculative mode that is called “horror” as a unique site of (re)articulating survivance, resilience, and reparation. Rather than emphasizing Indigenous death, which Euro-American gothic literature and film construct around the trope of the “Indian burial ground,” media addressed herein transform genre elements like monstrosity, haunting, possession, and the macabre into decolonial articulations of Indigiqueer power, agency, and resistance. Chapters examine works by or featuring two-spirit/Indigiqueer people—including work by Nick Medina, of Tunica-Biloxi; Joshua Whitehead, of Oji-Cree; Qwo-Li Driskill, of Cherokee; Michael A. Koby, of Cree & Cherokee; Darcie Little Badger, of Lipan Apache; Craig Womack, of Creek/Cherokee; and others. Contributing to critical Indigenous studies, LGBTQ+ studies, and postmodern American literary studies, this text offers a corrective to cultural studies in the United States by centering the voices of historically marginalized peoples in genre fiction. In the wake of underserved communities often represented, if at all, as disempowered victims, “Queer/Indigenous/Horror” shows how contemporary Indigiqueer creatives construct counternarratives that queer settler colonial archetypes.