Decolonizing Transgender: Deconstructing Western Framings of Indigenous Gender-Diverse Identities
Date of Award
May 2020
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Communication and Rhetorical Studies
Advisor(s)
Kathleen E. Feyh
Keywords
benevolent violence, coloniality of gender, decolonial, gender-diverse, indigenous, transgender
Subject Categories
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Abstract
Media representations of gender-diverse Indigenous communities are growing in popularity. A common trend in the framing of these populations is to use Western gender terms in order to describe and frame indigenous gender identities to Western audiences. Situated at the intersection of rhetorical studies, decolonial studies, and queer/transgender studies, this thesis uses a decolonial lens to explore how Western media representations of gender-diverse indigenous people perpetuate colonial ideologies of gender. I use Mara Lugones’ concept of the coloniality of gender in addition to Pedro J. DiPietro’s benevolent violence in order to articulate how media representations misrepresent indigenous identities through their privileging of Western epistemologies. I look at The Guardian documentary “Muxes – Mexico’s Third Gender” to explore how the use of what I call the “third-gender frame” and the “naming frame” are both privilege Western understandings of gender and contribute to misrepresenting muxe identity. Through this critique, I also look to the vernacular voices of the muxes in the video to see how their rhetoric differs from that of the media’s framing and argue that vernacular voices are potential ways to resist theses Western frames. Ultimately, I conclude that media representations of non-dominant groups is tense with both potentials and pitfalls, but that scholarship in academia maintains a special vantage point from which to identify the presence of the coloniality of gender and benevolent violence, resist and repair media’s false narratives, and work to delink from modernity/coloniality.
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Recommended Citation
Ratel-Khan, Joshua Tyler, "Decolonizing Transgender: Deconstructing Western Framings of Indigenous Gender-Diverse Identities" (2020). Theses - ALL. 459.
https://surface.syr.edu/thesis/459
