Through Space and Time: Bodies Disorientated

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with bodies in space, bodies acting on objects within spaces, and above all the way bodies are orientated to inhabit certain types of space.  As a poco theorist I keep imagining the ways bodies transcend space and time, and the ways in which bodies migrate and come into contact with other bodies.  Bodies and their orientations are VERY important because it defines the very nature of colonization. If you haven’t read Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, and Others by Sarah Ahmed, I strongly recommend it.  It really makes you think about the world around you, they way you perceive yourself, and the way you perceive others. Orientation can refer to many things, but it is certainly for most involved, in the ways in which we orientate our bodies within the spaces we inhabit.

This is a concept I learned from Sarah Ahmed.

I want to use a certain model, from Ahmed’s work, because I think it really fits nicely into the ways in which Lyons imagines the way his body—and the body of modern indigenous peoples—inhabits a certain space.

According to Ahmed, we can think of our bodies along the lines of two lines which form a vertical and horizontal line in terms of the way our bodies are situated—the “social” and the “straight line.”  

I want to touch briefly on her model of sexual orientation, because we can also understand it in terms of colonization. 

A “body at home,” is a body whose orientation is centered between these two lines of “social” and “straight.”  The social line represents all that society says is correct—think of it in terms of the cultural values that are placed as restrictions upon your body.  The straight line is the line that represents your family’s cultural values—these are also placed as restrictions upon one’s body.  So a normal body is a body at home centered between what’s considered normal between the straight and the social line.  A queer body is a body whose orientation doesn’t fall within the social and straight lines.  Thus, they inhabit an oblique space of the social and straight line.  Their bodies have been disoriented.

This is a picture I created. It is based on Ahmed’s model and I think it will help you understand it better:

 

 

So in terms of this model a body with the correct orientation—in terms of the social and straight—is a body that is correctly orientated.

LET’S think of this model in terms of colonization.  A “body at home” is a body that has not yet been colonized.  It falls within the social line and the straight line. BUT when colonization happens a body is forced off center and then becomes disorientated—it becomes queer in its relation to the colonial force governing its body.

Scott Richard Lyons occupies a space, and a body, that is disoriented within a queer space. We can understand his body and the space he inhabits in terms of Ahmed’s model of sexual orientation.  BUT because it is his ancestors that have been colonized his disorientation is passed down through his genetic lineage—his body is a physical product of colonization.

 Lyons says “But wholeness has never been my experience, at least not where identity is concerned. Liminality has always best defined me on the inside and perhaps the outside, too, and I say that without trying to privilege the condition of in-betweenness even one little bit…Most of the contradictory discourse that constitute “me” I have inherited…at any rate, there is nothing “pure” about me…” (IX-XI). 

Lyons is a product of disorientation and his body must inhabit a space of inbetweenness off centered within a space of impurity. 

Therefore, Lyons knows that to re-orientate his body he must define and understand the queer spaces that Native people have come to inhabit in correlation to the ways in which their bodies have been colonized. I am in no way saying that Natives are sexually queer, I AM saying however their experience comes from a queering effect that makes their body strange because of the space it inhabits.

Lyons starts with the colonization of his people through his explication of the “x-mark.” He says:

An x-mark is a treaty signature…Many an Indian’s signature was recorded by the phrase “his x mark,” and what the x-mark meant was consent. An x-mark also signified coercion…The x-mark is a contaminated and coerced sign of consent made under conditions that are not of one’s making. It signifies power and a lack of power, agency and a lack of agency. It is a decision one makes when something has already been decided for you. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. And yet there is always the prospect of slippage, indeterminacy, unforeseen consequences, or unintended results; is is always possible, that is, that an x-mark could result in something good.  Why else, must we ask, would someone bother to make it? I use the x-mark to symbolize Native assent to things…that, while not necessarily traditional in origin, can sometimes turn out all right and occasionally good.  (1-3)

The x represents the body—and when written it represents the consent of the body. The Native X mark represented treaties, consent to give up lands, and consent to give up the spaces in which their bodies inhabit.  I think what Lyon’s is trying to get across is that many Native’s see the x mark as the death of Native culture and life.  YET, Lyons sees an opportunity of re-orientation—or re-appropriation for that matter—within the x mark.  The x mark is the signifier of disorientation in space.  BUT it can also serve as a signifier for reorientation.  Lyons states that Natives are not unused to this idea of migration in have he posits the concept that Natives “have the right to move in modern time” which can only take place by “acknowledging the differences that already exist in the Fourth world” (32).   

Lyons uses the X mark to return to the Native body.  After all one can learn to live within a queer space, as long as one reorientates the body.  What better way than the thing which disorientates it in the first place?

The x mark serves as a removal, but according to Lyons “Sometimes a removal can become a migration” (33).

 Natives must make new X marks in order to become New Natives.  A body can never fully return home after colonization—instead it must reorientate itself in the present to create new lines within the future. New x marks are signs of reorientation.  They can be used as a beacon, a guiding light for all Native who have been disorientated.  If Natives were to rethink the idea of tradition within the space of a modern identity, I’d imagine these new lines for Native people would look something along the lines of an X.