American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION During the last few years anthropological research conducted among North American Indians has shown a high level of variability in its perceptions of gender, sex, and sexuality. Most of this research concentrated on the ideologies and norms underpinning social and ritual obligations as a means to determine the levels of institutionalization of roles assigned to individuals whose gender crossed or mixed men and women’s traits. To this day, not much attention has been given to indigenous representations of gender variability in North America, with the notable exception of minor interpretations of ambiguous figures in the rich iconography of Southwestern and Eastern peoples from prehistoric to historic times. Although a considerable amount of work has been done on Plains Indian pictorial conventions, specific research on representations of gender has been published only recently. In particular, the only articles about the iconography of gender variability in this region briefly concentrated on the female body. Despite a long history of academic interest in male gender variability among Plains Indians, there are few references to its visual representations; yet no proper analysis of the several known portraits of male gender variant individuals exists for the Plains area. This is in contrast to a modest body of research whose focus is the artistic production and material culture of some Plains Indian males who either donned women’s clothes or, because they crossed occupational boundaries, were considered to belong to a gender that was alternative to that of man or woman. This article will analyze the few published references to gender variation among Plains Indians in order to contribute to a growing corpus of literature concerned with building a more complete picture of the social and cultural lives of individuals accustomed to these practices. In recent years these people have been known among Native Americans under the collective term two-spirit.