UC Riverside

WHY NOT NOW: Native Poetry and Critical Erotic Relationality reads the poetry of Native poets as sites for theorizing human, inhuman, and more than human relationality and for reclaiming Indigenous forms of intimacy. This dissertation works at the intersection of Native and Indigenous studies, theories of gender and sexuality, environmental studies, and affect to re-shape dominant discourse surrounding environmental catastrophe and refusal in contemporary twentieth and twenty-first century Indigenous poetics. Centering on collections produced by poets such as Sherwin Bitsui, Natalie Diaz, and Tommy Pico, I argue that Native poetry subverts hyper-romanticized, hyper-sexualized representations of indigeneity by expanding on frameworks of relationality to include conversations about ‘the everyday.’ WHY NOT NOW incorporates eco-eroticism as a methodology to conceptualize how Native poetry expresses the resonances of everyday human and more than human encounters, and how that resonance is vital for disrupting settler colonial imaginaries which seek to reduce relation into a totalized, hierarchical system. Drawing from the work of Dian Million, I examine the role of emotions in producing and sustaining felt knowledges and social political attachments, arguing that intimacy in the everyday is as important/significant as large-scale mobilizations, as it localizes relationality and challenges attempts at erasure of Indigenous ways of relating and being. These poems support critical fabulations of Native agency and desire, as a way of seeing, thinking, and writing about the constantly shifting network of interconnectedness between human, inhuman, and more than human beings while existing within it.