Native Feminist Killjoy Series
The serigraphs in my Native Feminist Killjoy series draw inspiration from feminist scholar Sara Ahmed's concept of the feminist killjoy – the person who disrupts comfort by naming sexism, racism, and other forms of structural violence that others would rather ignore. This serigraph expands Ahmed's framework through an Indigenous feminist lens, asking what it means to be a Native feminist killjoy. I often find myself disrupting feminist conversations by insisting that intersectional analyses of race, gender, class, and sexuality must also contend with the ongoing logics of settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession. Rather than treating colonialism as a historical backdrop, the work argues that it remains a foundational structure shaping contemporary relations of power. By claiming the title "Mvskoke Feminist Killjoy," I embrace the labor of unsettling dominant narratives and invite feminist movements to imagine more expansive forms of solidarity grounded in Indigenous sovereignty and decolonial justice.
An integral component of the cisheteropatriarchal, capitalist, settler colonial project is the destruction of Indigenous knowledges and practices, especially Indigenous understandings of gender, sexuality and kinship. The Palestinian edition of this serigraph aims to operationalize "radical kinship" - a Native feminist practice of making relations that both resists settler colonialism and reclaims the expansive, generative, and life-affirming kinship practices of Indigenous peoples. It also aims to answer the Palestinian feminist call to recognize the settler colonial occupation of Palestine and the genocide against Palestinians as a feminist issue and declares Native feminist solidarity.
Native Feminist Killjoy (2024) 5-color serigraph, edition of 30, 18" x 24"
Native Feminist Killjoy - Palestine (2024) 5-color serigraph, edition of 30, 18" x 24"
Mvskoke Feminist Killjoy (2024) 5-color serigraph, edition of 30, 18" x 24"