Dying to Be Normal by Brett Krutzsch

Author:Brett Krutzsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

An Anti-Assimilationist Approach to Memorialization: Two Spirits

While Boys Don’t Cry depicts Brandon Teena as similar to Matthew Shepard, the 2009 documentary Two Spirits about the murder of sixteen-year-old Navajo F. C. Martinez explicitly contrasts Martinez with Shepard.62 PBS aired Two Spirits in June 2011, and the documentary became the most-watched film during PBS’s 2010–2011 season.63 As opposed to much of the commemorative work surrounding Matthew Shepard, Two Spirits rejects assimilation to the white Christian culture of the United States as a worthwhile political goal. The documentary also exalts Native American religious ideas external to Christianity that celebrate diverse gender possibilities.

Two Spirits interweaves the story of Martinez’s murder, historical information about Native American gender systems, and stories of contemporary Native Americans who have reclaimed indigenous ideas about gender variance that were mostly lost through colonialism and forced assimilation. The film accomplishes all of this by making Martinez’s murder a vehicle to illuminate the capacious gender possibilities that existed long before Christian colonizers and the U.S. government tried to “civilize” the indigenous populations. In effect, the documentary uses the emotional pull of a murdered adolescent to present a larger argument about the dangers of assimilation. The film, in turn, became not only the most successful attempt to raise Martinez’s national profile but also, as Native American scholar Gabriel Estrada notes, “The most popularly viewed depiction of [Native American gender diversity] in the United States.”64

Two Spirits opens with the words, “This is the true story of a Navajo boy who was also a girl.”65 The “Navajo boy who was also a girl” was given the name Fred at birth. As a teenager, Martinez went by the name F. C., other times as Frederica, and sometimes as Fred. Around the age of thirteen, Martinez began to wear makeup and carry a purse, both at home and to school. Martinez’s mother, Pauline Mitchell, testified that, “When he [Martinez] was thirteen and in middle school he started changing, wearing makeup. First eyebrow pencil. Later on curling his hair, putting more makeup on, and putting on nail polish. And Fred always carried a purse.”66 Mitchell explained that when Martinez started to dress in feminine ways, she told her child, “You know what they call that in Navajo? They call that if you want to be half woman, half man, they call it nadleeh.” Martinez reportedly responded, “Oh, so cool, I’m a nadleeh.”67

For Martinez’s mother, her Navajo culture provided her with a name and an explanation for her child’s feminine appearance: nadleeh. Commonly translated as “the changing one,” the term described a third gender possibility for the Navajo.68 Historically, the Navajo had four genders. The first Navajo gender was asdzaan, or feminine women. The second was hastiin, or masculine men. The third gender, nadleeh, included those born into male bodies, but who possessed feminine traits and who took on feminine tasks in adulthood. And the fourth, dilbaa, included those born into female bodies, but who adhered to masculine roles. Until the early twentieth century, the Navajo considered families with a nadleeh especially fortunate.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.