Indigenous Sexual Politics: theoretical-analytical challenges in International Relations

In the last decades, sexual politics have become a central dimension of International Relations, at the same time Indigenous People all around the globe have been conquering more space and protagonism in discussions concerning politics, both on a national and global level. Following this blooming of new approaches to world politics, in this work we propose the question of how we can study the sexual politics lived by the bodies marked by the colonial undertaking. Working from the experiences of indigenous people with gender and sexuality, we present some theoretical-analytical challenges that emerge when developing studies with indigenous peoples. The three central challenges that we found were: the debate about the origin and presence of a sexual and gender multiplicity in indigenous cosmologies; the role of modern and colonial regulation devices in the production and control of indigenous bodies; and the dilemma around the categories, identities and acronyms mobilized to interpret these experiences without reproducing colonial hierarchies of knowledge. This piece of research compiles the first findings of a literature review that integrates a much broader work of collective and collaborative research that is still in development. Through this work we show that just as indigenous people are diverse the approaches must also be and that the dialogue with them and their active participation must be at the center of the research and discussions about their experiences.