Abstract
A Politics of Feeling: Personal to Collective Sovereignty in the Poetry of Natalie Diaz, No'u Revilla, and Hinemoana Baker is a critical-creative PhD project that develops a methodology for reading the poetry of three queer, Indigenous women poets as activism. This activism often takes the form of writing about the erotic, as Audre Lorde defined it in her essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power." Like erotics, politics of feeling gestures to the political relevance of what is otherwise dismissed as personal expression, and has its roots in what Tanana Athabascan scholar Dian Million calls felt theory. It is concerned with how the narratives and poetry of the intersectionally marginalised—in this case the thrice colonised, in terms of gender, sexuality, and culture—represent knowledges that have been foreclosed in the imposition of colonial values and systems. In this project, I argue that not only are these women's personal expressions valuable but that they represent epistemological, sociological, and historical knowledge that merits inclusion in legitimate political discourses. It is from this position that I apply the framework of a politics of feeling to reading the poetry of Hinemoana Baker (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa, and Te Āti Awa), No'u Revilla (‘Ōiwi, or Hawaiian) and Natalie Diaz (Mojave American). I also posit that a critical component of conveying a politics of feeling is the establishment of one's personal sovereignty, which has the potential to contribute to sovereignty in the collective.
A question posed by No'u Revilla in a 2022 interview takes a central position in my research and creative manuscript: "What happens when you are strong enough to believe that not only are you worth protecting, but you are also a worthy protector?" The answer to her question locates the moment when one understands that she has become personally sovereign and that she has the mana (personal power) to stand, and, if necessary, fight, for such collective gains. The creative component of my project, entitled Not Waving But Dying, tracks my own progression toward personal sovereignty. In the space of three years, I turned fifty years old, ended a lifetime pattern of adhering to what Adrienne Rich terms "compulsory heterosexuality," and began the process of liberating myself from the settler colonial, heteropatriarchal constraints under which I was socially conditioned. Not Waving But Dying performatively chronicles this journey through poetry and autofictional fragments.