Strange Fire

Q&A: Joseph M. Pierce

By Rafael Soldi | October 13, 2022

Joseph M. Pierce is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19th century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the 2021 special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” His work has been published recently in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, Latin American Research Review, and has also been featured in Indian Country Today. Along with SJ Norman (Koori, Wiradjuri descent) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Rafael Soldi: Hi Joseph, thanks for taking the time to chat with me. Your practice centers on "kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19th century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging." How has your own relationship to identity throughout your life informed the topics you have gravitated toward?

Joseph M. Pierce: Identity, lol. I think the most important throughline that connects the various aspects of my work is not identity but relationality. Though, sometimes I think that “relationality” is an overly complicated way of saying “relations”. What I mean is I am a subject, I have an identity, it is true, but that subjectivity is always in dialogue—in tension and rupture and vibration and iteration—with others. Perhaps another way of saying this is that I am constantly trying to figure out how I am constituted in relation to others. 

When I was young, and now I’ll tell a bit of who I am, I grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, and we didn’t know anything about my father’s biological family because he had been adopted by a white family as a newborn. My dad is very dark, and my mom is white, and I look a lot like my dad. But we didn’t know his “identity,” which is to say, his ethnicity, his “race.” I was always kind of unmoored in terms of “identity” because other people would see me and assume I was Latino, and usually Mexican-American. In part that was because in Corpus Christi people who look like my dad or like me are almost always Latino. But then again, someone would look at me and interpolate me in one way, and then another person would do so differently. I was constantly being hailed by people (I have language to describe this now) in ways that were often in conflict with my own sense of self. What are you? I was constantly getting that question. I didn’t have an answer back then. 

But in 2005 we went through the process of opening my father’s sealed adoption records. And that was wild. I was in my early 20s and my dad was in his early 50s and we received this government archive that had his original birth certificate, which listed his mother as Native American and his father as white. And it listed their names! This didn’t change who I was, but it changed my “identity” in a sense. It changed how I told the story that I could tell. This one that I’m telling right now. 

We were eventually able to find my grandmother, Ada, my father’s mother. She was still alive back then. And we met for the first time in the lobby of a Days Inn in Lubbock, Texas. She was a full-blood (as they say), raised in Cherokee community, but had to give my dad up for adoption. She was 20 when he was born. And there we were 50 years later, reconnecting. Words fail me sometimes when trying to describe this.

RS: I'm curious about your experience of unfolding, in adulthood, your indigenous identity, especially as it relates to the feeling of appropriating your own culture and how you've navigated this conundrum. Can you expand on that?

JMP: The story I’m telling, this storying, is what I have. The narration of what my body is, how it unfolds in time. As I have wrestled with what my return to a Cherokee community means, it has become clear to me that I have to be very open about where I come from and how I relate to other people. This is challenging, of course, but I also want to say that no one has ever rejected me. I always feared that. I always thought that someone would come up to me and say: “You didn’t grow up here, so you aren’t one of us.” That has never happened. And I think in part it is because I don’t claim to be something I’m not. 

The important thing is that I recognize myself as part of an ongoing community formation, one that has endured so many ruptures and traumas. When I started to write about adoption and its intergenerational effects, part of that was so that I could help situate myself within a longer history. I academicized my story. But it was helpful to me because in doing this research I realized that my story is actually very common. There are thousands and thousands of Indigenous people who were removed or separated from their communities. This is not to say that people who are living in their ancestral homelands do not also experience ruptures, but that my particular experience was not isolated. I had to learn that. I had to understand that I was not alone. And I thought I was for a long time. I really did think that there was no one else out there with a similar experience to mine—to my family’s. But then I read works like Susan Devan Harness’s Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption, and I was introduced to Sandy White Hawk’s advocacy for adoptees and boarding school survivors, and I realized that the feeling of isolation is part of settler colonialism. It is the effect of the ruptures of settler colonialism. If settler colonialism is predicated on the removal of Indigenous people from the land, then my personal experience of removal, which is one generation after that of my father, is also part of the Cherokee experience. Our community includes those ruptures. Perhaps what I mean is that when I finally realized that I was not alone in being raised outside of community, and that in fact settler colonialism wants, desires, that I be separated from community, then I felt like the only thing I could do was reconnect in a way that was slow and deliberate, ethical, but also compassionate. I had to be compassionate with myself. With the feelings of alienation and separation. 

But then the question of “appropriation” comes up. Sure, early on I felt like I was appropriating my own culture. But in order for it to be appropriation—and this is how I think about it now—I should never have been part of that culture to begin with. And that isn’t true. I was always part of Cherokee culture, but I had been separated by the structural forces of colonialism. So now I don’t think of it as appropriation—of course I don’t run around claiming I know things that I don’t know, but I also don’t imagine that I don’t have the right to be Cherokee. I do. The most loving thing I can do for myself is to allow myself to heal by being in good relations with other Cherokee people, as well as Indigenous people from other communities.

RS: That’s beautiful, thanks for sharing your thoughts on that journey of healing and discovery. You've mentioned before this idea of "kinstillations," as you talk about speculative relations and indigenous worlding through the Americas. Can you elaborate on this term/idea and these sort of spectral representations of indigenous people and histories?

JMP: I think this is one of the major breakthroughs that I have had in my life. And I want to make sure that I am very clear about how this came about. The term “kinstillation” was first developed by Cree scholar Karyn Recollet. Karyn and Yup’ik dancemaker and choreographer Emily Johnson have collaborated toward deepening and developing that term. And Karyn, Emily, and I have also collaborated toward thinking about what kinstillations mean. But it was first developed by Karyn, and I am very grateful for that. 

By theorizing constellations and kin together, Karyn gave a name to something that resonates with anthropological understandings of kinship, while not being circumscribed to that settler epistemology. Instead, kinstillations invoke our own stories and understanding of the relationships across worlds, between land and sky. This is crucial because it is based on an Indigenous cosmology, rather than a settler epistemology. And it makes sense in many Indigenous worldviews, but perhaps not all. Some communities, like the Cree and Anishinaabe have many stories in which the people travel to the sky, or beings (like Sky Woman) fall to the earth, and so they are literally related to beings in or from the sky. Cherokee have stories like this too, like one that tells the origin of the Pleiades and the Pine Tree. I have written about these stories, but the thing that resonates with me about them is that they teach me how to relate in a good way. They teach me things that I did not have growing up. I can’t go back to when I was a child and know things that I didn’t learn back then. So, I have to be deliberate and learn now. And that is humbling.  

Kinstillations is a way of describing relations that exist in Indigenous communities and which are not only human, but also more-than-human relations. This is crucial. It is not just that we have relations between human beings, but with ancestors, land, water, sky, animals. But I want to provide a caveat here: this is not to say that the more-than-human or spiritual aspects of Indigenous relations are the only way of describing what it means to relate, but simply that those are important parts of our relations. Sometimes we turn to the metaphysical to signal that Indigenous relations are “beyond” in some sense (beyond time, beyond the body), but this is not really true. They are right here, present, landed. Grounded. I don’t want to idealize the metaphysical. It is one component of relations that often is left out of the general conversation, but we cannot always turn to the metaphysical when the land itself—land, water, air, the physical environment—is constantly under siege by colonialism’s extractive economic policies. So kinstillations is a concept that helps me understand how these are intimately related, and how intimacies are always part of the ongoing forms of Indigenous relations.

RS: In your recent book, Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press 2019), you dive into the archives of one of Argentina's formost intellectual and elite family, the Bunges. How did you first learn of the Bunges, and what kind of access did you get to their archives to complete your research?

JMP: I narrate some of this in the introduction to the book. But what I’ll say here is that when I was first thinking about this project as a graduate student, I wanted to write a dissertation about sibling artists. I was interested in, for example, the relationship between Victoria and Silvina Ocampo or Jorge Luis and Norah Borges, siblings who each had an artistic practice, and at times collaborated. There was something about this sibling bond that I thought needed to be explored. And as I was trying to find examples of this type of relationship, I came across Carlos Octavio Bunge and his siblings. They are a rather obscure bunch in the context of Latin American letters, so it took some time for me to figure out how to place them. But that was what became interesting to me. These people, a generation of writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were writing about family, and they were doing so in very contradictory ways. I expected them to all be conservative, white supremacist, homophobic, traditionalists. And they were. But as I read more, I realized that there were quite a few moments when these writers did not say what I thought they would. They were upending my expectations about what a conservative family would say about “family”. 

I focused the book on them as a case study, a way of framing the discussion. But I hope that people take the method of queer kinship as an invitation to ask deeper questions about the family in other locations and time periods. For me, the breakthrough came when I was able to travel to Argentina in 2011 and later in 2015 and have a series of conversations with Lucía Gálvez, who is a historian of the Bunge family, and is herself the granddaughter of Delfina Bunge (who married novelist Manuel Gálvez, and often signed her work Delfina Bunge de Gálvez). Lucía and I were able to relate to each other because of a shared interest in family (in general) and the Bunge family (in particular). Of course, we had very different understandings of what family meant, or could mean, but in this instance, I was able to access the family archive that she was caring for because of this shared interest in kinship. That is how I was able to include a chapter about the diaries that Delfina and her sister Julia Bunge each wrote—but also shared with each other—in the early twentieth century. And another about the family photographs that they kept over decades in an album that Delfina created and which later Lucía cared for. We established trust, though I also didn’t ever make explicit that I was doing a “queer reading”. 

One of the most important contributions of the book, in my view, is this contrast between public and private writing. That interchange is what allowed me to really see how even members of an elite family—a normative family—were actively cultivating what I call queer forms of attachment or non-normative forms of kinship. 

Delfina writes specifically about never wanting to marry and wanting to live her life as a spinster. But then eventually she did marry. And this is part of the contradiction: at times in order to uphold normativity you actually have to brush up against, engage with, or adopt queer orientations. And that means, in my view, that normativity is not as normative as we often think, but rather is constantly reshaping itself, adopting and adapting forms, orientations, desires, that exist just on the outside of the norm. The main point of the book is that normativity is constantly negotiating with queerness. I hope that if we are more attuned to that dynamic, then we can better resist the oppressive forces of normativity when they adapt to coopt those queer bodies, forms, and desires, that they should reject, but which the need to function.

RS: Do you feel like in this book there is a path to using similar strategies to understand other significant family archives around the world? Is there something fundamental we can take from queer studies and queer kinship to better understand the larger world around us?

JMP: Absolutely. The method is the important thing. And to be honest, I thought that within the North American academy this book would not really be taken up outside of Spanish departments. But I have been pleasantly surprised by folks who are situated in English or cultural studies, or gender and sexuality studies, who see something valuable in approaching intimacy through the thick archival readings that I try to carry out. 

The methodological intervention involves not assuming we know normativity in advance. However, to engage with that question, to doubt in this way, we need a robust archive from which to draw more nuanced conclusions. One of the issues that I really try to be honest about in the book is what this archive means, looks like, in all its diversity. Various members of the Bunge family wrote fiction, essays, textbooks, poetry, memoir, diaries, jurisprudence, economic plans, etc., all of this in addition to the photographs and other forms of intimate archival materials. Though I was trained in literary and cultural studies (and queer studies), I really had to learn a lot about other disciplines like anthropology, sociology, psychology, and economics to approach the diversity of this writing. That inter- or multi-disciplinary work allows me to focus on one specific family, but in truth, this family is just the container for working through how to read kinship differently. How, in other words, to approach queerness not as what is outside of kinship, but rather what is necessary for kinship to constitute itself as such. 

RS: Pivoting toward your current research, Gestural Resistance, which you've described as a methodology of thinking that is itself a form of "haunting"  that photographs both depend on and preserve. Tell me more about this new research, where are you in the process?

JMP: Let me draw a connection between one of the photographs I analyze in Argentine Intimacies and my new book project, which I’m tentatively titling Speculative Relations (one of the chapters is called “Gestural Resistance”). The last image I study in Argentine Intimacies is of Carlos Octavio’s living room. It was taken in the early 20th century, and Delfina, his sister, wrote on the bottom of the image “casa en que murió” (the house in which he died). And I found this fascinating. An image of the living room in which her brother died. I described that image as conjuring a haunting presence and speculated about what that might mean in the context of their queer sibling relationship.  

Fast forward to now: I have always been struck by how photographs of Indigenous people seem to fix us in time, as if we were spectral, haunting presences in the colonial archive. What I am trying to do now is make that plain, on the one hand, and on the other, resist that spectral drive by developing a method of reading those photographs as enlivening the subjects that are ostensibly captured through the ethnographic, or as I have been thinking of it, the ethnopornographic gaze. 

I want to imagine ways of seeing photographs of Indigenous people not for what is plainly captured—their bodies—but rather for what lingers, haunting, in those images. So, for example, the work of Edward Curtis, Frederick Monsen, or other quasi-ethnographic photographers aims to document Indigenous communities for posterity. Fuck that. There must be ways of making present, alive, those people for whom the photograph serves as a moment of historicizing stultification. I want to resist that historical impulse, that past-making, by speculating about other forms of engaging with—relating to—those subjects. This is an Indigenous methodology, this is kinstillatory, this is enacting good relations. But it requires looking at photographs differently. It requires relating to—rather than gazing upon—them. 

RS: That makes so much sense to me. The ethnopornographic—I love that word—gaze disguises as “neutral,” as an objective act of looking and recording, when it is often far from it. A “neutral” reading can be violent too, when it fails to address the nuances that make the ghost of an image come to life, as you’ve described it—when it fails to relate.

JMP: Relations is also central to my work with Koori (Wiradjuri) artist SJ Norman as co-curator of the series Knowledge of Wounds. We started working together in late 2019 and have held in-person gatherings and digital gatherings focused on the work of queer, trans, and two-spirit (or Indigiqueer) artists. This platform and gathering space is crucial to how I see my contributions to the broader fields of Native studies, though it isn’t a “study” space so much as a gathering space. The thing that excites me about Knowledge of Wounds is that we are able to do things, to enact and practice, the forms of relationality that most academics only theorize. So, I want to highlight that as part of my academic praxis because it is not actually academic. And that is important. We need to expand what counts as academic, and if the academe isn’t willing to expand, then we need to create spaces for us by us regardless.  

RS: On that note…you're a professor at Stony Brook University, how does your research and your teaching feed one another, if at all? Is the classroom a fertile site for your own research and ideas to develop, or is your teaching practice quite separate from your research and writing?

JMP: I’m fortunate to have great students and colleagues at Stony Brook. Sometimes it is challenging, however, to teach Native studies at a university that does not have a program, institute, student group, or center, that deals with Native issues. We’re really isolated in that sense. And as far as I know, I’m the only Native American faculty member at the entire university. Think about that.

But I have recently taught courses about queer Indigenous studies, Indigenous writers from Abiayala, and Decolonial visual cultures. All that feeds my soul. And the students who engage with me through those classes have really been amazing. They are more advanced than the administrators on issues of sovereignty and Indigeneity, to be honest. 

I am always trying out my research in the classroom. And I am always honest with students about what I know, or what I have been working on, and what I don’t know—which is usually a lot. In fact, I have never taught the same class twice at Stony Brook. If I teach a required undergrad course for example, I always modify it to reflect what I am currently working through in my research. It doesn’t make sense to me to separate teaching from research, though perhaps that is a privilege. My ethical stance regarding teaching is that I can’t presume to know everything, but I can be honest with students about where we are going, and why I think it is important. They appreciate that, or at least that’s what they tell me. 

RS: Thank you, Joseph. We really appreciate you taking the time to share your practice with us.