Sara E. Salminen: unsettling trajectories: thinking queerly with Sámi feminisms, art and archives

Abstract

This thesis centres on the interconnections between gender, sexuality, Sámi Indigeneity and Nordic settler colonialism. At its broadest, it asks how different epistemological trajectories are reinforced, navigated and challenged in the two distinct and overlapping Nordic feminist contexts; a feminist and queer studies archive and Sámi feminist and queer artistic knowledge production.

Grounded in Sámi feminist and queer theoretical studies, and by building on the international field of queer Indigenous studies, the thesis explores Nordic settler colonial logics of erasure and its impact on Sámi understandings of gender and sexuality, as well as how the relations between Indigeneity, gender and sexuality are being re-imagined in feminist and queer/trans Sámi art. The thesis approaches archives as diverse and complex sites for different contested epistemological claims and possibilities. 

The first part analyses a digitalised journal archive of Nordic feminist and queer studies, between 1977-2021, illuminating how gender studies has historically placed Sámi questions in the margins and assimilated Sámi women under hegemonic understandings of feminism, suggesting that Sámi Indigeneity is marked by a simultaneous absence and presence. While considering how Nordic feminist and queer studies remains haunted by settler colonialism, this part points to current efforts of changing the terms of Nordic feminist conversation. By learning to learn from Sámi epistemologies, the thesis argues that Nordic feminist and queer studies can find other ways of relating in the settler colonial present.

Part two is a dialogue with a woven archive of art by Katarina Pirak Sikku, Outi Pieski and Timimie Märak, highlighting how Sámi feminist and queer art critically explores Sámi relations. The artworks illuminate how Sámi epistemologies, where subjectivity exists beyond the human, have tools for re-negotiating Sámi relations of gender and sexuality. Through this re-negotiation, the Sámi artists work along and against settler colonial (knowledge) trajectories, that place Sámi Indigeneity as out of time, and shape the conditions for Sámi feminist and queer (knowledge) struggles in the settler colonial present. The thesis concludes in proposing that by creating decolonial soundscapes, Sámi feminist and queer art demonstrates how other worlds can be imagined in the settler colonial dystopian present.