Daniel Heath Justice

Heaven and Earth: From the Guest Editors

One of the unexpected reminders of the continued anxiety elicited by queer bodies emerged in the final stages of preparing this manuscript for publication when the image we had selected for the cover was vetoed by Duke University Press. The intended image was the one on the following page: Heaven and Earth, by Kent Monkman (Cree/English/Irish), one of Canada’s most celebrated contemporary multidisciplinary artists and a man of great generosity, who was more than happy to offer permission for us to reproduce the image for this issue. This particular painting offers important ironic commentary on the sexualized history of colonialism, but it also reverses perceived power dynamics, repositioning the familiar status of Native bodies (often those of women) as submissive victims of the colonial erotic to assertive and enthusiastic agents of unashamed sexual subjectivity while also intimating the penetrability of white male bodies. It’s certainly a provocative painting — while a casual first glance might presume a moment of transparent sexual violence, a closer look challenges this assumption. Are the men smiling? Is the Indian pinning the white man’s arms behind him, or is he helping to remove his lover’s shirt? The wounded bison isn’t running away — if anything, s/he is distracted by the curious scene that is taking place elsewhere on the land. (And both bow and arrow quiver are absent from the painting, so the agent of injury isn’t necessarily one of these men.) And then there’s the erection. The unobtrusive, barely noticeable white penis rising up to greet the prairie sky. While not something to which we paid much attention (in fact, most of us didn’t even notice it until the controversy arose), it became the center of intense interest to Duke University Press. It was deemed unsuitable for reproduction in the books catalog, and then subsequently it was dropped as the cover image altogether, with the suggestion that it be replaced by a less provocative image. The justifications for this decision revolved around the public nature of that particular penis: Duke argued that while content inside the journal had a context that readers knowingly engaged, an image circulating more publicly on the outside cover was “out of context” and thus legally problematic.