New Queer Negativity: Kent Monkman, Love-Politics, and Queer Legal Humanities

Abstract

Abstract

This article develops the concept of “new queer negativity” through the visual and performative practice of Kent Monkman and his Two-Spirit persona, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. It argues that Monkman’s use of contradiction, parody, and erotic excess reconfigures negativity as a generative critique of law’s demands for coherence, consent, and sovereign subjectivity. Engaging queer theory, Indigenous studies, and “queer legal humanities,” the article treats Monkman’s paintings as acts of “aesthetic jurisprudence,” or as visual sites where juridical and affective meanings converge. Through a reparative queer legal method, it reads “Welcoming the Newcomers,” “Resurgence of the People,” the “Four Continents” series, and “Hanky Panky” as differently inflected scenes of new queer negativity. Ultimately, the article reframes queer negativity as both reparative and relational: a love-politics of nonsovereignty that unsettles juridical order and opens new ways of imagining law, intimacy, and collectivity beyond recognition and closure.