SOURCE: Prince-Hughes, Tara. “Contemporary Two-Spirit Identity in the Fiction of Paula Gunn Allen and Beth Brant.” SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures 10, no. 4 (winter 1998): 9-31.

In the following essay, Prince-Hughes views the concept of two-spirit identity as a central theme in the work of lesbian writers Allen and Beth Brant.

A central concern in contemporary Native American fiction is that of identity. According to Louis Owens, in Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, common to many writers is a “consciousness” of the “individual attempting to reimagine an identity, to articulate a self within a Native American context” (22). This struggle for identity has required writers to engage actively and dispute dominant Western fictions of “Indianness” and to express the fragmentation experienced by people of mixed ancestry. Their sense of alienation, Owens claims, differs from that of postmodern European-American thinkers; unlike their European-descent contemporaries, who emphasize the instability of...