Embodied Liminality and Gendered State Violence: Artivist Expressions in the MMIW Movement

This article examines four multimedia artivist artefacts at the nexus of the missing and murdered Indigenous women’s (MMIW) crisis. I position artivism as a decolonial methodology that radically alters our attunement to embodied aesthetics, contending that feminist artivists employ a radical imagination to liberate the body/body politic. Decoloniality must be an enacted praxis, and for many Indigenous feminists, creative and artistic practices provide a transformative pathway towards “making” and “living out” one’s indigeneity as knowledge and tradition-bearers. Each of the four exhibits illustrate the ways in which settler politics are narrated and resisted through and by the Indigenous body. My analysis illuminates what I theorize as an “embodied liminality” allied to Anzaldúa’s (1987) “Borderlands” and Bhabha’s (2004) “Third Space.” By articulating both feminist and decolonial forms of liminality, I explore the radical dimensions of artivism and the strategic subjugation of the liminal’s in-between threshold in which Indigenous women are traditionally relegated as “monstrous” Others. Using feminist artivism as a pathway to decolonization renders indigeneity clearly visible, such that the once-shadowy forms of its liminality are now simultaneously the protagonist and antagonist of the settler state. Building a decolonial movement against the MMIW crisis must begin with the recognition of the Indigenous body across fluid boundaries of radical resistance and critical vocabularies of aesthetic deviance.