Reciprocal relationalities and possibilities between Indigenous queer and Fat Studies

Indigenous Queer Studies prioritizes Indigenous queer worldviews in response to western settler-colonial cis-heteropatriarchal societies and their ongoing occupation. While performing critical anti-colonial work, Indigenous Queer Studies also invests in the salvage and continuity of sovereign embodiments, expressions, and desires produced and maintained by Indigenous societies for thousands of years globally. Extending out from the focal point of gender and sexuality, this article explores the possibilities between Indigenous Queer Studies and the emergent field of Indigenous Fat Studies as mutually beneficial and co-constructed sites that hold potential to further embed the self-determined agenda of contemporary Indigenous Studies as a humanizing and future-oriented academic project. This article will engage these interconnected fields of inquiry through the perspectives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander LGBTIQ+SB peoples who have reinvigorated conversations about Indigenous identities and embodiment as sites of resistance to settler-colonialism in so-called Australia. This will be explored by examining how Indigenous fat/queer embodiments challenge settler-colonial imaginaries through socio-political issues including racialized homo/trans/queerphobia, misogyny, fatphobia, and introduce conceptualizations of Indigenous sovereignty which recognizes, validates, and affirms the level of inclusivity that Indigenous relational theory encompasses.