“Don’t respond”: sexting and scrolling in First Nations’ queer literature

Abstract

Queer and trans First Nations literatures offer a complex range of perspectives on social media use. In this piece, written as a letter addressing an anonymous brotherboy character called Benny, who is based on a person that catfished and harassed me online, I examine three Indigenous books that present complex, critical, or disillusioned accounts of social media use, exploring the forms of deception, harassment, racism, and creativity enabled by digital media. I engage loosely with the practice of ficto-criticism to produce this article. Ficto-critical writing, a method of anthropological and cultural studies, subverts traditional academic writing; presenting a hallucinatory form of self-narration and anthropological writing. Using this interdisciplinary and experimental approach, this article experiments with the concept of anonymity and privacy, key themes in the writing of queer First Nations authors on the topic of the internet.