Painting You, Painting Me: Viewing the 'Other' through Gendered-Violence against Indigenous Women and Girls in Kent Monkman's "Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience"

Abstract

This paper presents a critical analysis of the ‘Other’ as a mechanism of hegemonic Eurocentric colonialism. ‘Othering’ as a methodological lens allows for consideration of the complexities of identity politics, in an interdisciplinary manner. Through this interdisciplinary approach, a re-telling and re-consideration of the position of Indigenous Peoples in Canada is possible, engaging in a process of decolonization through ‘resurgent recognition’. The disproportionate gendered-violence perpetrated against Indigenous women and girls in the Canadian context acts as an example of the extent to which the prescription of the ‘Otherness’ distorts power relations: not only does the ‘colonial imagination’ situate the West and European settlement as ‘civilized’, and the Indigenous as ‘savage’, but it also inscribes a heteropatriarichal hierarchy. Through the representational art of Kent Monkman, ‘resurgent recognition’ provides public audiences, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, with the opportunity to reflect and reconsider the past 150 years of colonialism in Canada.