The State is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gendered Costs of Settler Sovereignty in Canada

This lecture examines the geopolitics of settler colonialism and its relationship to Indigenous (women's) death that underwrites an affective state and in this, a governing state. It explores two affective modes of incredulity: the skepticism that met (Chief) Theresa Spence's hunger strike in December and January 2012-13, and the outrage that met the murder of Inuk student Loretta Saunders in February 2014.

Dr. Simpson argues that the structure of settler colonialism in Canada showed its public face in blog posts, editorial commentary and popular discourse when Spence'€™s strategic life in the face of a stated and willed death, continued on – as hers was a life that was already predisposed to death. The incredulity that obtained to Saunders'€™ murder was itself a page from the same book of disbelief and exonerating culpability from a public that disavows the relationship between Indigenous women'€™s death and its relationship to settler governance. In this lecture, Dr. Simpson argues that these deaths are of a sort, and their reception, worked effectively to highlight the gendered, biopolitical life of settler sovereignty, a sovereignty in which the state may be characterized as a man.