Author Meets Critics: Gabriel S. Estrada’s Queer Indigenous Cinemas: Sovereign Genders from Seven Directions (U Arizona Press, 2026)

This Author Meets Critics roundtable features three scholarly readings of Gabriel Estrada’s Queer Indigenous Cinemas: Sovereign Genders from Seven Directions (University of Arizona Press, 2026). Queer Indigenous Cinemas is a monograph that relates Indigenous LGBTQI2+ media from the Americas, Pacific, and Caribbean, with chapters on Diné, Caxcan, Kānaka Maoli, Nêhiyawak, Yorùbá, and Tongva media, spatiality, and gender. It focuses on how Indigenous media producers confront colonial trauma and reclaim spatial, visual, spiritual, and erotic sovereignty of LGBTQI2+ peoples. As all five session scholars Drs. Celidwen, Churchill, Gomez, Lopez, and Estrada have served on the Native American Traditions of the Americas and/or Indigenous Religious Traditions Units in the American Academy of Religion (AAR), this session’s book reviews will bring particular attention to sovereign Indigenous methods, languages, representations, genders, spiritualities, lands, and politics valued within those AAR Units. There will be time for the author's respondent responses and for questions and answers.