This article makes a case for bringing Literary Studies and Sociology together to theorize the intersections of race, Indigeneity, gender, and sexuality. Anchored in Audre Lorde’s claim “poetry is not a luxury,” I demonstrate how the logics conveyed in sociological concepts of gender and sexuality can just as easily be conveyed in poetry, and that non-white gender and sexual minorities, or “minoritarian subjects” (Muñoz), have often turned to poetry for this reason. I argue that sociologists’ refusal to recognize poetry’s analytical potential serves to limit their analyses of gender and sexuality to the white supremacist roots of the discipline, just as understanding poetry as doing a type of Sociology helps to expand Literary Studies’ commitment to poetry as critique, or “poiesis,” which I believe undergirds Lorde’s assertation that poetry is not a luxury. For this, I explore the works of two "Canada"-based writers: Joshua Whitehead, a two-spirit Indigiqueer, and Trish Salah, an Arab Canadian trans woman. My analysis is framed around two popular queer and trans of colour theoretics: disidentification and monstrosity and designed to show what many minoritarian scholars/creatives have long known: that poetry and social theory are one in the same.
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