The Dilbaa Project: portraiture and place in the queer Navajo imagination

In 2019, artist and photojournalist Jolene Nenibah (Bean) Yazzie began a series of photographic portraits of queer Diné (Navajo) women, transmasculine and nonbinary people, and their families. They were inspired by Yazzie’s desire to return, after more than a decade, to the Navajo Nation with their wife and, they hoped, new child. Five years later, they are taking up the series again, in some cases revisiting earlier conversations and subjects. For Yazzie and their queer family, the Navajo Nation is a place of contradictions: politically conservative (gay marriage is banned in Navajo law, and they say they sometimes feel unsafe outside their own home) but culturally familiar; under-resourced economically but rich in family and ancestral ceremonial knowledge. Raised in the Navajo Nation, Yazzie was only empowered to come out as a lesbian when they encountered the post-Stonewall politics of urban America—but ultimately found a more recognizable identity in the Diné gender dilbaa. Adopting this term as title for The Dilbaa Project, Yazzie creates a community of genderqueer Diné peers through sessions that combine lengthy interviews with a series of informal portraits. The conversations range widely, giving unprecedented shape to woman- and transmasculine-identified queer Indigeneity. More specifically, in this paper I suggest that Yazzie’s photographs co-create a queer, embodied sense of place with their subjects that is informed by and intervenes with hegemonic structures of place and identity both in and beyond the reservation.