Queer Natives in Latin America: Forbidden Chapters of Colonial History

82 Pages·2021·1.038 MB·English

by  Fabiano S. Gontijo, Barbara M. Arisi, Estêvão R. Fernandes

Fabiano S. Gontijo
Barbara M. Arisi
Estêvão R. Fernandes
Queer
Natives
in Latin
America
Forbidden Chapters of Colonial History
Queer Natives in Latin America
Fabiano S. Gontijo • Barbara M. Arisi
Estêvão R. Fernandes
Queer Natives in Latin
America
Forbidden Chapters of Colonial History
Fabiano S. Gontijo Barbara M. Arisi
Graduate Program in Anthropology (PPGA) Programa de Pós-Graduação Interdisciplinar
Federal University of Pará (UFPA) em Ciências Humanas
Belém, Pará, Brazil Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina
Santa Catarina, Brazil
Estêvão R. Fernandes
Department of Social and Cultural
Department of Social Sciences (DCS)
Anthropology
Federal University of Rondônia (UNIR)
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Porto Velho, Rondônia, Brazil
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
ISBN 978-3-030-59132-8 ISBN 978-3-030-59133-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59133-5
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Preface
This book was written in the hope that the native people’s non-hetero-normative
sexualities become less taboo. We hope to contribute to make the lives of LGBTQI2+
indigenous people easier and nicer. We wish that “Queer Natives in Latin America”
can be an inspiring book that will encourage other researchers, indigenous scien-
tists, in particular, and queer people, in general, to write more about the topic. We
hope to support indigenous queer people to be whomever they choose to be and to
enjoy the freedom to live “out of the closet” and to be proud of who they are and
who they want to be.
We intend to show in this book that indigenous people who are considered les-
bian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, two-spirit or any other letter from this
rainbow’s wonderful “letter soup” (as the Brazilian expression calls the acronym
LGBTQI2+) have a tradition of “native queers” that existed in indigenous culture
before the arrival of the European occupation and colonization. Some indigenous
people were (what we now might call) “gay”, “lesbian” or “trans” before the arrival
of Columbus and all other Europeans.
We hope that based on our historical and anthropological data, indigenous peo-
ple who have relationships with people from their same sex or who like to cross-
dress (as men or women) are not going to be labelled as “indigenous who are
becoming white” just because they are not hetero-normative.
We wish to have learned from academic people who call themselves “two spir-
its”, so that our book can be part of this “two-spirit” turn that fight for lesbian, gay,
trans, queer, intersex, two-spirit people are accepted by their peers and by the non-
indigenous societies and that they can live their lives respected in the choices they
made for their own lives.
Belém, Pará, Brazil Fabiano S. Gontijo
Amsterdam, The Netherlands Barbara M. Arisi
Porto Velho, Rondônia, Brazil Estêvão R. Fernandes
v
Contents
1 Taking a Closer Look at “Queer Natives” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2 Mesoamerica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Invasion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Nahua Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Homosexual Copula in Rock Painting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Queers Deities and Transvestism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Muxe Sexual Fluidity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3 The Andes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
4 The Amazon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
A History of Shaping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Colonization, Racialization, and Exploitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Assimilation, Organization, and Resistance in Brazil. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
5 Conclusion: What Does It Mean to Be Native and Queer
in Latin America Today? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
An Amazonian Indigenous Gay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
vii
Chapter 1
Taking a Closer Look at “Queer Natives”
Anthropology is the art and the science of studying human communities and human
lives. We are the artists and the scientists that devote our time to live among people
to try to grasp how diverse and amazing they are. Anthropology tries to open up the
spectrum of the diversity of ways that human (and now also non-human) communi-
ties create, transform, dream, and experiment during this short time we spend on
this planet being born, growing, and dying. We try to follow some footprints of
some of our ancestor anthropologists to write in a way that we make familiar what
is considered, at a first glance, as being totally different from the way we live. At the
same time and with the same passion, we try to make familiar to us what looked as
strange or as very different from us. And so we try to produce reflections on what
makes us human, the senses of humanity, and how we can make the world better for
all people, despite the effects of the multiple forms of colonialism and imperialism
of the past and of capitalism and neoliberalism of the present, that is, of cultural
globalization and persistent coloniality.
The process of colonization, to which imperialism and capitalism were linked
as marks of modernity, had as one of the most unshakable effects precisely the
dehumanization of an enormous portion of the planet’s population. Or rather,
colonization, as well as the corollary imperialism and capitalism, would not have
acquired the necessary strength to impose themselves on the entire planet, exploit
resources, and establish modernity if they had not supported themselves in the
submission of people in the name of certain legitimator values of domination and
submission, such as hierarchies by race, gender, and sex. From the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, culminating between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries,
powerful discourses developed in Europe, establishing truths about bodies and
minds with the institutionalization of the modern biomedical sciences and moral-
legal disciplines (Foucault 1995, 1999). The knowledge then instituted have con-
tributed to legitimizing the colonial and imperialist bourgeois expansionist
projects by producing, naturalizing and justifying the hierarchies of race, gender,
and sex which, until the present day, continue to essentialize, through bodies, the
“metaphysics of difference” (Mbembe 2000) and the “colonial and imperialist
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 1
F. S. Gontijo et al., Queer Natives in Latin America,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59133-5_1
2 1 Taking a Closer Look at “Queer Natives”
difference” (Mignolo 2011)—that is, the particularism and the exceptionality of
the human experiences of the immense area subjected to colonization and imperi-
alism. This established European white and male bodies as authentic bearers of
civilization, rationality, and hombrity1, while non-white bodies, such as Native
Americans, as bestial, emotional, or feminine bodies, on which discipline of con-
trol and domestication should rest, thus granting their submission and/or enslave-
ment, now on a “scientific-legal-moral.”
The European values instituted by medical-scientific discursivity and legal-
normative disciplines, as well as by religious beliefs camouflaged with scientificity,
were universalized as the true values that all humanity should share. The bearers of
these values, the European colonizers, thus became the promoters of civilization,
imbued with a “civilizing mission.” This mission imposed a new model of govern-
ment of people on a global level. Michel Foucault proposed that this model of gov-
ernment of the modern nation-states should be called governmentality, that is to say,
“[…] the set of institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and
tactics that make it possible to exercise a very specific form […] of power that is
primarily aimed at the population, as knowledge the political economy, and as a
technical instrument the security dispositive.” (2004a, pp. 111–112). In the modern
era that begins with the colonization process, it is about the imposition of a type of
power over all people, characterized by the control of bodies and territories through
the use of control and disciplinary dispositives. Foucault called dispositive a hetero-
geneous group of things that encompass “[…] discourses, institutions, architectural
organizations, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific enun-
ciations, philosophical, moral, philanthropic propositions […]” (1998, p. 244) that
may have as its strategic function the production of truths with powerful effects on
bodies, thus becoming biopolitical dispositives. Biopolitical governmentality would
thus be this peculiar government of bodies and minds instituted by European moder-
nity which has expanded and infused itself across the planet as a missionary civiliz-
ing mission, with the persuasive force of colonial weapons and capitalist deterrence.
Biopolitical governmentality is based on the production of truths about bodies—
through medical-scientific discursivities—and truths about minds—through legal-
normative disciplines, and truths about being in the world—through the scientific,
legal, and religious moralities thus constituted. The truths about some bodies to
which certain minds are tied are naturalized, considered from then on as “normal,”
and aimed at the production and reproduction of governmentality, the state, national
ideology, and the expansionist capitalist mode of production. “Naturally,” therefore,
would be considered as “abnormal” and “abject,” as suggested by Judith Butler
(1990, 1993), all the other forms of human expression, animalized and susceptible
to submission of their bodies, exploitation of their resources, minimization of their
thoughts, silencing of their voices and concealment of their existence, that is, era-
sure of their ontology and consequent enslavement.
1 Hombridy comes from the Spanish term “hombredad”.
1 Taking a Closer Look at “Queer Natives” 3
Some of the most powerful biopolitical dispositives are the racial and sexual
taxonomies that have hierarchized (and still hierarchize) the bodies and minds at the
service of the persistent colonial project. Although submission and even enslave-
ment based on racial hierarchies predate European and Arab colonialism and
imperialism (Trabelsi 2010, 2016), as are gender binarism and heteronormativity
(Fausto-Sterling 2000), we can affirm, after reading Quijano (2000) and Foucault
(1995, 2004b), that the biopolitical dispositives of governmentality established by
European modernity have created and continue to create quite particular social rela-
tions of racial and sexual cleavages that particularize coloniality. In this way, for
example, the image of nègre-biologique-sexuel-sensuel-et-génital was forged, in the
words of Fanon (1952, p. 163), who would endorse the sexualization and erotization
of Africa, as a powerful instrument of domination at the service of colonization
(McClintok 1995). This instrument is a powerful instrument of colonization as well
in the Americas and Asia, making all natives’ bodies always “natural” objects of
desire and repudiation, under the control of the colonizers.
The decolonization of Latin America, still in the nineteenth century, led the new
nations to adopt the Western state model with the maintenance of much of its ideo-
logical structuring based on those biopolitical dispositives of modern governmen-
tality, including the conservation of the religious morality of the colonizers, although
with local nuances. The post-colonial Latin American national elites were not faced
with the obligation to reinforce the particularism of the common Latin American
experience or the exceptional continental uniqueness concerning the “rest” of the
world since these elites maintained close visceral ties with the former colonizers.
Sexuality and the control of the bodies, as well as the medical-scientific and legal-
moral discursivities of European origin, would not cease to be instruments of power,
but would acquire other meanings, for example, by naturalizing the subordination of
women, essentializing the primordial patriarchalism, reconducting the sexualized
racial hierarchy, invisibilizing sexual practices, and identities or gender and sexual
diversity, as in force in the societies of the ancient colonizers at the time of the inde-
pendence movements.
Throughout the twentieth century, Europe was no longer so religious, heteronor-
mativity was no longer based on the same moral principles, and female protagonism
and alternative sexualities were no longer threats to the development of the world-
system idealized from the West or from the Global North, and colonialism, as a doc-
trine, became an evil to be condemned. Western national states are now considered
“civilized” because they defend the ideal of Human Rights and individual freedoms
and even act on some ways to protect some identities based on the experiences of
sexual and gender diversity, always in the name of scientific truth and international
legal security. Non-Western nations, on the other hand, are now accused of being
“uncivilized” for keeping the population or part of it under the yoke of violent secu-
rity mechanisms to guarantee the sovereign integrity of the national territory, most of
the time legitimizing the use of coercion in the name of religion and tradition to
enforce biopowers. The former are seen as the bearers of universal happiness, while
the latter are seen as “others,” promoters of hatred; and thus whiteness is normalized
as a “natural” expression of civilization and “true” human values (Dabashi 2011).
4 1 Taking a Closer Look at “Queer Natives”
However, the relationship between state and sexuality mediated by social control
and disciplinary practices would not be exclusive to political regimes considered by
Western states as oppressors but would be on the existential basis of all national
states, including Western ones, that create any type of Homo sexualis, just as they
constituted the “legitimate” modern and westernized Homo œconomicus, Homo
politicus, Homo religiosus, in short, a Homo nationalis. Analyzing the work of sev-
eral authors who approached the relationship between state and sexuality, Jyoti Puri
(2004) or Alexandre Jaunait et al. (2013) noticed the recurrence of the theme of
regulation by the state on the most diverse aspects of private life, by delimiting the
contours of the “respectable sexualities.” Since the invention of “homosexuality”
and “heterosexuality” in the nineteenth century (Foucault 1999), each person has
been designated by state institutions as the bearer of “sexual identity,” according to
Eve K. Sedgwick (1990), and becoming thus the locus of intense social regulation.
Ruth Vanita (2002) adds that, because they are Euro-American or Western inven-
tions, the concept of sexual identity gained the planet through European expansion-
ism with meanings particular to each cultural context, due to the local configurations
of power relations that define truth regimes, biopolitical dispositives and institu-
tional and ideological mechanisms of social control of bodies. It is these regimes,
dispositives, and mechanisms that locally determine what is “normal” and what is
“abject” and that institute and reinforce the inequalities of gender, class, race, etc.—
the local forms of coloniality of power/knowledge (Gontijo 2018a, b; Quijano 2000;
Lander 2005). It is up to anthropology to understand how the coloniality of power/
knowledge works to minimize its persistent and perverse effects on bodies and
minds considered as “others.”
Latin American anthropologies, since their beginnings, have adopted particular
characteristics related to the national contexts in which they developed, despite their
common European and North American origin. One of the hallmarks common to
these anthropologies would have been the relationship between theoretical produc-
tion and commitment to the societies studied, since researchers also participate, in
this region, together with the interlocutors, in the process of national construction
through the struggle for democracy and the constant revision of the ideological
bases of the national state and against coloniality and the imposing forms of internal
colonialism (Cardoso de Oliveira 1993; González Casanova 2006; Krotz 1996;
Jimeno 2007). The interlocutors of Latin American anthropologists, as well as
Indian anthropologists or African anthropologists (initially indigenous, peasants,
and orality people, respectively), demand, with the help of researchers, not only
political recognition of their former social existence, but the right to participate in
the processes of elaboration of the national memory, acting in this way to reinvent
the concepts, dear to anthropology, of civilization, culture, identity, community,
society, ethnicity, democracy, and cultural diversity in the context of the nation-
state, as Myriam Jimeno Santoyo (2004) pointed out for the Latin American con-
text, Veena Das (1998) for the Indian context or Archie Mafeje (2001, 2008) and
Jean-Marc Ela (2007) for the African context. Aware of the heuristic potential to
deprovincialize the anthropological doing from the point of view of the Global
South (Chakrabarty 2007; Mafeje 2001, 2008; Restrepo and Escobar 2005), Latin