Abstract
This work explores decolonizing a multifaceted construction of sexuality, by uncovering colonial Latin American constructions of race and gender, in dialogue with how religion has been a force of this construction. In a process of building a critique to theologies that identified with power structures, Liberation Theologies argued that “the poor” become a category of subjects. Yet, without the multilayered ways in which such a broad category was constructed in the context of Latin America, I contend that decolonization projects can dismiss how systems of power in Latin America were constructed on the backs of black and brown people, their labor and exploitation through a violent sexual history. This history continues to figure in their critique of power structures.
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Notes
- 1.
Quijano, Anibal. Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology. June 2000. Vol. 15 (2): 215–232. SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi).
- 2.
Mignolo, Walter D. The Idea of Latin America. Malden, Oxford, Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 1–51.
- 3.
Dussel, Enrique. Epistemological Decolonization of Theology, 7.
- 4.
The method of counter-narrative is used by my classes when we read Telling to Live by the Latina Feminist Group in a text based on “testimonio” as the way to tell one’s particular guarded story, as the counter to either a silenced history or a forbidden version of history. It is not quite ethnography or auto ethnography; it is about the places in one’s history where trauma or silence has become pivotal to one’s story.
- 5.
Rivera-Pagán, Luis N. Towards a Decolonial Theology: Perspectives from the Caribbean. 4–5.
- 6.
The Latina Feminist Group, Telling To Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001. The counter-narrative to a status quo narrative is based on “testimonio” as developed in community by The Latina Feminist Group; this text explains the history of testimonio in Latin America and how it is incorporated into Latina reality in the United States as a way of sharing “papelitos guardados,” or the stories that are guarded or silenced or hidden with regard to one’s identity or past.
- 7.
See Marcella Althaus-Reid’s explanation in the text Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. The introduction begins with the premise that all theologies are sexual. Could it be that all histories of conquest and colonization are also sexual?
- 8.
Dussel, Enrique. Epistemological Decolonization of Theology. 8.
- 9.
Rivera-Pagán. Towards a Decolonial Theology: Perspectives from the Caribbean. 11.
- 10.
Ibid., 12.
- 11.
See Quijano, Anibal. Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology. June 2000. Vol. 15 (2): 215–232. SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi). Anibal Quijano, in his work about the Coloniality of Power, explains that capitalism and modernity coincided with the construction of whiteness as a superior and homogenized race. Blackness specifically was seen as backward, or the past and the old dualities of body and soul that had been philosophies (and theologies) debated and then later brought into force with the Cartesian argument of a thinking and souled body did not apply to the African. The African was an object, for the production of capital, not a subject. This means that the colonial subject excluded those dehumanized bodies of African diasporas; they were things, bodies. This is important for the discussion of sexuality in Latin America, because a violent sexuality cannot be a colonial problem unless there is a soul and mind, and specifically unless the body belongs to a person.
- 12.
Wade, 2009. 96.
- 13.
Quijano, 2000. 220.
- 14.
Wade, 2009. 113.
- 15.
Ibid., 71.
- 16.
Wade, Peter. Race and Sex in Latin America. London: Pluto Press, 2009. 72–73.
- 17.
Mignolo, Walter D. (2008). Racism as We Sense It Today. PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 123(5), 1737–1742.
- 18.
Sheller, Mimi. Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012. 26.
- 19.
Ibid., 27–31.
- 20.
Ibid., 33.
- 21.
Dussel, 14.
- 22.
Sheller, 33.
- 23.
Molinatti, F., & Acosta, L. (2015). “Trends in mortality by assault in women in selected countries of Latin America,” 2001–2011. Pan American Journal of Public Health, 37(4–5), 279–286.
- 24.
Rivera-Pagán, 6.
- 25.
Quijano, 221.
- 26.
Sheller, 37.
- 27.
See Trigo, Beningno. Subjects of Crisis: Race and Gender as Disease in Latin America. Hanover & London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.
- 28.
Wade., 80.
- 29.
Ibid., 99–112.
- 30.
Ibid., 71–82.
- 31.
See Quijano. A., coloniality of power concept and Mignolo, Walter’s view of a racialized order, found in articles and in his text The Idea of Latin America.
- 32.
Ibid., 83.
- 33.
Ibid., 84.
- 34.
Ibid., 85–88.
- 35.
Ibid., 89–92.
- 36.
See Medina, N. Mestizaje: (Re) Mapping Race, Culture and Faith in Latina/o Catholicism. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2009. In the chapter on the shifting shapes of mestizaje, Medina reminds us that hybridity has a patriarchal stamp on it, mostly brought about by sexual injustices against indigenous and African women.
- 37.
See Grimes, K. Christ divided: Antiblackness as Corporate Vice. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017. 2. In the introduction, Grimes explains that in order to differentiate anti-blackness racism from all the other forms of asymmetrical relationships such as heterosexism, anti-blackness “bears the imprint of black slavery,” in which men and women had to submit to their owners, sexually and in any other form of submission, including labor, talent and humanity itself. This means that the very honor and superiority gained through direct violence practiced by the Eurocentric “whiteness” was gained through anti-blackness in all of the Americas.
- 38.
Wade., 160–190.
- 39.
Althaus-Reid, 2000. 165–177.
- 40.
Ibid., 30.
- 41.
Ibid., 35.
- 42.
Isasi-Diaz, Ada Maria & Eduardo Mendieta. Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. 56.
- 43.
Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999. 42.
- 44.
Marcos, Sylvia. Mesoamerican Women’s Indigenous Spirituality: Decolonizing Religious Beliefs. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. Vol. 25, No. 2 (Fall 2009), pp. 25–45.
- 45.
Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology. 71.
- 46.
Ibid., 16.
- 47.
Ibid., 27.
- 48.
Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology, London: SCM, 2004, 81–82.
- 49.
Ibid., 85.
- 50.
Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 165–173.
- 51.
Ibid., 173.
- 52.
Ibid., 174.
- 53.
Althaus-Reid, Marcella. From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology: Readings on Poverty, Sexual Identity and God. London: SCM Press, 2004. 85.
- 54.
Ibid., 4.
- 55.
Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 132.
- 56.
Ibid., 69.
- 57.
Ibid., 165–172.
- 58.
Ibid., 179.
- 59.
Ibid., 194–200.
- 60.
Marielle Franco was assassinated in Brazil on March 14, 2018. She was an elected official that struggled against police brutality.
- 61.
See Dixon, Kwame & John Burdick, editors, Comparative Perspectives on Afro-Latin America. University Press of Florida: Gainesville, Tallahassee, Tampa, Boca Raton, Pensacola, Orlando, Miami, Jacksonville, Ft. Myers, Sarasota, 2012. For descriptions of various expressions of blackness in Latin America, Afro social movements and various state responses.
- 62.
See Jane G. Landers & Barry M. Robinson. Slaves, Subjects and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. An entire historical text in which the social activism of African diasporic peoples throughout various parts of Latin America is highlighted, with disruption of the colonial enterprise present all along the imposing of coloniality in the Americas. This is the starting point of what now, much later in the twenty-first century, we see as social/political resistance.
- 63.
See Tortorici, Zeb; editor. Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. In order to do anti-sexist work we must understand how sexuality out of heteronormativity was seen as “unnatural.” Many of the social movements that promote a colonial perspective today are church groups that term the anti-sexist work as “gender ideology.” I recommend referring to Tortorici’s text, which highlights the long history of repression.
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Moros, M. (2019). Inversion and Diasporas: Decolonizing Racialized Sexuality Transnationally. In: Barreto, R., Sirvent, R. (eds) Decolonial Christianities. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_10
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