Decolonizing Sexualities

Decolonizing sexualities has multiple meanings, theoretical strands, and praxes extensions. The term is often invoked to signal undoing the damage caused by colonialism specifically to colonized peoples’ gendered and sexual meanings, subjectivities, relationalities, and practices. However, with Franz Fanon (1968; 2001) we can understand colonialism not as a thing done by active colonizers to passive colonized, but instead as a relationship that produces effects on everyone and everything concerned including the colonizer. The colonized and colonizer are constituted as kinds of subjects in and in relation to the colonial context. Fanon also incites us to think about the complexity of colonial relations within but also beyond the binary colonizer-colonized. In turn, Michel Foucault (1976) observes that sexuality is a particularly dense transfer point for relations of power. Indeed, colonialism is inseparable from contemporary sexualities, and sexualities are intense sites of investment for colonialism, coloniality, and decolonizing.

Sexuality is central to discourses and practices inside a plethora of kinds of colonialisms: settler colonialism (as in Turtle Island and Abya Yala or what colonizers called North and Latin America, in Palestine, Kashmir, Aortearoa or the place that colonizers call New Zealand, and elsewhere); administrative colonialism (Morocco under the French); commercial colonialism (British East India Company in India); military colonialism (the U.S.-Mexico border); colonial occupation (Palestine, Kashmir); internal colonialism (non-Native possession of Native reservation properties); external colonialism (pipelines lain on Native land); break away (Brazil), and combinations thereof (Bacchetta 2023). Colonizing actors mobilizing sexualities include: states and their apparatuses, institutions, militaries, capitalists, missionaries, settlers (farmers, workers, etc.), educators, academics, writers, artists. Colonial actors have produced a plethora of differential discourses and practices wherein sexuality is central. They range from pathologization, criminalization, and marginalization, to dividing the colonized society and blackmailing queers within it as in Palestine today (Abboud 2024), to the outright individual and collective murder of specific subjects of subalternized, demonized sexualities. Sexuality plays a role in many other colonial strategies and tactics, too: genocide, disablement, displacement, land theft, destruction of the colonized’s environment and its colonial replacement, toxification, extraction, economic re-orientation in the colonizer’s interests, enslavement, trafficking, epistemicide, bulldozing and replacing the colonized’s culture, food system, architecture, language, habitations, religion, spirituality and relationality to the world, erasure of pre-colonial history and present and future memory, continual invisibilization as part of the “logic of elimination” (Wolfe 2006), assimilation, and other “murderous inclusion” tactics (Haritaworn et al. 2013; Bacchetta and Haritaworn 2011).

Currently most studies of colonialism overwhelmingly foreground heterosexuality, and newly, to a lesser extent, homosexuality. However, the forms of sexuality implicated in pre-colonial, colonial, and post-independence contexts span many other genders and sexualities that have names beyond those currently known in English or that need no name in the contexts in which they exist.

At present a transnational scholarly literature about how colonialism mobilized and devastated gender and sexuality in colonized sites is available in multiple languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German. For example, María Lugones’ (2008) work shows us how non-feminist decolonial theory reproduced white feminist notions of gender while expressly invisibilizing colonized gender and sexuality. She also explains how the colonial gender binary is imposed across colonized sites. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí (1997) questions dominant white global northern feminist and queer theory’s presupposition of gender as a universal category and traces how colonizers imposed the notion of gender in Nigeria. Hortense Spillers (1987) explains how enslaved people were forced into a process of “ungendering” as they were trafficked from west Africa across the Atlantic to Turtle Island and Abya Yala, a point importantly taken up by C. Riley Snorton (2017). Maboula Soumahoro (2020; 2022) highlights how an effect of colonial gender and sexual violence has been the construction of “misogynoir,” or the specific kind of intersectional anti-Black sexism, lesbophobia, and queerphobia to which Black women, lesbians, and queers are subjected. Several studies demonstrate how – despite the global north’s self-identity as more-queer-friendly-than-thou – colonizers significantly shattered the lives of people in colonized sites whose gender and sexuality they deemed anormative. For example, the colonial British outlawed homosexuality and marginalized transgender peoples in more than 50 countries they colonized. This colonial violence continues to have various kinds of effects today.

The ongoing research on gender, sexuality and colonialism has been invaluable for configuring modes of survival, oppositional and non-oppositional resistance, and transformation that are inscribed in processes of decolonizing sexualities. With caution so as not to essentialize or homogeneously glorify pre-colonial gender and sexuality relations (Rao 2015), a growing ensemble of scholarly, artistic and activist movements in the global south(s), including the south(s) in the north(s), is critically rejecting basic presuppositions of dominant queer theory in the global north on colonial grounds, affirming other concepts and modes of being, and proposing yet other possibilities. For example, the seminal work of PJ DiPietro (2020) radically de-universalizes the global northern presupposition of a bounded, internally coherent subject in linear time, a notion that uncritically abounds in dominant queer theory, and points to indigenous concepts of the subject in other temporalities in Argentina and that subject’s becoming-with-animals. Haneen Maikey (2012) and other Palestinian intellectuals and activists define an end to the settler colonial occupation of Palestine as a prerequisite to Palestinian queer liberation. Sandeep Bakshi (2024:44) points out that “Decolonial queerness departs from standard accounts of queerness to bring into focus ways of being – both knowledge making and worldmaking – that do not solely attach to gender and sexuality formations and critiques.” Qwo-Li Driskill (2004) considers decolonizing sexualities in terms of indigenous territorial sovereignty and “the sovereign erotic.” Massinissa Garaoun (2022) is opening an important linguistic and epistemic point of entry towards decolonizing sexualities as they work to remember, record, and keep alive historical and contemporary queer and transgender languages created inside and in relation to Maghrebian forms of Arabic. For Sandeep Bakshi, Suhraiyya Jivraj, Silvia Posocco (2016), and many authors in their co-edited volume, these are all vital methods. In sum, insofar as the relations, manifestations, tactics, and strategies that bring colonialism, gender, and sexuality into relationality are multiple, so too does decolonizing sexualities require a plethora of distinct modes of survival, resistance, and transformation.