In 1646, Portuguese colonial overlords expanded their laws against same-sexuality to include females, as well as males. Native Brazilian women, he observes, carry weapons and even form same-sex marriages.” Queer Heritage reports that in 1551, “Portuguese missionary Father Pero Correia, writing from Brazil, asserts that same-sex eroticism among Indigenous women is quite common, in fact as widespread as in Africa, where he was previously stationed. The early epoch of direct colonial rule reached its zenith more than three centuries later with British domination of India in 1857. Within this context, ideology is not an arbitrary, discrete force - rather, it serves to reproduce and perpetuate social forms, behaviors and individuals suitable to a particular mode of production.”Įuropean colonialism exported its domestic, counterrevolutionary Inquisition around the world, starting with Portuguese expansionism around 1500 C.E. “The cultural construction of gender and sexuality must be seen in terms of the sexual division of labor, subsistence patterns, social relations and male-female relations. Entitled “Sex/Gender Systems in Native North America,” it explains: “Social, and specifically sexual, life is embedded in the economic organization of society - an organization that gives rise to a variety of cultural forms. Midnight Sun (Anishnabe) provides a historical-materialist view of sex/gender systems in these varied Native societies in one of the book’s essays. For instance, the Gay American Indians History Project, first published in the germinal 1988 book “Living the Spirit,” lists 135 Indigenous peoples on the North American continent, who made room for many more sex/gender roles than the European nations did. These Indigenous societies under siege were diverse. The violent legal restructuring of Indigenous societies - which affected economic organization, kinship, family/community organization, sexualities, gender and sex roles - served enslavement, exploitation and oppression. European colonialism used Inquisition terror to enforce these laws against same-sex love and sex/gender variance. The ruling class mandated adherence to a father-dominated family unit, rather than the ancient mother-right gens, because it assured the transmission of wealth to male heirs.Īs ruling classes grew stronger and expanded their territories by overthrowing neighboring communal societies by force of arms, they violently enforced their legal codes and social order on militarily conquered peoples.Įuropean ruling classes exported laws against same-sex love all over the world as they established their colonial empires. The status of women, who had played a pivotal role in pre-class societies where the blood line was traced through females, not males, was degraded with the ascendancy of patriarchal class rule. Wherever class-divided societies overturned matrilineal-communal groupings, laws began to punish sexualities, gender expressions and bodies that did not fit the new patriarchal family models.
Kelly, one of the hair donors, explained why using “gay” to mean “bad” is offensive even when not intended as a homophobic slur: “I know the argument is, ‘well I don’t mean it that way, I just mean that it’s stupid.’ Find a different way of saying that because gay is taken and it doesn’t mean anything negative.Sodomy laws, imposed on India in 1861 by British colonizers, were still in force at the time of this 2013 protest. “I would have loved to grow up in a world where ‘that’s so gay’ wasn’t a thing,” Jeremy Dias, director of the centre says in a video unveiling the creation. The hope is to get the hashtag #TheGaySweater trending to raise awareness of how offensive it is to use “gay” as a derogatory word.
After a rainbow array of buttons were added, the Big Gay Sweater will be revealed Tuesday as part of Toronto fashion week. The Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity collected the hair and brought together knitters in Toronto to bring the sweater to life. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.