Gay Indians in Brazil: Untold Stories of the Colonization of Indigenous Sexualities by Estevão Rafael Fernandes and Barbara M. Arisi (review)

Gay Indians in Brazil is a decolonial critique of Iberian colonialism's imposed heteronormativity on Amerindian peoples in Brazil during and after colonization. Chapters 1 and 5 are, above all, a brief introduction and an epilogue. In the three central chapters, the authors underscore the repercussions up until the present day of Catholic and Eurocentric understandings of sexuality and of the degradation and massacres of peoples whose sexual lives fell outside of colonial norms.

In the chapter "'Between the Cross and the Crown': Missionaries and Indigenous Sexuality," Fernandes and Arisi describe the historical, theological and legal aspects of the colonization of Amerindian sexualities. They analyze historical accounts of the first centuries of colonization of Brazil in which—through European and colonizing eyes—Amerindian sexualities were disciplined. Both in Iberia and Brazil, individuals whose sexual lives did not conform to norms of heterosexuality were called sodomites. After an instructive etymological explanation of the term and their conclusion that it initially referred primarily to "the idea of obedience under penalty of severe punishment of God" (14), the authors contend that the punishable aspect of sodomy came to shape the idea that any threats to the Iberian Peninsula's emerging States during the Late Middle Ages was to be punishable by death and was adopted by legislation. Indeed, as a threat to the very existence of the state and the Church, sodomites were ordered by royal law to be executed and were denigrated with labels that belonged to the semantic field of crimes against natural law. Indeed, most depictions of Amerindians made by Jesuit missionaries, who Christianized them up to the mid-eighteenth century, linked "savage" natives to sodomy, lust, polygamy, cannibalism, and debauchery. Such a bestial representation of Amerindians came from the Aristotelian notion of nature, as interpreted in a Christian framework by Aquinas. Here the notion of "Nature" entailed a hierarchy in which the male, portrayed as a rational and self-disciplined being, controls, dominates and protects the female, who is associated with uncontrollable passions, desires, and lust, among other similar signifiers. It is safe to say that Amerindians were placed alongside women at the bottom of the hierarchy. Regarding their Christianization and the resulting disciplining of the body, the book covers—although very briefly—the methodology of catechization by the Jesuits in Brazil. Their conversion method, based mainly on fear, was performed in special settlements.

The chapter "Becoming 'Useful Citizens': The Control Over Natives and Their Sexuality" covers the colonization of Amerindian sexualities from the mid-1750s, when the Jesuits were expelled from Portuguese colonies in America, until the proclamation of the Republic of Brazil in 1889. The authors approach the heterosexualization of Amerindian sexualities as part of a complex process that was interrelated with the racialization and the civilization of colonialism. Also, the colonial control of sexuality went beyond sexual practice; it pointed to colonial dynamics of power relations in marriage, kinship, and political alliances. After the expulsion of the Jesuits, Portugal's emerging "enlightened despotism" looked for ways to optimize the Portuguese economy. Amerindian lands and labor gained a greater interest for the Crown who issued laws such as the Directory of Indians, in order to partially secularize native administration and to civilize the Amerindians. Additionally, the Crown advocated turning former missions into villages and implanting in them full-scale urban administration and taxes. Regarding the somewhat secularized civilizing of Amerindians, the laws dealt with replacing native housing practices and clothing with Western living and sartorial standards. Furthermore, they encouraged white settlements to occupy former missions and stimulated marriage between natives and Europeans. The authors contend that this type of initiative came from the Enlightenment model that held that human redemption could be obtained through education and by reason. In this way, during the first half of nineteenth century, regulatory legislation was issued in order to further "civilize" and...