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Threatening Sexual (Mis)Behavior Homosexuality in the Penal Code Debates in Trinidad and Tobago, 1986 Yasmin Tambiah Sexual behaviors and their organization have been subjected to serious contestation since the 1980s in legal terrains of states in the global south. Scholars of challenges faced by postcolonial societies have demonstrated how definitions of the reproductive and sexual roles of (especially female) citizens in “state” texts, such as constitutions and other law codes, have had important implications for the self-representation of a postcolonial state. Nationalist leaders concerned with the development of postcolonial states have negotiated between, on the one hand, embracing a secular, scientific model for modernization that draws on post-Enlightenment schemes of reasoning and knowledge and, on the other hand, recalling or re/inventing cultural and religious traditions from an inevitably glorious, autonomous, precolonial past. This tension between “modernity” and “tradition” appears to have remained at the core of epistemological and moral dilemmas being negotiated by postcolonial states in the global south. As would be familiar to the reader, anticolonial, nationalist movements have charged women with “bearing” the nation, physically and symbolically . Central to this mandate are women’s conformity to particular constructions of the family and their compliance with prescriptions that reify female sexual containment through virginity, compulsory heterosexuality, marriage, and motherhood. “Woman” is often inscribed as a natural, predetermined category requiring protection, whether by individual men, families , communities, or the state (see, e.g., Kapur, Erotic Justice; and Parker et al.). In each of these contexts the law has been implicated. Definitions of sexuality and sexual actors and the companion constructions of morality and respectability, whether within or outside the law, have undergirded both colonial projects and anticolonial movements.1 Anxieties about sex and sexual behaviors are easily stoked. Sometimes sexual behavior itself may be the primary issue under debate. At other times, sexuality serves as a site of strategic displacement for restrictions on the freedom of expression.2 Couched in concerns for morality and public order, 144 Yasmin Tambiah and through these implicating the law in the constructions of normative and deviant behaviors, such anxieties continue to intrude on, and be informed by, more recent economic, political, and social developments at the local and the global level. Thus law, intimately linked with the processes of governance and the ordering of society, has been, and increasingly in new ways, a site of discursive contest regarding sexuality. The Foucauldian nexus between knowledge and power can be referenced at several sites in the making of law (see Foucault, History). In particular, criminal law and its interpretations are implicated in the permissions and denials of sexual behavior; the constructions of legitimate and illegitimate sexualities, in which sexual behavior meshes with morality; and the frequent gendered differentiations (among other differences) that underpin such binaries. In turn, laws themselves are often premised on notions of sexuality that lawmakers (rightly or wrongly) presume reflect national or public values. Such values tend to be conceptualized as static, ahistorical, undifferentiated markers of a (homogenized) national culture, anchored in a male-centered viewpoint. It is in such a field of contest that this essay is located. Specifically, I examine the discursive construction of homosexuality and the homosexual (male and female) in the parliamentary debates surrounding the creation of the Sexual Offences Act in Trinidad and Tobago in 1986, in which the “moral” location of Trinidad and Tobago vis-à-vis the metropolitan centers of the North Atlantic was also a concern. This examination links with the problem of how to articulate cultural and epistemological autonomy from a postcolonial location while at the same time drawing upon the scheme of knowledge and reason universalized by the colonial power (Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought 11). It is done with the recognition that articulating such autonomy is attempted in a context in which law seeks to be a hegemonic discourse par excellence, continuously recalling colonial domination in its invocations and enactments. I engage with, and elaborate on, the pioneering work of M. Jacqui Alexander regarding the discursive construction of sexual-(im)moral citizens in this parliamentary legislation of sexuality, drawing on legal texts, parliamentary debates, newspapers, and interviews.3 Legislating Sex and Sexual Offences in Trinidad and Tobago The genesis of the Sexual Offences Bill in Trinidad and Tobago in the early 1980s is rooted in a historical period that witnessed a high level of sexual violence against women, accompanied by a growing feminist consciousness around this violence and its implications, both locally and internationally. Trinbagonian women’s-rights advocates have suggested...

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