Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

10 Syncretic Religion and Dissident Sexualities

10 Syncretic Religion and Dissident Sexualities Roberto Strongman This essay presents a dissatisfaction with certain strains of thought within the political discourse on sexual orientation produced by economically and racially privileged segments of the gay and lesbian movement in the United States. I argue that the exportation of these knowledges on sexual orientation has a universalizing and homogenizing effect that erases culturally distinct and politically enabling gender differences and options in poorer populations and among communities of color worldwide. I also discuss an equally disturbing trend within scholarly discourse that polarizes U.S. and Latin American homosexualities to an extremely reductive and essentialistic simplicity. My main argument consists of an investigation of the Afro-Catholic syncretic cults of the Americas—Santería, Vaudou, and Candomblé—as sites of local knowledge that can serve as cultural arsenals in the resistance to these hegemonic discourses and as places in which Latin American homosexual identities can find the construction materials necessary to continue developing without total absorption by the hegemony of the mainstream gay and lesbian movement in the United States. One of the most important reevaluations taking place in queer communities of color, in both Latin America and its diasporic population in the United States, involves a generalized realization that the promise of liberation of the North Amer176 ican gay, lesbian, transgender movement is implicated in the project of U.S. hegemonic control through the bodies of its citizens. The work of U.S.-based gay human rights organizations in Latin America, aside from attaining security and asylum for victims of sexual orientation discrimination in many countries, has had the effect of emplotting Latin America as culturally backwards in comparison to what is presented as the more enlightened and progressive United States. For instance, the work of the San Francisco–based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) often involves the judicial defamation of the countries of origin of asylum seekers. This has been required to constitute the main line of argument in immigration judicial proceedings after the February 3, 1986, ruling of U.S. immigration Judge Robert Brown, in which he granted Fidel Armando Toboso’s request to withhold his deportation to Cuba on the basis that Toboso fit the definition of a refugee by virtue of being “a member of a particular social group (homosexuals)” who feared persecution from the Cuban government. Further, the indiscriminate imposition of such gender categories as “gay” or “lesbian” without questioning the culture-specific conditions that gave rise to them in the United States and their noncorrespondence to local Latin American categories is an act of cultural hegemony that the wealthier United States imposes on its neighbors in the hemisphere. The rhetoric of the gay and lesbian human rights movement in the United States unites under the single category of “gay” such different sexual categories as an Indian hijra and a Mexican joto. Moreover, as U.S. cultural products are exported, often by the demand of other cultures around the world, U.S. categories of sexual orientation start to subsume local modes of sexual alterity. Aware of the role of translation as a mechanism for the stabilization and homogenization of identities, even as it begins, this essay must confront the problematic nature of language. How is it possible to strive for the construction of more local gay, lesbian, queer Latin American identities when the very terms “gay,” “lesbian,” and “queer” have been manufactured elsewhere? Therefore, it seems more appropriate to speak of Latin American homosexualities than, for instance , a Latin American “gay” or “lesbian(a)” identity. Nevertheless, because of the current usage in Latin America of the U.S.-fabricated terms “gay,” “lesbian(a),” “queer” to refer to some types of Latin American homosexualities—especially among the U.S.-influenced upper classes—I will be using those labels throughout the essay. I will also be using more native designations for same-gender sexualities . As a rule, I will use the sexual label that the subject referred to is likely to use SYNCRETIC RELIGION AND DISSIDENT SEXUALITIES 177 in identifying him/herself according to his/her geographical, linguistic, and class position. The paradoxical scenario in which a liberational movement among a privileged population translates into a situation of hegemonic domination for another population group is not altogether new. In fact, the problematic displayed in the domination of the U.S. gay, lesbian, queer identities over Latin American native forms of alternative genders is...