Post-Colonialism to Justify Queerness: A Refutation
To understand this conundrum, we shall look at an example of this
narrative in use. The following is an excerpt from a paper written by a
queer-identifying individual. He writes:
In pre-colonial South Asia, the Khawaja Siras were living their
lives as the ‘third sex’ by virtue of their gendered expression and sociality.
Yet, British India’s 1871 census relied upon a rigid gender code predicated
solely upon biological sex understood by British colonial machinery as the
male-female binary. This fundamentally displaced the many indigenous South
Asian gender-sexuality regimes that were conceptually built upon fluid gender
expressions”
(SZABIST LAW JOURNAL pp. 61)
What is ironic about this excerpt is the language that the person
uses. Conceptions or terms like third sex, gender expression, and fluidity, did
not have any meaning from a historical perspective for the people it is being
used for i.e., Khawaja Siras in pre-colonial South Asia. This imposition of
“western-generated” terms on past people showcases the inadvertent colonial
nature of the post-colonialists. Their usage of terms such as fluidity shows
how they are highly affected by the western knowledge productions on
understanding reality. Furthermore, this imposition of foreign terms leads to
historical inaccuracies. Khawaja Siras were not imagined as a ‘third sex’
simply because there exists no explicit literature to suggest that they
conceptualized themselves as such. Even if there exists such literature, it is
hardly the case that the ‘third sex’ was understood as it is now. In an effort
to dismiss biology, and to reinforce queer narratives as conceptualized in the
west, the gender binary is dismissed on the basis of it being a “colonial
project”. Much can be said about the absurdity of this claim but anyone who
knows science would know that regardless of who oppresses whom, some facts of
human existence remain unchanged. The colonialists only made laws on what
biology and human existence already affirmed i.e., the gender binary. The
colonialists did not make up the biology of gender binary. Hence, the Khawaja
Siras were never conceptualized as a ‘third sex’ but only males who were
castrated and served as guardians of harems during the Mughal empire due to
their masculine strength and inadequacy to sexually harm any woman.
Another factor that we intended to shed light on was the purposeful
abandonment of religion while analyzing communities before they became
colonies. Even if we were to accept that all these things existed in the
communities before their colonization, as the writer writes in their paper, it
would still be of no benefit in justifying “diverse sexual behavior” or gender
non-binaries since a people espousing religious beliefs would oppose these
statements and behaviors regardless of whether they existed before or after
colonization. Since their whole framework is predicated on subjectivity,
religion, on the other hand, claiming to be objective, would never approve of its
followers adopting or accepting any behavior contrary to its teachings
regardless of how indigenous or colonial it is. Hence, if the queer narratives
are trying to indigenize western behaviors such as transgenderism or
homosexuality, it would never be accepted by religious people not because of
the colonial hangover but because of the scriptures themselves prohibiting
these behaviors.
Then there is the issue of selective indigenizing that is a
necessary result of these subjective interpretations of existence and human
behavior. These post-colonial writers selectively indigenize those aspects of a
community, before its colonization, that align with what’s part of the queer
experience in the western world. Hence, one would see these writers
indigenizing those behaviors, such as homosexuality and transgenderism, and not
indigenous behaviors and institutions that truly existed in pre-colonial
communities. This would include, the school system, the constitution, or the
Madrassah system for example. Why not celebrate Suttee as a behavior since it
was widely practiced in the indigenous communities? What they unknowingly
equate morality with selective indigeneity. So, what’s selectively indigenous
becomes moral. This is only a remnant of subjective morality which is unfounded,
to begin with.
Finally, these post-colonial narratives tend to be orientalist
themselves. They posit as if one sort of behavior was the norm among all the
people of the Orient. So, when proving queer behavior in these pre-colonial
communities, these narratives assume that all people in those communities were
the same and chose to have an attitude of acceptance towards these behaviors. This
is orientalism at best. The diversity of beliefs among people is enough to
dismiss this claim. As mentioned earlier, religious people, regardless of pre
or post-colonial era, would choose to oppose queer behavior by virtue of their
beliefs.
Very eloquently written.
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