Post-Colonialism to Justify Queerness: A Refutation

Postcolonialism refers to the political or cultural condition of a former colony. Concerning queer discourses, this narrative specifically means that before the formation of a colony, the communities were sexually diverse or that even gender binaries didn’t exist. It was the colonialists that imposed these “binaries” onto the otherwise “diverse” communities with wide acceptance among the people. However, as we shall see, this narrative, at best, is historically inaccurate and superimposes the western conception of gender and sexuality to understand the behaviors of communities before they were colonized. An important factor that will be highlighted is the probably purposeful abandonment of religion in the analysis of these supposedly “diverse communities”.

 

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.