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What Are We About?

Bienvenidos! (Welcome to this blog) This blog was started in March of 2020 by two young women studying at The Claremont Colleges in California to create an inclusive community that acknowledges all aspects of identity as a learning process and continues to grow with your support. This is an open platform so feel free to share your experiences or opinions at the end of every blog or on our home page! Our blog overall is about the intersectionality of race and sexuality in Latin America. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term said that intersectionality is a “a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things.” In other words it is an overlap of different aspects of identity that shape how we move through life. A good way to think abo
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"Definitional Violence": Rediscovering Indigenous Sexuality

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The indigenous women of Latin America are so diverse in terms of ethnicity and tradition, that they are really only bound together in their shared identity by systematic forms of marginalization. They are defined by the systematic exclusion from the state and are therefore reliant on self-identification. Of that violence, definitional violence, where one is permitted or denied their identity as indigenous or otherwise, can be the most harmful. In the same way, the historical amnesia regarding the pre-colonial diversity of sexuality is a loss and violence towards queer indigenous women. When there is no space to name a problem, the problem cannot be fixed. A number of Latin American scholars have tried to decolonize the history of sexuality in Latin America. Marc Rifkin (2011) argues that heterosexual patterns are a tool of colonization. He asks his audience to consider just when Indians became straight. Heterosexual vocabulary is as inappropriate a term as the gender binary is on
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El Reconocimiento (Acknowledgement)

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Getting to the Roots with  Yvette Modestin: Why it Matters     https://dollywrites.com/2017/07/04/for-the-black-queens-black-girl-magic/   By: Amiya Turner In the world we live in it’s hard to talk about identity without bringing up the normative structural systems of racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, etc. Systems uphold and define social identities. Discussing intersectionality is an opportunity for dissecting the underlying operations of power and people hidden by such structures. Kimberlé Crenshaw, coined the term intersectionality, defining it as “a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things.” It is the overlap within aspects of identity.  “Who are today's marginalized people
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La Política de Feminismo (The Politics of Feminism)

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By: Amiya Turner Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso is a writer, activist, and teacher from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, but resides in Bogota, Colombia. She works to deconstruct heteronormativity, patriarchy, and socio-cultural expressions of racism. In one of her writings, The Feminism-Lesbianism Relationship in Latin America: A Necessary Link, she argues for understanding heterosexuality as a ploy to make women desirable to men and ensure dependency. In this case lesbianism and feminism, as a political framework that also looks at race, work together to deconstruct this notion. Both systems fight for equality and idenity rights, whilst upsetting notions of sex, gender, and sexuality. With lesbianism, feminism unites politics and life. The intersection between sexuality, in this case lesbianism, and feminism is important to making political leadway in on overall feminist movement globally. As Sueli Carniero mentioned in her journal, Rendering Feminism Blacker: The Situation of black
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By word of Mouth and the Power of Language: Cambiar el Idioma (To change the Language)

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  By: Amiya Turner Ochy Curiel is an inspiring Afro-Dominican lesbian, feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, singer, and scholar-activist whom intrigues me and is a prime example of what our blog represents. The self defined feminista negra lesbiana autónoma (autonomous black lesbian feminist) is one of the founding leaders in the contemporary Afrolatinx feminist movement in Latin America. Curiel enforces that lesbianism is a political position rather than a sexual preference or orientation. I think this is important to understanding why stigmas around the LGBTQ+ community have lasted, partly because of the political backing. Ochy Curiel is part of Grupo Latinoamericano de Estudio, Formación y Acción Feminista ( GLEFAS , Latin-American group of study, formation and feminist action) founded by Afro Dominican feminist activist Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso in 2007. They recuperate the history of Latin-American feminism that has remained hidden due to dominant and white feminist narratives. S
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Spirituality: Chuqui Chinchay

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Spirituality: Chuqui Chinchay Ancient Incas worshipped a dual gendered mountain deity named chuqui chinchay. This deity was also the patron of dual-gendered individuals such as the quariwarmi, the shamans who attended this gods wishes and rituals belonged to a third gender. Part of these rituals required same-sex erotic practices. The quariwarmi wore neither male nor female clothing, to represent, “a visible sign of a third space that negotiated between the masculine and the feminine, the present and the past, the living and the dead.” They represented dualism in Andean cosmology and their existence resists being taken out of their cultural context to be fit into a non-native Andean classification. The arrival of the Portuguese, however, destroyed the culture as it was. This touches on the relationship between sex and spirituality. Religion often informed ideas of sex and sexuality, which makes it difficult, or impossible, to impose western ideas of sex and sexuality onto any spec
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Indigenous genders

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MUXES: Indigenous Genders Juchitán, Mexico recognizes a third gender. Muxes are people who are biologically male but embody a third gender that is neither male nor female. Their gender and sexuality intersects with their native identification in a way that cannot be recreated outside of the Zapotec society, where there is more gender freedom than the rest of Mexico. In the past, muxes were seen as a gift from the gods. Contemporary muxes are an integral part of Zapotec, and they are fully active and accepted in the community. Because in Zapotec, “la-ave referred to people, la-ame to animals, and la-ani to inanimate beings,” the construction of ‘he’ and ‘she’ came from the Spanish and renders their unique identity untranslatable to other contexts. Sexuality became a powerful mechanism through which Europeans, Spaniards in this case specifically, could frame their existence as "perverse" and validate violence. Muxes are only one of the many pre-colonial examples of sex
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Tikuna Self-determination

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Tikuna Self Determination: Religion and Colonization's effect on Same-Sex Unions Indigenous sexualities vary greatly across the Americas, but through certain communities, we can see indigenous resistance to the erasure of their intersectional identity. These key communities include the Tikuna, Muxes, and Quariwarmi. The Tikuna are one of the largest Indigenous groups in Amazonia, which extends over Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. Tikuna "lesbian" couples are fighting to reclaim their sexualities under Tikuna terms. Marriage among the Tikuna are policed according to clan identification. Unions between two people in the same clan is seen as insestuous, and only inter-clan marriages are desired. However, with the intrusion of the church came the imposition of western religious morality. The churches saw same-sex unions as sinful, making regular couples into an abnormality. One Tikuna woman said, “Our ancestors experienced people living homo-affective lives but never inte
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