Andil Gosine IDS Bulletin Vol 37 No 5 2006
A 1990s study of several thousand Indian men led Shivananda Khan to conclude: ‘there are no heterosexuals in India’; local patterns of sex between men were not the exclusive practice of a few ‘homosexual’ men, his research showed, but were a part and parcel of general sexual practices, thus denying the characterisation of men engaged in homosexual acts as a minority, and of exclusive heterosexuality as “normal” (Khan 1998: 5). In many countries across the Third World, the introduction of western conceptualisations of sexuality have had the effect of marking practices that were previously tolerated as deviant and dangerous. For example, Oliver Phillips credits the famously homophobic leader, Robert Mugabe, as the one who:
… has not only been responsible for producing a conception of homosexuality in the Zimbabwean context, but also that of heterosexuality. All those Zimbabweans who have previously not even considered this notion of a ‘sexuality’ suddenly find themselves blessed with one – by designating others as ‘homosexual’ you automatically designate the norm as ‘heterosexual’. Many Zimbabweans suddenly came to see themselves as ‘heterosexual’, where they had no such consciousness before.
(Phillips 2000: 30)
Caribbean feminist M. Jacqui Alexander also points out that the criminalisation of homosexuality in most of the developing world only came about as a consequence of colonialism, and contemporary laws forbidding homosexual acts and relationships are revisions of preceding colonial texts (Alexander 2005: 21–65).
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