Performing postcolonial homophobia

A decolonial analysis of the 2013 public demonstrations against same-sex marriage in Haiti

Bibliographic Data

ID4928486
AuthorsErin L Durban (0000-0001-9437-5492, Gender Studies, corresponding author), Erin L Durban-Albrecht (Anthropology and Women's and Gender Studies, Illinois State University, Bloomington, IL, U.S.A.)
Year2017
Volume27
Issue2
Pages160-175
Publication date2017-05-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueWomen & Performance a journal of feminist theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0740-770X • E-ISSN: 1748-5819
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0740770x.2017.1315229
OpenAlexW2616911950
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited17

This article analyzes a public demonstration against same-sex marriage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The author provides a thick description of this performance led by Protestant Haitians, focusing on creative displays of evangelical Christian antigay sexual politics. While the author intends to represent the demonstration in ways that are recognizable to its organizers and participants, the author comes at this project through a concern about the public performance’s effects on Haitians with same-sex desires, with whom the author has been conducting multi-sited ethnographic research since 2008. As the author contends, the demonstration was more than an enactment of “Haitian homophobia.” The author situates the contemporary conflicts and controversies about (homo)sexual politics in the context of French colonial and U.S. imperialist legacies, as performances of “postcolonial homophobia.” Postcolonial homophobia refers to the cumulative effects of historical and contemporary Western imperialist biopolitical interventions to discover, regulate, manage, control, govern, and/or liberate (homo)sexuality in postcolonial nations. Here, postcolonial homophobia is played out by two seemingly antithetical transnational social movements: evangelical Christianity and LGBTQI human rights. Debates about whether Haiti is too queer (the evangelical Christian discourse) or too homophobic (the LGBTQI rights discourse) ultimately work together to erase histories of imperialist intervention and promote American exceptionalism, which negatively impacts all Haitians

Colonialism · Exceptionalism · Homosexuality · Human rights · Human sexuality · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Queer · Sociology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Gender Studies · History · Law

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