Intersections of race, gender, and sexuality: Queer of color critique

José Esteban Muñoz, Presente Given how varied queer people of color are in our histories, cultures, and strategies for expression and survival in the Americas, it is impossible to fully take account of us in one chapter. This essay is an abbreviated account of the field that has come to be known as “queer of color critique” over the past thirty years, focusing on a few keywords and themes. In what follows, I narrate some of the overlapping histories of queer communities of color as they resonate and reverberate across the shared trajectories and cultural productions that emerged from modernity, modern and neoliberal capitalism, the evolution of race and racism, and the colonial and neocolonial encounters and diasporas of the past 500-odd years. Although the phrase “queer of color critique” only came into usage recently, we can trace the origins of the collusion between constructions of race and sexuality in the Americas to the particular expression of sexual violence, Christian and colonial militarism, and homophobic racism that came into existence during and that has survived since the colonial encounters between Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples. As scholars of settler colonialist discourse have shown, violence toward and a fear of non-heteronormative sexualities (as defined by Euro-American Christianity) were firmly in place during the first centuries of the colonial encounter – particularly in the violence toward indigenous peoples who showed what was, for Europeans, nonnormative gender and sexual expression, including what we might now recognize as same-sex oriented, inter-or transgendered ways of living. This violence took place across the Americas, as Spanish, English, and French colonial forces sought to destroy the nations and cultures that were already in place by using geopolitical disruption (forced migration and the displacement of native peoples from their sovereign lands), the breaking up of family networks (native boarding schools and the sexualized and cultural violence that took place there), disciplinary regimes (the Inquisition and other colonial bodies that criminalized gender nonnormativity, sodomy, and forms of same-sex desire), and bald, naked violence (for instance, Balboa's setting of dogs upon indigenous peoples in what is now Peru for their “sins” of sexual transgression and for dressing as women).