Colonized Sexuality

Maria Lugones expands this idea by introducing the concept of the coloniality of gender, revealing how colonialism did not just impose hierarchies of race and class, but also forcibly introduced a binary gender system and heteronormative matrix where diverse pre-colonial gender expressions and sexualities were erased or demonized. In many Indigenous, Afro-diasporic, and ancestral worldviews, sexuality was not reduced to reproductive function or moral control, but existed as a force of connection, ritual, community, and spirituality. The colonial project severed this sacred link between body and territory, between sex and meaning.

Gloria Anzaldúa, in her writings on the borderlands, reminds us that colonized sexuality also emerges as a site of internal fracture — a space where hybrid identities (queer, mestiza, racialized) are forced to navigate shame, fragmentation, and invisibility within both dominant culture and their own communities. Her work affirms that to reclaim sexuality is also to reconfigure language, myth, and flesh — a border practice that is both spiritual and political.

Achille Mbembe points out that the colonial order functions through necropolitics — the regulation of who may live and who must die. Within this framework, the sexuality of Black, queer, Indigenous and trans bodies becomes a field of state control, medicalization, and hypervisibility paired with disposability. The erotic life of the colonized subject is policed, exoticized, or erased — never autonomous.

Ochy Curiel, building from Afro-Caribbean feminism, reminds us that decolonizing sexuality cannot be a mere liberal inclusion of "diverse" sexualities into the colonial order. Rather, it requires a rupture with the racial-capitalist and patriarchal logic that continues to shape intimacy, desire, kinship, and relationality. It requires unlearning the colonial gaze and recovering ways of being together that do not rely on domination or commodification.