Sexuality in South America
The arrival of Europeans changed South American sexual practices and gender expressions, forcing them to adhere to the classical heteronormative model.
Where there artifacts are largely without context, stripped of archaeological data, and absent any written records, their significance and purpose are frequently left up to interpretation.
More prevalent in the lowlands of South America, this deeply historically-rooted notion, sometimes “accompanied by ritualized sequential sex” could help to formalize male alliances as well as minimize the risk of death or abuse of the infant.
[5] After the arrival of the colonists in South America, the goal of conversion to Christianity was manifested in sexual practices: indeed, for many of the original peoples, homosexuality was not a taboo at all.
[7] The researcher Patricia Carvalho Rosa explains the exclusion of homosexuals who did not submit to heterosexual norms in the post-colonial period in indigenous Tikuna communities in Brazil.
[7] Despite the harsh repression of homosexual practices throughout Latin America, the existence of erotic artworks has allowed a whole section of certain cultures to survive, such as the Moches or the Chimu.
For the traditional Guna (Indigenous people of Panama and Colombia), the term “Omeguitt” (like a woman) serves to refer to “homosexual men who are educated by their mothers from a very early age in housework and away from the jobs that are socially assigned to heterosexual men.”[9] Through this process, homosexual men acquire a female sexual and social identity, which in the Western culture is equivalent to a transgender person.
Viceroy Francisco de Toledo and the priests were dismayed to discover that homosexuality was accepted and that the indigenous population did not prohibit premarital sex or place any particular emphasis on female chastity.
Indeed, the reality that the indigenous people experienced on a daily basis was not transcribed in terms that Europeans were able to understand: “Las sexualidades indígenas son intraducibles en términos occidentales.
To that extent, the catechism, confession manuals and sermons inspired by the Third Council of Lima served as privileged tools to justify a society intolerant to diversity.
[12] To understand the current situations of violence, marginalisation, discrimination and concealment that exist in the indigenous peoples, societies, cultures and member states of Abya Yala regarding non-heterosexual, bisexual, transgender, transsexual and intersex persons, it is necessary to study and have an objective historical perspective of the processes of conquest.
South American countries that previously had special categories for people who did not identify as male or female in pre-Columbian times (with the Omeguitt and the Muxes) seem to be returning to this model.
In March 2021, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of their cities in Peru, El Salvador, Ecuador, Chile and Colombia to demand the legalisation of voluntary termination of pregnancy.
