Tag: colonialism

Moral Panic and Syphilis in Jamaica

By Jill Briggs March 1, 2016 Medicine and Sexuality 0 comments

Jill Briggs In 1934 Jamaica was gripped by a moral panic. According to a well-publicized British naval report, the island was “rife” with venereal diseases, particularly syphilis. Some venereal disease experts speculated that infection rates topped eighty percent of the population and included children as young as eight. The root […]

A Chile is Never Just a Chile: Food & Sex in Mexico Before & After Colonization

Eating and reproduction are crucial biological processes that are fraught with emotional meanings.

“When Sex Threatened the State”: An Interview with Saheed Aderinto

By notcheseditor August 25, 2015 Author Interviews 0 comments

Interview by Pat Omoregie Saheed Aderinto’s When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958 (Illinois, 2015), explores tensions in colonial Nigeria through the lens of a struggle over how to control and regulate prostitution. Aderinto argues that the British perceived prostitution as evidence of […]

The Queer Caribbean: Conflicting Uses of the Colonial Past

By Agnes Arnold-Forster May 29, 2014 Latin American Sexualities, LGBTQ 2 comments

Agnes Arnold-Forster In 1991, the Progressive Liberal Party government amended the Bahamas’ Sexual Offences Act, decriminalising “buggery” and other same-sex sexual acts in private. Over twenty years later the Bahamas still remains ahead of the majority of its Caribbean neighbours. Male-male sexual activity continues to be illegal in eleven Caribbean nations. […]

Hyperbole and horror: hijras and the British imperial state in India

By Onni Gust January 6, 2014 LGBTQ 8 comments

Onni Gust Nineteenth-century British travel writers and colonial officials rarely passed on the opportunity to prefix some derogatory hyperbole to the word ‘eunuch.’ Frequently they offered extensive defamation, referring to eunuchs as “the vilest and most polluted beings” and commenting on the “revolting” practices that they imagined, but could rarely […]