section_path: Sociocultural aspects/Sexuality, colonialism, and race
section_name: Sexuality, colonialism, and race
paragraph_text: Sexuality, colonialism, and race
  
  European conquerors/colonists discovered that many non-European cultures had expressions of sexuality and gender which differed from European notion of heterosexual cisnormativity. These would include transgender practices. In 1516, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, a Spanish explorer, discovered indigenous people in Central America, among whom several indigenous men who dressed like women and had sex with each other, resulting in him feeding forty of these men to his dogs for having non- gender conforming behaviors and sexuality. In North America and the United States, Europeans have used claims of sexual immorality to justify discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities.
  
  Scholars also study the ways in which colonialism has affected sexuality today and argue that due to racism and slavery it has been dramatically changed from the way it had previously been understood.
  
  In her book, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia, Laura Stoler investigates how the Dutch colonists used sexual control and gender-specific sexual sanctions to distinguish between the rulers from the ruled and enforce colonial domination onto the people of Indonesia.
  
  In America, there are 155 native tribes that are recorded to have embraced two-spirit people within their tribes, but the total number of tribes could be greater than what is documented. Two-spirit people were and still are members of communities who do not fall under Western gender categories of male and female, but rather under a " third gender " category. This system of gender contradicts both the gender binary and the assertion that sex and gender are the same. Instead of conforming to traditional roles of men and women, two-spirit fill a special niche in their communities.
  
  For example, two-spirited people are commonly revered for possessing special wisdom and spiritual powers. Two-spirited people also can take part in marriages, either monogamous and polygamous ones. Historically, European colonizers perceived relationships involving two-spirited people as homosexuality, and therefore believed in the moral inferiority of native people. In reaction, colonizers began to impose their own religious and social norms on indigenous communities, diminishing the role of two-spirit people in native cultures. Within reservations, the Religious Crime Code of the 1880s explicitly aimed to "aggressively attack Native sexual and marriage practices". The goal of colonizers was for native peoples to assimilate into Euro-American ideals of family, sexuality, gender expression, and more.
  
  The link between constructed sexual meanings and racial ideologies has been studied. According to Joane Nagel, sexual meanings are constructed to maintain racial-ethnic-national boundaries by the denigration of "others" and regulation of sexual behavior within the group. She writes, "both adherence to and deviation from such approved behaviors, define and reinforce racial, ethnic, and nationalist regimes". In the United States people of color face the effects of colonialism in different ways with stereotypes such as the Mammy and Jezebel for Black women; lotus blossom and dragon lady for Asian women; and the spicy Latina. These stereotypes contrast with standards of sexual conservatism, creating a dichotomy that dehumanizes and demonizes the stereotyped groups. An example of a stereotype that lies at the intersection of racism, classism, and misogyny is the archetype of the welfare queen. Cathy Cohen describes how the welfare queen stereotype demonizes poor black single mothers for deviating from conventions surrounding family structure.