William Snchez

Response Paper 5 4/29 HuffPost Readings

Reading about both of these events in the Caribbean and South America on
the topic of LGBT issues abroad made me consider, first, the differences in views on
a single subject in a geographical area that are often conflated in the minds of the
general U.S. American public. Jamaica, a primarily English-speaking country in the
Caribbean, and Uruguay, a primarily Spanish-speaking country in South America,
are of course going to have significantly different perspectives on the same issue
and as we saw in todays readings, they indeed do. I would hope that such significant
differences on social purviews concerning sexuality inspires (or has inspired)
scholarship on the impact that the colonial histories of these countries has on
contemporary perspectives. Starkly different societies have developed in each of
these cases, and I believe an analysis, for instance, on the intersectionality of
economics, gender, sexuality, and politics historically in each of these cases would
yield valuable and significant answers to the questions concerning the now
seemingly accepted same-sex friendly social climate in Uruguay and the
homophobic social climate of Jamaica. We have covered in this course throughout
the semester the importance of applying intersectional lenses to our approach of
gender/sexuality studies, and thus I feel that this sort of application rings true here
as well.
With that being said, I found the way in which the story of the transgender
victim in Jamaica was presented. The article on Dwayne Jones was presented on this
now tired presentation of Jamaica as a hotbed for savagely homophobic culture in
the Caribbean. The quotation, Some say the hostility partly stems from the legacy of
slavery when black men were sometimes sodomized as punishment or humiliation.
Some historians believe that practice carried over into a general dread of
homosexuality, I find particularly problematicit oversimplifies and reduces the
occurrence of homophobia in the country to a singular, narrow, and clichd social
reaction that is often far more complex and multivalent in its composition. In such
situations, it would be beneficial to turn, I think, to the history and occurrence of
homophobia in our own society/country. It was not very long ago that Matthew
Shepherd was killed for being homosexual, and just last year, Islan Nettles, a
transgender woman in Harlem, was viciously beaten to death. Too often do we
present other societies as harboring unusually aggressive homophobic societies when
we, in our very own local communities, continue to perpetuate the very thing we are
astonished to see reflected in foreign communities.
Lastly, the readings peaked my interest on the degree to which the Catholic
Church and other types of religiosity play roles in the progress (or lack thereof) of
acceptance of the LGBT community in the Caribbean and Latin America. As we saw
earlier in our readings on abortion and womens reproductive rights in Chile and
Argentina, the church was not as influential in the lack of advancement in womens
reproductive rights as initially believed by our class. Nevertheless, I feel that it would
be important to explore the topic of religiosity on the subject of LGBT conditions in
the Caribbean/Latin America, as taking into consideration the gender roles
established and constructed by such widely held doctrines/beliefs would be
interesting to see. In particular, the confluence of culture and religion (for instance,
the African-infused tradition of Santera and the Western/European tradition of
Catholicism) would be of great benefit, as they might lead to more specific nuances
or differences in the articulation of certain social views at play in this issue.