A Natural Sexuality

Sometimes entire societies are dispossessed of their own history, not through forgetting, but through the will of those who subdued them. The encounter between Europe and the Americas was not an exchange, but a conquest. In that movement, Indigenous understandings of the body and of sexuality, fluid, woven into social life, depicted without shame, were swept aside. A Christian sexual order imposed itself through brutal force, relegating to the status of “savagery” practices whose only crime was to belong to the defeated. What was destroyed was an entire way of being in the world, of which only fragmentary traces remain today, filtered through the very gaze of those who annihilated it.

Indigenous Sexuality Before the Great Disaster of Conquest

The encounter between the European and American worlds was not an exchange, but a conquest. On arriving on these lands, colonizers sought neither to understand the societies they encountered nor to establish an equitable relationship with them. Their eyes were elsewhere, turned toward profit, the possession of territory, the exploitation of wealth and of human beings, and also toward the conversion of souls, imposed by force in the name of the Christian religion. In an enterprise so fundamentally amoral and contemptuous, nothing and no one was meant to stand in the way. Indigenous peoples, in their customs, their beliefs, and their way of being in the world, were pushed aside or brought to heel.

Sexuality, like every aspect of social life, did not escape this tide. To grasp what was at stake, we must consider the situation among Indigenous peoples of the northern reaches of South America and the wider Caribbean sphere before Europeans arrived, and measure what unfolded in the confrontation. Recent academic research makes it possible to identify several fundamental features of precolonial sexualities in this region.

Gender Fluidity and a Plurality of Practices

Before the arrival of colonizers, Indigenous societies in South America and the Caribbean did not conceive of sexuality according to a binary, Western, heteronormative model. Research in historical anthropology points to fluid gender identities and a diversity of sexual practices integrated into social and ritual life.

In the Andes, colonial sources reread by recent scholarship suggest ritual roles and gender performances that cannot be reduced to European binarism, sometimes described by researchers as forms of mediation or a “third gender”¹. In the Nahua world, terms such as cuiloni and patlache appear in colonial sources to designate sexual positions and morally charged figures, showing above all how difficult it is to translate these realities without collapsing them into European categories².

A Sexuality Depicted and Not Taboo

Unlike the Christian conception that binds sexuality to sin, pre-Columbian cultures did not treat sexuality as a taboo. Moche ceramics from Peru, dating from 300 BCE to 700 CE, offer a famous corpus of explicit sexual imagery, including scenes that have been interpreted as relations between people of the same sex. For these societies, sexuality was affirmed as a vital force, depicted in art without shame or concealment³.

Across several lowland South American societies, anthropology has documented systems in which conception may be understood as cumulative, opening the possibility of shared paternity among multiple genitors, within contexts of non-exclusive relationships⁴.

The Imposition of the Colonial Model

The arrival of Europeans marked a violent rupture. With conquest, colonial and ecclesiastical authorities reclassified some local practices and roles through the grids of sin and crime, especially around “sodomy,” and imposed a Christian sexual order through norm, penance, and repression, with sanctions that could be extreme depending on context⁵.

Sources and recent scholarship suggest that, in multiple societies of the Andes, the Caribbean, and lowland South America, categories of gender, ritual roles, and sexual practices cannot be reduced to the Christian moral binarism imported by conquest. Yet these realities are difficult to reconstruct, because the descriptions that survive often pass through colonial filters that translate, distort, or criminalize⁶.

Let us be clear. The victor’s morality did not triumph by virtue alone. The Christian conception of sexuality did not replace local conceptions because it was truer or purer, but through conquest, law, and punishment, carried by European military and political power. It was the force of arms, not the force of argument, that raised a particular vision of the body and of sexuality into a universal norm, relegating ancestral practices, in the same gesture, to “savagery” to be extirpated. It is hard, today, not to notice that brutality and savagery describe the customs of the defeated less well than the methods of the European conquerors.

Reconstructing What Was Silenced

Now the work ahead is one of reconstruction. What survives comes to us in fragments, and yet it is enough to begin restoring a fuller picture, one that honours Indigenous realities rather than the distortions imposed upon them. This means moving, calmly and deliberately, toward a renewed respect for multiple ways of understanding the body, desire, and kinship, not as curiosities, but as part of the world’s natural and human diversity. It also means recognising that many forms of sexuality are legitimate, and always have been, despite what the conquerors’ Christian ideology insisted on declaring “unnatural.” In that spirit, rebuilding this knowledge is not a return to the past, but a clear, peaceful commitment to truth, dignity, and a more honest relationship with the living complexity of human nature.

If this reflection stays with you, take the next step with Encounter in the Collections section, where a freer vision is presented without inhibition through a sensual, utopian encounter. Click here to explore the work.

QFA 

Curiosity piqued?

1.     Horswell, Michael J., Decolonizing the Sodomite: Queer Tropes of Sexuality in Colonial Andean Culture. University of Texas Press, 2005. Google Books

2.     Sigal, Pete, “Homosexualities in Early Colonial Nahua Society.” Scholars@Duke, 2007. scholars.duke.edu

3.     Weismantel, Mary, “Moche Sex Pots: Reproduction and Temporality in Ancient South America.” Faculty Fairfield, 2015. faculty.fairfield.edu/dcrawford/weismantel.pdf

4.     Walker, Robert S., et al., “Evolutionary History of Partible Paternity in Lowland South America.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 107, no. 45, 2010, pp. 19195 19200. PMC

5.     Silverblatt, Irene, “Honor, Sex and Civilizing Missions in Colonial Peru.” Latin American Studies Center, University of Maryland. lacs.umd.edu/sites/default/files/2023-01/07_silverblatt.pdf

6.     Dictionnaire de la langue nahuatl, entrée “cuiloni”. Wired Humanities Projects, University of Oregon. nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cuiloni