Sex and the Norm: State Front, Patriarchy, Dispossession and Coloniality

Abstract

In this article I examine the various effects of the expansion and intrusion of contemporaneous state – enterprise – media – Christianity front, ever colonial and also parastatal, into Brazilian indigenous communities - called village-world for the sake of the argument here -, and their consequences for the lives of women. After this overview, focus is placed on some cases and examples that reveal a shift in the understanding of sexuality and the meaning and value attributed to sexual access to bodies, as well as on a crucial change in the meaning of “norms” in precolonial intervention societies and in societies intervened by the colonization process – in Hispanic countries, the “criollo” society. Transformation of the sexual field by the introduction of the pornographic gaze emerge then as the pivot or rotation axis of the mutation of one world into the other. The alienated body-object, and colony emerge as coetaneous and akin in the new order in constant expansion. Dispossession, in this process, is, therefore, progressive dispossession of one’s body and sexuality.