Threatening sexual (mis)behavior : homosexuality in the penal code debates in Trinidad and Tobago, 1986

Sexual behaviors and their organization have been subjected to serious contestation since the 1980s in legal terrains of states in the global south. Scholars of challenges faced by postcolonial societies have demonstrated how definitions of the reproductive and sexual roles of (especially female) citizens in “state” texts, such as constitutions and other law codes, have had important implications for the self-representation of a postcolonial state. Nationalist leaders concerned with the development of postcolonial states have negotiated between, on the one hand, embracing a secular, scientific model for modernization that draws on post-Enlightenment schemes of reasoning and knowledge and, on the other hand, recalling or re /inventing cultural and religious traditions from an inevitably glorious, autonomous, precolonial past. This tension between “modernity” and “tradition” appears to have remained at the core of epistemological and moral dilemmas being negotiated by postcolonial states in the global south. As would be familiar to the reader, anticolonial, nationalist movements have charged women with “bearing” the nation, physically and symbolically. Central to this mandate are women’s conformity to particular constructions of the family and their compliance with prescriptions that reify female sexual containment through virginity, compulsory heterosexuality, marriage, and motherhood. “Woman” is often inscribed as a natural, predetermined category requiring protection, whether by individual men, families, communities, or the state (see, e.g., Kapur, Erotic Justice; and Parker et al.). In each of these contexts the law has been implicated. Definitions of sexuality and sexual actors and the companion constructions of morality and respectability, whether within or outside the law, have undergirded both colonial projects and anticolonial movements.