Imagine a world where love knows no boundaries, where two people can marry regardless of their gender. Now open your eyes. In some parts of the globe, this is reality. In others, it's a distant dream. Twenty years ago, a mere 26% of Americans supported same-sex marriage. Today, that figure has skyrocketed to 69%. That is extremely rapid cultural change in favour of love and liberalism. But hold your applause, because here’s the plot twist: most of the world is not joining the parade. When asked about their least desired neighbours, most Africans and Asians still say “homosexuals”.
As we approach Carnival on my Caribbean island, I am also curious about what impact, if any, cultural traditions of cross dressing/dressing to invert social roles for special occasions might have on tolerance for gender role flexibility. Many European (and especially Catholic) influenced cultures have for centuries had a festival like Mardi Gras or Carnival, where there are costumes that are both gender-bending and also invert social roles, like poorer people dressing up as the king/having various frivolous "king" characters who parade through town. In the Caribbean and Latin America, these are especially famous and locally popular--but the Caribbean and Latin America include both gay-friendly locales (again, hooray Saba, my island home) and places that are violently homophobic (looking at you, Jamaica). I'd be interested to know your thoughts on this.
Embarrassing fact: I know very very little about the Caribbean. I will try to improve! I’ve visited Antigua & the BVIs before, but only as a tourist sailing a big yacht so i only appreciated the natural beauty!
Well, I think you are in for a treat in learning more about the Caribbean. The region has a lot of features that allow for interesting test cases of social science hypotheses.
First, the Caribbean region is very ethnically diverse. Islands were inhabited by indigenous groups not found elsewhere in the Americas (e.g., the Taino and Arawak) which had unique cultures to begin with, and that also did not suffer the same rates of death from disease that indigenous people on the American continents did. So these people groups continued to be a major part of the culture after European contact.
European "discovery" of the islands led to European settlement, but also to enslaved Africans and indentured servants from India and Asia being shipped to the islands as well. This led to lots of intermixing among ethnic groups. Many island economies involved men leaving and women staying behind, leading to very lopsided sex ratios (on Saba in the early 20th century, women outnumbered men by > 2:1) and interesting resulting social effects.
Colonizing countries waxed and and waned in power, and so islands often changed hands many times, leading to polyglot cultures with mixes of influences from different European countries on top of the indigenous, African, and Asian cultures. (Creole languages like Papiamiento are a whole trip in themselves, with their combinations of German, Spanish, and French words with phonetic English spellings.)
Because opportunities and resources might be scarce on an island, islanders commonly lived on multiple islands over the course of their lives. Today, it's still common for someone to say "I'm from St. Maarten--I've lived here 20 years--but I was born on St. Lucia, grew up on Barbados, and worked on Antigua for 15 years before coming here." A huge fraction of the adults living on Caribbean islands are thus "immigrants" in some sense.
I've only lived in the Caribbean for 11 years myself, so I'm not an expert, but the erudite Rasheed Griffith is, and I'm sure he'd have more smart things to say about what a cool region this is for a social scientist to study.
Separately, I'll direct message you with some photos of gender-bendy Carnival costumes.
I think one aspect missing from your analysis is the influence of indigenous American cultures both on the Americas and on western Europe (through colonization and contact with indigenous peoples). There were many indigenous peoples that were far, far more libertarian culturally, politically, and sexually than almost anywhere in Eurasia before the 20th century.
Libertarian is not the right word. Other cultures were not more individualistic. Certainly there were some African cultures that had same-sex relationships.
Libertarian referred to anarcho-communism for more than a cemtury before the Austrian School repurposed it to mean rampant greed and property worship. Libertarian leftism was and still is a thing even if both reactionaries and authoritarian Marxists would like to pretend never to have heard of it.
The letter complaining about the "Sleaze March" is not from the Daily Telegraph, it is from the Australian newspaper The Daily Telegraph Mirror. Rockdale is a city in Australia.
Letters to the British Daily Telegraph newspaper always begin "SIR -"
"When compared with its foreign counterparts [Brazil, Ireland, and Spain], the American campaign was notable for one thing: the extraordinary modesty of its framing.
The approach was good enough to make gay marriage the law of the land. Yet by failing to make a more ambitious case for equality across the board, as other countries did, the campaign limited the transformative power of gay marriage and created an opening for today’s backlash."
Given your reporting here on Brazil would seem to undercut it as an example of a more transformative campaign that avoided backlash. That said, perhaps Ireland and Spain better support Omar G. Encarnación's point. Regardless, I'll definitely be interested in continuing to read about cross-national experience.
Fascinating as always, Alice.
As we approach Carnival on my Caribbean island, I am also curious about what impact, if any, cultural traditions of cross dressing/dressing to invert social roles for special occasions might have on tolerance for gender role flexibility. Many European (and especially Catholic) influenced cultures have for centuries had a festival like Mardi Gras or Carnival, where there are costumes that are both gender-bending and also invert social roles, like poorer people dressing up as the king/having various frivolous "king" characters who parade through town. In the Caribbean and Latin America, these are especially famous and locally popular--but the Caribbean and Latin America include both gay-friendly locales (again, hooray Saba, my island home) and places that are violently homophobic (looking at you, Jamaica). I'd be interested to know your thoughts on this.
Embarrassing fact: I know very very little about the Caribbean. I will try to improve! I’ve visited Antigua & the BVIs before, but only as a tourist sailing a big yacht so i only appreciated the natural beauty!
Well, I think you are in for a treat in learning more about the Caribbean. The region has a lot of features that allow for interesting test cases of social science hypotheses.
First, the Caribbean region is very ethnically diverse. Islands were inhabited by indigenous groups not found elsewhere in the Americas (e.g., the Taino and Arawak) which had unique cultures to begin with, and that also did not suffer the same rates of death from disease that indigenous people on the American continents did. So these people groups continued to be a major part of the culture after European contact.
European "discovery" of the islands led to European settlement, but also to enslaved Africans and indentured servants from India and Asia being shipped to the islands as well. This led to lots of intermixing among ethnic groups. Many island economies involved men leaving and women staying behind, leading to very lopsided sex ratios (on Saba in the early 20th century, women outnumbered men by > 2:1) and interesting resulting social effects.
Colonizing countries waxed and and waned in power, and so islands often changed hands many times, leading to polyglot cultures with mixes of influences from different European countries on top of the indigenous, African, and Asian cultures. (Creole languages like Papiamiento are a whole trip in themselves, with their combinations of German, Spanish, and French words with phonetic English spellings.)
Because opportunities and resources might be scarce on an island, islanders commonly lived on multiple islands over the course of their lives. Today, it's still common for someone to say "I'm from St. Maarten--I've lived here 20 years--but I was born on St. Lucia, grew up on Barbados, and worked on Antigua for 15 years before coming here." A huge fraction of the adults living on Caribbean islands are thus "immigrants" in some sense.
I've only lived in the Caribbean for 11 years myself, so I'm not an expert, but the erudite Rasheed Griffith is, and I'm sure he'd have more smart things to say about what a cool region this is for a social scientist to study.
Separately, I'll direct message you with some photos of gender-bendy Carnival costumes.
I think one aspect missing from your analysis is the influence of indigenous American cultures both on the Americas and on western Europe (through colonization and contact with indigenous peoples). There were many indigenous peoples that were far, far more libertarian culturally, politically, and sexually than almost anywhere in Eurasia before the 20th century.
Libertarian is not the right word. Other cultures were not more individualistic. Certainly there were some African cultures that had same-sex relationships.
Libertarian referred to anarcho-communism for more than a cemtury before the Austrian School repurposed it to mean rampant greed and property worship. Libertarian leftism was and still is a thing even if both reactionaries and authoritarian Marxists would like to pretend never to have heard of it.
Interesting. I wonder if that would apply to other indigenous cultures (Pacific, African)?
FWIW, gay marriage actually has a long history in the West, specifically through the concept of the female husband:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_husband
IMHO, we should make this concept popular again for those who want it, along with of course the related concept of the male wife.
Do you think Hindus will secularise the way Buddhists have?
The letter complaining about the "Sleaze March" is not from the Daily Telegraph, it is from the Australian newspaper The Daily Telegraph Mirror. Rockdale is a city in Australia.
Letters to the British Daily Telegraph newspaper always begin "SIR -"
Thank you! My oversight!
Are pentacostals in Latin America more individualistic than Catholics?
Thanks for sharing your interesting research.
There was a recent article in the NY Times that had a counterintuitive thesis to me (gift link; https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/opinion/gay-marriage-america-pride.html ):
"When compared with its foreign counterparts [Brazil, Ireland, and Spain], the American campaign was notable for one thing: the extraordinary modesty of its framing.
The approach was good enough to make gay marriage the law of the land. Yet by failing to make a more ambitious case for equality across the board, as other countries did, the campaign limited the transformative power of gay marriage and created an opening for today’s backlash."
Given your reporting here on Brazil would seem to undercut it as an example of a more transformative campaign that avoided backlash. That said, perhaps Ireland and Spain better support Omar G. Encarnación's point. Regardless, I'll definitely be interested in continuing to read about cross-national experience.