HETEROSEXUALITY AS A SINE QUA NON

Patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism in relation to the regime of sexual difference

Abstract

To speak of ‘heterosexuality’ in an anachronistic way is undoubtedly problematic, as Katz demonstrates in The Invention of Heterosexuality. But, while the use of the concept of ‘heterosexuality’ as a consolidated relational descriptor about the past is misguided, there is a concern to name practices which, even before this medical-legal formulation, were already strongly controlled (and even eliminated, physically and discursively) and which, in turn, functioned as a fundamental part of the consolidation of the capitalist ego conquiro. In this sense, rather than noting the break between the discourses on sodomy and homosexuality, this paper aims to take a first step in the recomposition of their relations in terms of thinking not of an ahistorical heterosexuality, but of a regime of sex-gender (and racial) differences that still survives in our postcolonial imaginaries. In this sense, as an introduction, this paper will take up an Arqueología del mestizaje (Catelli, 2020) and reconstruct the argument in The Invention of Heterosexuality (Katz, 2011) in order to develop the mentioned problematic.