4th Global Conference
Monday 19th November - Thursday
22nd November 2007
Salzburg, Austria
Session 4: Culture and Institutional Context
Chair: Becky McLaughlin
The Impact of Post-Colonial Euro-Christian Culture on the Sexual Identity and Practices of Canadian Aboriginal Women
Allison Reeves
School of Health & Human Performance,
Dalhousie University,
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Aboriginal peoples in Canada constitute a marginalized population whose current reality is rooted in past and present political, historical, social, and economic injustices. Aboriginal women currently face a disproportionate burden of sexual health issues, such as cervical cancer, HIV/AIDS, Sexually Transmitted Infections, and sexual abuse, as compared to non-Aboriginal women in Canada. While pre-colonial Indigenous cultures enjoyed a positive model of sexuality, where women were empowered, pleasure was celebrated, and sex considered a gift from the Creator, post-colonial models enforced Euro-Christian values of patriarchy, White dominance, and sexuality-as-sin. Additionally, through the infamous Residential School system of the twentieth century, thousands of Aboriginal children underwent a forced assimilation into Christian ways, including a sexual ideology which enforced the suppression of sexual desire by using tactics such as whipping, sexual abuse, and confinement and humiliation, to instill fears of sexual wrongdoing. Ultimately, the powerful forces of colonization drove Aboriginal communities, especially Aboriginal women, away from a healthy, Indigenous experience of sexuality, toward a pathologic and misogynistic one.
This qualitative study investigates the beliefs and values of contemporary Aboriginal women, in an effort to understand the current social climate of sexuality for these women. What emerges from the women’s stories are their perspectives on pleasure, sexual safety and reproduction, as well as dialogues on gender roles, body image, and the impacts of mass media and Christian religions on sexuality. Findings show that contemporary Aboriginal women have been heavily subjected to Euro-Christian messages about sexuality through colonization, westernization and the media, messages which normalize the subordination of women, and ‘sex as immoral’. Having lost the Indigenous cultural norms which embrace sexuality, these women, like many non-Aboriginal women, now find themselves struggling to locate a healthy sexuality within a world where sexuality is at once confusing, shameful—and highly coveted.
Judaism/Same-Sex Marriage; Homosexuality and Jewish Marriage; Reimagining Taharat HaMishpachah
Diane Klein
La Verne College of Law, Ontario, California, USA
Taharat hamishpachah, which translates literally though euphemistically to the laws of “family purity,” is the cornerstone of the Orthodox Jewish understanding of the marriage relationship between a man and a woman. It consists, for those who practice it, of an extremely elaborate and complex set of (arguably) menstruation-phobic norms governing the sexual availability of spouses to one another. But embedded in it is also a “theory” about how lust and desire function in an exclusive, committed relationship, including (at least) the following claims: that a relationship of unbridled sexual indulgence is unlikely to last, or to meet the more complex needs of each person; that sexual interaction between adults who are sexually attracted to each other can have a tendency to “crowd out” other, equally valuable, modes of relating; that relationships without a period of ritual impurity and abstinence to “balance” the sexualized side of the relationship would necessarily be excessively carnal and even orgiastic, and hence, without a process for maintaining and restoring ritual purity, the partners would fall ever more deeply into (and ultimately, out of) a relationship driven by lust alone. Taharat hamishpachah is a theory, in part, about maintaining desire by suppressing it.
This abstinence/purity structure for marriage, built around a woman’s menstrual cycle, casts the traditional Jewish “problem” with male homosexuality into a different light, and at the same time suggests a possible remedy: the establishment of a fixed period of abstinence between two men, which in turn would make kosher marriage between them possible. This insight can then be brought back into the heterosexual context, to explore “alternate” forms of taharat hamishpachah that may work better for feminists, pro-sex persons of all orientations, etc. Having done all this, we can then ask, about taharat hamishpachah as a theory– is it true? Does the practice of taharat hamishpachah, in any form, “work”? Doesit stimulate, cultivate, and sustain desire? Does it make sex “better”? As a thoroughly norm-driven approach to sexuality, it stands at an opposite extreme from (and hence is a critique of) our culture’s valorization of spontaneity and desire-driven sexuality. Can we learn something valuable from that critique?