Reading Response 8 - FIRST YEAR SEMINAR PDF

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READING RESPONSE 8 MIRANDA’S, EXTERMINATION OF THE JOYAS

Ivanna Alcantara FYS: body, sexuality & desire November, 2017 As with other readings Miranda re enforces the idea of gendercide to people who are not straight,

people who don't fit the social stereotype of “normal”. In her text she specifically talks about men during the spanish colonization in Mexico and then California. With her own experience of being multiracial,a lesbian who is also Indian she gives her own notion of what happened to the “joyas”. The “joyas” was the name given to men who were considered gay, by the Spanish when they first got to America. Miranda makes a clear point to say that it wasn't homophobia that drove the spanish to kill and torture so many joyas, gender, gendercide is what occurred. “Was this violence against joyas classic homophobia (fear of people with same-sex orientation) or gendercide? I argue that gendercide is the correct term.”1 Why is it that Miranda calls it gendercide and not homophobia? She says that the “definition of gendercide as an act of violence committed against a victim’s primary gender identity.”2 It wasn't about the sexual orientation of the indians but about their gender. And it was a gendercide and nothing else because the encounter between spanish and indians was not a cordial one but of destruction. “Thus the killing of the joyas by Spaniards was, indeed, “part of a coordinated plan of destruction”—but it was only one strategy of gendercide.”3 The abuse that occurred against the joyas was abominable, they were thrown to the dogs alive, to be eaten and teared up to death. This expanded as the colonists expanded and indians feared their lives, feared all around them. All of this and more of the writings of Miranda try to encompass the real meaning of gendercide and what was what happened to these people during colonization. Many times pictures as new ideas set upon a new race, it was more than that. It was abuse and many killings, something society still doesnt comolety understand. “We have mistakenly called this behavior “homophobia” in Indian Country; to call it gendercide would 1 Miranda, EXTERMINATION OF THE JOYAS pg. 258 2 Miranda, EXTERMINATION OF THE JOYAS pg. 259 3 Miranda, EXTERMINATION OF THE JOYAS pg. 260

certainly require rethinking the assimilation of Euro-American cultural values and the meaning of indigenous community.”4

BIBLIOGRAPHY Miranda, Deborah A. EXTERMINATION OF THE JOYAS. Duke University Press, 2010.

4 Miranda, EXTERMINATION OF THE JOYAS pg. 260...