This laid the basis for the persecution of Africans who entered the European worldview through the slave trade that participated in practices opposing imperialist heteronormativity. Records from European Inquisitions demonstrate how the slave trade granted European enslavers the power to enforce heteronormative Christianity against the people they kept as property. They used this to target those who deviated outside of their sexual norms, mainly for same-sex practices they saw as sodomy. On August 21, 1591, Sweet writes that two enslaved African men, Joane, and another man, consented to have same-sex intercourse with each other at the Jesuit College in Bahia, Brazil. As a result of being forcefully relocated to European territory and heteronormative worldview as a result of slavery, the men were denounced in the name of sodomy. The same person who testified against Joane and the unnamed African, Mathias Moreira, also denounced other Africans who violated the Portuguese heterosexual gender binary. Moreira testified against Francisco Manicongo, stating that he had seen Francisco on the streets of Bahia dressed as a woman as well and accusing him of having a reputation as a “sodomite.” Francisco’s denunciation in this inquisition represents how Africans who were stolen onto the land through the slave trade were persecuted for having sexual and gender behaviors that did not adhere to the cisheteronormative imperialist colonies.
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The system of the slave trade and slavery here is crucial because only through their access to African lives were European colonizers able to impose their heterosexual worldview, which condemned samesex penetrative sex in the name of “sodomy,” on captured Africans who deviated outside of it. The European/American heteronormative binary thrust upon enslaved Africans continued in the slave markets as well during the Antebellum period. In these markets, enslaver merchants would separate men and women from each other and then provide them with minimal costume to match the gender identity they had to present themselves as. Narratives from enslaved people sold at these markets confirm this, where Solomon Northup stated that men sometimes wore a “hat, coat, shirt, pants,” while women on the auction block wore “frocks of calico” and handkerchiefs. The women were then separated from the men. William J. Anderson’s narrative also displays this, where their “best clothes” were put on and men and women were separated from each other. WPA narratives also confirmed that enslavers lined men and women up on opposing sides based on their sex. Contrary to the obfuscation of gender, where scholars have suggested that enslavement had reversed and complexified the gender roles of enslaved people, it appears that gender boundaries became stricter rather than neutralized in the market.
