Some Western cultures say that gender is binary and divided into male and female and
that gender fluidity is a recent phenomenon. But this isn’t the case. In Indian, Native American and
Aboriginal culture’s gender is more fluid and has been for centuries.
The BBC’s Gender and Identity correspondent, Megha Mohan, has been speaking to young people
from these communities, taking to social media in new ways to educate people about how
gender identity is viewed in their culture. On 6 September last year, the Supreme Court of
India struck down Section 377 (S377) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), decriminalizing
homosexuality. Introduced during British colonial rule in India in 1864 as a legal transplant of the
British 1533 Buggery Act, this section criminalized non-procreative sexualities.
Historically it was used to target, among others, transgender persons, including Hijras, a traditional community in India and South Asia more broadly and gender and colonialism specialists draw as much of their intellectual inspiration from each other as they do from the nation- or region-bound fields in which they research and teach. As the field of gender and colonialism has developed and expanded, it has been faced with two significant challenges. One is whether the concerns of gender and colonial
history have affected the problems of older fields in record, such as economic, political, labour, and
military accounts; recent assessments of imperial history suggest that gender is considered a
marginal category of analysis. Women were involved in these activities in a variety of ways. Studies
of women’s work during the colonial period often show that they lost power and economic
autonomy with the arrival of cash crops and women’s exclusion from the global marketplace.
Analysis of the development of legal systems under colonialism suggests that women were at a
the disadvantage, as “customary” laws were established based on male testimony that gave men,
especially elite men, advantages over women in issues of marriage and divorce.
