sexuality and morality as colonial weapons
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Rana describes the parallels between how the Native Americans of the "New World" were conceptualized by the Spanish and the way that Catholic Spain constructed its identity in contrast to Islamic Spain. In the case of Muslims in Spain, and later of Indigenous people in North America, Spanish Catholics constructed an "Other" who was so unreasonable that they were justified in their colonial and imperial project (Rana 38).
Christians, both British and Spanish, imagined the Muslim and North American Indigenous subjects as sexually perverse. They were also denounced for their homosexuality, which was not only immoral in the view of the European Christian colonizer but also a threat to their masculine ideal (Rana 39). This idea of sexuality and masculinity as a colonial tool harkens back to Said's argument that "Oriental" men were constructed by the West as effeminate to further assert the backward nature of the Orient as opposed to the Occident.