redlightpolitics replied to your post: Yes, This Happened
Oh, if I can add to your list of stereotypes based on my own background: Latin America! Femicides! Anti Abortion Catholics! More Femicides!
Absolutely! For us South Asian “third worlders”, we are meek and subservient and ETERNALLY WAITING FOR WHITE MAN TO SAVE US (Thanks Mr. E. M. Forster and Jules Verne for cementing this trope), for Latin@ women it’s a *different* kind of overt sexualisation, no? Particularly that “all” Latin@ women are always up for sex, and once they are over a certain age, they can be house cleaners and nannies, no?
Correct me if I’m wrong — and I very well can be, I’m still learning.
You are totally spot on! I even have to regularly put up with these stereotypes in my daily life. When we meet someone new, my own partner is regularly asked, amid a wave of sneer and sarcastic laughter how he “manages to keep up with me”, implying that obviously the oversexualized Latina must be so difficult to deal with! And in media, it’s a trope of either salsa dancers in skimpy clothes or victims of femicide in the hands of macho culture. Add a good dose of “all those backwards Catholic countries where women will never get abortions!” and you will have the complete picture.
They always forget that Argentina was the first country in the entire American continent to legalize same sex marriage. They also never mention that the country is currently debating in congress a law (the only one of its kind in the world) that would allow the de-medicalization of trans* identities based on what they call “personal narratives” (thus, allowing trans* folks to legally change names and all documents without the need to go through an invasive medical evaluation and only basing the changes on the personal life stories of trans* folks and not on the opinions of doctors or therapists). And this is just to give two examples out of the top of my head, there are many, many more across the continent. But such matters are hardly ever spoken about in English speaking media when they address “backwards, poor and oversexualized Latin America”.
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