Coming of Age.A (Post) Colonial and Queer Contribution Towards the Deconstruction of the Notion of “Minority”

Abstract

The notion of “minority” has historically been a determining factor in the granting of rights to different groups in modern societies, whether because of their ethno-racial, gender, religious or sexual orientation status, among others. However, the use of the concept has been used to maintain these groups as subaltern.This article explores the notion of minority and “minority discourse” functionality as a colonial tool. After analyzing the story of the term in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, this article focus in the case of ethnic and sexual minorities in order to related them to the discourse of Latin American Liberation Theology. Drawing from ethnic studies, Michel Foucault’s studies on power, Slovoj Žižek’s reading on Jacques Lacan’s concept of jouissance, and Marcella Althaus- Reid’s indecent theology, this essay concludes that both the notion of minority and the “minority discourse” are rhetorical technologies of colonialism whose function is to restrict Otherness and perpetuate a desexualized and racialized perspective on subaltern subjects.