Joaquin Sanchez on La Opinión, Evo, GMO chicken and sexual orientation

In the front page of la Opinion (Bolivia), and also the Diario from
Cuba, journalists are saying that President Morales said that GMO
chicken causes homosexuality (in men)
http://www.diariodecuba.net/internacional/55-internacional/1291-evo-morales-c...

The particular paragraph in question says this:

"También señaló la alimentación como causa de la homosexualidad. Según él, todo se debe a la ingesta de pollo criado en grandes explotaciones industriales, que estarían cargados con hormonas femeninas.

"El pollo que comemos está cargado de hormonas femeninas. Por eso, cuando los hombres comen esos pollos, tienen desviaciones en su ser como hombres", aseguró, entre las risas de su auditorio."

[He also signalled that food is a cause of homosexuality. According to him [Morales] chicken that has been raised in the grand exploitative industrial way is full on female hormones. "The chicken that we eat is full of female hormones. Because of this, when men eat this chicken, they have deviations as males," he asserted, with the laughs of the audience.]

Here's what Joaquin Sanchez from Brooklyn, NY by way of Chicago, IL had to say about that: 

Exactly: the newspapers are totally exaggerating *what Evo actually said.*

And me, well here you go:

I read the statement actually as being about the impacts of endocrine disrupting hormones on the development of reproductive organs and secondary sexual characteristics in children, young men and young women, in the womb and through the mother's milk, if they are breastfed. This is well documented in the scientific environmental health literature.

As Joaquin told me earlier, the media sensation that is trying to be created is a misrepresentation of what Morales said, and plays on adult heterosexual male fears about their own masculinity. 

I also understood this more as a play on fears of male impotence if they have too much female hormones (progesterone and the other one, which i forget).

As a feminist i have to say if your masculinity is that fragile then you really better worry about that.

Regardless, you should be worrying about the chicken that's full of hormones, and the corporations.

It's true that it's problematic to associate emasculation and femininity with homosexuality, which is what is sort of behind the tittering and the sensationalistic headlines.

What makes the newspapers blow this up, unfortunately, is a sort of intersection of racism and sexuality / heterosexism, playing on particular kinds of masculinity, but also, in international discourse, a racialized sexuality that some scholars argue is related to colonization and a particularly rabid type of Christianity or Catholicism.

sorry to get all cultural studies on you ...

Posted via email from Decolonizing Environmentalism