Lgbtphobia in the Yoruba religious tradition of Ifá: speculations and practices of heteronormativity

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to promote a historical descriptive study of the "Queer" spirit in the Yoruba religious community in Nigerian territorialities, as well as to search the social representations of the heteronormative models of depredation, submission and Abjection of individuals of sexual orientation or non-heterosexual sexual identity in the religious practices and initiations of priesthood of Ifá in Brazil. The analysis seeks to demonstrate - through historical fragments under the focus of ethno-philosophies and decolonial African studies - how the construction

of moralism and LGBT-phobic discrimination by Christianity and Islam in the ethnic communities of an ancestral Yoruba matrix in times of colonization and post- Colonization in Nigeria. The methodology used has as a characteristic the approach of qualitative research with the use of triangulation procedures (literature review, document analysis and discourse analysis facilitated by nuances of ethnographic research of a virtual nature). The results demonstrate that it is possible to perceive that the Yoruba culture and African ancestral matrix is something very distant, although at the same time, it is so close, within the Afrodescendant Brazilian religious culture. Finally, we come to the conclusion that there is the possibility of reinventing what has not yet been thought, of breaking our own barriers, of discussing gender relations and sexual orientation in the history of African and Afrodescendant culture. It is important that we, Afro- descendants, approach our origins, our griot culture, our pretagogies, our Arché, our Àè, that is, of a whole worldview that separate us from the spirit of purity, and respectively, that distance us from Eèlà.

Keywords:  Intercultural Education, Ethnofilosophy, Gender Studies, Ifá.