On the Delusion of Being Better: Empire, Heteronormativity, and the Art of Moral Theft

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Just a heads up: this essay is personal and opinionated. If you disagree, that’s completely okay. These thoughts are simply my own, shaped by my experiences, and they aren’t meant to pressure, persuade, or dictate what you should believe.

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Colonialism has often been explained through paperwork and gunboats, but its real justification was embarrassingly simple: we are superior to you. Homophobia operates on the same infantile premise, only dressed in family values instead of empire—we are normal, therefore you are wrong. One flew the Union Jack; the other waved morality like a blunt instrument. Both are less about difference than hierarchy, less about belief than entitlement. Strip away the language of “civilisation” or “nature,” and what remains is the same rotting assumption: superiority mistaken for truth. History didn’t invent this logic; it just refined it, gave it uniforms, laws, and sermons, and pretended cruelty was responsibility. This essay is not about equating histories, but about exposing the shared logic that makes both oppression and prejudice feel justified.

It sounds absurd at first, doesn’t it—to draw parallels between homophobia and colonialism. And yet, don’t they spring from the same poisoned root? Not just hatred, but an obsessive scrutiny of things that never needed justification to begin with. Traits that lie beyond human control, yet are endlessly policed, corrected, and coerced into conformity. A person does not choose their ethnicity or the colour of their skin any more than they choose who they love. To be born queer is no more a decision than to be born brown, or Black, or anything else deemed inconvenient by those desperate for dominance. And still, both are treated as errors in need of fixing. How difficult is it, really, to accept that humans can only ever be human? Loving, existing, being. Embrace it—or at the very least, stop demanding it apologise.

I am not arguing that homophobia and colonialism are the same in scale, history, or harm. I am arguing that they are built from the same architecture of power. They do not merely coexist in history; they arise from the same psychological impulse—the urge to dominate by appointing oneself as the standard. Both are born from the manufactured idea of “normalcy,” and from the dangerous belief that difference signifies inferiority rather than simple, human variation.

This line of thought didn’t emerge in isolation. It took shape during my postcolonial literature course at university, where we were grappling with the question of why British colonialism happened in the first place. The answer we kept circling back to was uncomfortably simple: because the British believed themselves superior. That conclusion lingered with me longer than the syllabus intended. I began to wonder if the same logic operated elsewhere, closer to home. Drawing from both theory and personal experience, the parallel felt unsettlingly familiar. Homophobia—why? For much the same reason. Because heterosexuality is positioned as the standard, and those who fit it are taught, implicitly or explicitly, that they are better than everyone else.

Once superiority decides what is “normal,” it begins to police even the most intimate parts of life, including love and belief.

Why, then? One can’t help but ask, especially as a queer person. Why is your love deemed purer than mine? Why is my love branded unnatural or sinful while yours passes unquestioned, when the only thing separating us is a manufactured idea of “normal”? The thought can spiral in many directions, most commonly toward religion, which I won’t linger on for long. Still, I’ve lost count of how many times queer people, myself included, have been asked what God must think of us, of our love, as if divinity itself were a moral referee. And yet the answer feels almost painfully simple: if God made me this way—queer, loving, whole—then what, exactly, is He condemning? Queerness is not a choice. Love is not a rebellion. We love who we love. Full stop.

Neither colonialism nor homophobia begins in open cruelty; both begin with certainty, which, in my view, is far more dangerous. The British Empire never cast itself as a marauder, but as a benefactor, carefully dressing invasion in the language of improvement. Civilising, uplifting, modernising—these were not decorative words, but moral alibis. Once you position yourself as the pinnacle of progress, intervention starts to look like obligation, and domination can be reframed as duty. Within this logic, violence is no longer aggression; it becomes a regrettable necessity, an unfortunate but justified step on the so-called path to enlightenment. 

And did the victims of this so-called enlightenment ever ask for it? Setting aside the alleged need for it, was it ever invited at all? Has any queer person, in the entirety of history, asked to be branded sinful—or has that accusation simply fossilised into what we now call “normalcy”? How, exactly, does someone’s skin colour, an entirely external fact that affects no one else, or two people of the same gender loving each other, trouble the life of a mere onlooker—someone with no stake, no involvement, and no right to interfere? It becomes an issue of sight alone. Straight couples perform public affection without consequence, but the moment two openly queer women hold hands, affection is recoded as provocation, and existence itself becomes an offence. 

How is that fair—or has unfairness simply been normalised? Why are people applauded for being homophobic or racist at all? It is not the hatred itself that earns praise, but the confidence with which it is delivered. Take heteronormativity, for instance. It operates on that very confidence. It rarely declares itself as prejudice; instead, it insists on being natural. Words like “normal,” “biological,” and “traditional” are not neutral descriptors but judgments masquerading as facts. By positioning heterosexuality as the unquestioned default rather than a constructed social arrangement, heteronormativity places itself beyond scrutiny. What is presumed inevitable never has to explain itself. And so difference is no longer seen as an alternative way of being, but as a mistake—something to be corrected, cured, or subtly erased.

Theory gives language to what experience already knows. 

Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism is useful here not as a metaphor but as a method. Said argues that domination requires the prior invention of an inferior “Other”—people defined less by who they are than by how they fail to measure up. The Orient is irrational, childlike, excessive; the West, by contrast, is rational, mature, restrained. This binary does not emerge organically; it is constructed to make the rule seem reasonable. In much the same way, queer people are framed not simply as different, but as excessive, unstable, or incomplete—everything the “normal” subject is not.

And so I ask again: what, exactly, is so threatening about love—or even about culture? Is my love truly lesser than that of a straight person? Is my existence somehow less valuable than that of a white person? And if so, by whose measure? How did this hierarchy come to be accepted as fairness at all?

I’d argue that the link binding it all together is epistemic arrogance: the belief that one group not only knows better, but knows on behalf of everyone else. Once knowledge is monopolised, consent becomes optional. Colonised people were never asked whether they wished to be “civilised,” just as queer people are never asked whether they want to be “corrected.” Superiority does not ask; it instructs. It does not reason; it pronounces. And when those pronouncements are resisted, violence follows—not as a rupture in moral certainty, but as its most natural extension.

Where, then, does equality even enter the conversation when superiority only declares and never debates? There is no exchange, no dialogue—only a rigid proclamation of what is deemed right and wrong, delivered without the slightest regard for those who are most affected by it.

Domination, more or less, does not begin with chains; it begins with classification. Before a group can be controlled, it must first be named as abnormal. The invention of the deviant is not accidental—it is foundational. Colonial regimes did not merely conquer land; they reorganised human difference into hierarchies. Colonised people were racialised, infantilised, and feminised—portrayed as childlike, emotionally excessive, morally undisciplined, and in need of guidance. These descriptions were not observations but strategies. To be childlike is to require supervision; to be feminised is to be deemed unfit for power; to be racialised is to be reduced from individual to type.

Queer people undergo a parallel process, though the language shifts from empire to expertise. Where colonial subjects were “uncivilised,” queer subjects were “disordered.” Difference was rerouted through medicine, law, and religion: medicalised as pathology, criminalised as deviance, moralised as sin. The homosexual was not merely someone who loved differently, but someone who was different in essence—marked, diagnosable, suspect. As Michel Foucault notes, the moment sexuality becomes an object of scientific scrutiny, it ceases to be an act and becomes an identity, one that can be monitored, corrected, and punished. Deviance, once named, becomes manageable.

Judith Butler’s theory of performativity further deepens this understanding. Norms, she argues, do not describe reality—they produce it. Gender and sexuality are not innate truths but repeated performances enforced through social reward and punishment. What falls outside the script is labelled unnatural, not because it is rare, but because it threatens the illusion that the script was inevitable in the first place. The “deviant” thus exists to stabilise the norm. Without someone to point at and say not that, the category of normal begins to wobble.

Frantz Fanon extends this logic inward. In Black Skin, White Masks, he shows how the colonised subject is eventually taught to see themselves through the eyes of the coloniser. Inferiority is not only imposed; it is internalised. The deviant begins to police their own behaviour, to minimise their difference, to pre-empt punishment. The same psychic violence is evident in queer experience—the pressure to be palatable, easily understood, respectable. Resistance itself is reframed as pathology: anger becomes hysteria, refusal becomes extremism, pride becomes provocation.

What is most revealing is how resistance is always reclassified as deviance. Anti-colonial uprisings were not responses to exploitation but outbreaks of savagery. Queer visibility is not self-expression but “agenda.” The system cannot acknowledge dissent without destabilising itself, so it recodes resistance as further proof of abnormality. To disobey is not to object, but to malfunction.

Deviance is not found in people; it is built for them. It is crafted deliberately, sharpened into a tool, wielded with politeness, and justified until it sounds reasonable. Once someone is branded as deviant, their suffering stops looking like injustice and starts looking like consequence. The system creates the wound and then applauds itself for knowing how to dress it.

Power always leaves fingerprints. We only have to look at who benefits.

Even so, who truly profits from this architecture of superiority? Always the same answer: those already standing at the centre. Superiority is never an abstract belief; it is an investment. Empire was not merely a cultural project—it was an economic one. Britain did not colonise out of curiosity or moral duty, but because conquest paid. In land, in labour, in resources, in prestige. The language of civilisation merely softened the violence, but it did not change the transaction. Superiority made exploitation sound like generosity, and it turned theft into stewardship and domination into responsibility.

Heteronormativity functions in much the same way, only its currency is stability rather than spice or silver. It safeguards inheritance by preserving the nuclear family as the primary economic unit. It reinforces patriarchy by aligning masculinity with authority and femininity with submission. It streamlines social order by offering a single acceptable script for love, sex, and kinship. When everyone is expected to fit the same mould, society becomes easier to govern. Predictability is power. Deviance disrupts it.

What superiority offers, above all, is power without merit. One does not have to be kinder, wiser, or more capable—only correctly positioned. Whiteness, heterosexuality, masculinity, citizenship: these become shortcuts to authority. They remove the burden of proving oneself. Superiority is the laziest form of dominance because it requires no excellence, only exclusion. You do not have to build anything better; you simply have to convince yourself that others are worse.

And perhaps that is its greatest appeal. Dominance is easier than self-examination. It is far simpler to rule than to reflect, to categorise than to understand, to command than to confront one’s own fragility.

Superiority absolves people of complexity. It offers a world neatly divided into leaders and led, normals and deviants, civilised and uncivilised. In such a world, no one at the top ever has to ask whether they deserve to be there.

So where does one even belong in all of this? It feels unbearably unfair. And yet, that is precisely where the so-called superiors scoff and say, 'That’s just life'. 

Because they never face the consequences, do they? It is always the ones they have pushed to the margins, singled out as strange or deviant, who bear the weight, while they crown themselves as the standard of what is acceptable. None of this disrupts their lives, not really. Not even for a day.

This comparison, as it is, upsets people so deeply because it dismantles the fantasy of moral innocence. Colonialism is safely archived as a historical crime—something regrettable, distant, and already judged. Homophobia, however, is still alive, still practised, still defended in everyday language. When you place them side by side, you collapse the comfort of temporal distance. You expose that the logic which once justified empire is the same logic still circulating in everyday judgments of love, identity, and legitimacy.

People do not object because the comparison is inaccurate. They object because it is implicating. If colonialism is wrong not only in outcome but in structure—because it rests on manufactured superiority—then any system built on that same structure inherits its moral stain. Neutrality becomes impossible. Silence stops being harmless. “I don’t have an opinion” begins to sound suspiciously like “I benefit too much to question it.”

And this is where the distinction matters: you are not arguing the equivalence of suffering, scale, or history. You are tracing a shared architecture. Different buildings, same blueprint. One operated through ships and borders, the other through laws, families, and language—but both depend on ranking human worth. Both demand an inferior category to stabilise a superior one. Both survive by pretending their hierarchies are natural rather than chosen.

Discomfort, then, is not a flaw in your argument. It is its evidence. It proves that something stable has been disturbed. The comparison forces a reckoning: either colonialism was not uniquely monstrous, or homophobia is not uniquely benign. You cannot keep both beliefs intact. One of them has to collapse.

For superiority has never been an argument—it’s a shortcut. It saves its believers the inconvenience of curiosity, the risk of empathy, and the work of coexisting. Empire collapsed when its lies became too expensive to maintain. Heteronormativity, too, survives on borrowed authority, insisting that difference is danger and sameness is safety. History suggests this strategy never ages well. 

And we, as humans, have proved it, time and again. The question is no longer whether superiority is wrong, but how long we will continue to pretend it is necessary.

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Glossary:

Infantile - of or occurring among babies or very young children.

Marauder - a person who marauds; a raider.

Benefactor - a person who gives money or other help to a person or cause.

Epistemic Arrogance - the belief that one's own knowledge (or the knowledge one recognizes as valid) is sufficient, and that nothing important can be learned from fields one does not understand or respect.

Monopolise - (of an organization or group) obtain exclusive possession or control of (a trade, commodity, or service).

Proclamation - a public or official announcement dealing with a matter of great importance.

Deviant - departing from usual or accepted standards, especially in social or sexual behaviour.

Pathology - the study of disease. The word pathology also refers to the study of disease in general, incorporating a wide range of biology research fields and medical practices.

Pre-empt - take action in order to prevent (an anticipated event) happening; forestall.

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