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2 - Colonialism and Modern Sexuality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2024

By
Penny Russell
Edited by
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks  and
Mathew Kuefler
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Mathew Kuefler
Affiliation:
San Diego State University
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Summary

The archives of modern European colonialism are preoccupied with sex. Desire, with its contexts and consequences, presented colonial authorities with opportunities and motive for the exercise of power. Yet the gamut of sexual practices they sought to regulate bore a tenuous relationship to the messy intimacies of lived experience. Those worlds of desire, repugnance, accommodation, and resistance remain beyond our reach. Historians have employed various methodologies to tackle the complexities and silences of the colonial archive. Some have striven to find dissenting, variant or “hidden” voices within bureaucratic records. Some have sought traces of fantasy, desire, and subjective experience in personal writings or works of creative imagination. Some have shown how the fashioning of the archive itself is implicated in the production of both desire and desiring subjects. Arguing that we learn most about colonial sexuality when we allow for multiple possibilities, this chapter presents and describes some of the more influential lenses historians have brought to bear upon their elusive subject: those of erotics, regulation, intimacy, mobility, and violence. While these do not exhaust the possibilities of understanding colonial sexuality, when taken together they reveal how entwined was the emergence of modern sexual mores with colonialism”s history.

Keywords

colonialismsexualityempiredesirefantasyarchivesintimacyviolenceregulationmobility
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge World History of Sexualities , pp. 27 - 49
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Aderinto, Saheed. When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aldrich, Robert. Colonialism and Homosexuality. New York: Routledge, 2003.Google Scholar
Arondekar, Anjali. For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Burton, Antoinette, ed. Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities. London: Routledge, 1999.Google Scholar
Burton, Antoinette, and Ballantyne, Tony, eds. Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Camiscioli, Elisa. Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Clark, Anna. Desire: A History of European Sexuality, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edmonds, Penelope, and Nettelbeck, Amanda. Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economies of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ghosh, Durba. Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Tortorici, Zeb. Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
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