Postcolonial/sexuality, or, sexuality in “Other” contexts: Introduction (original) (raw)
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In this paper I utilise 'autoethnography'. In dialogue with my white ancestor's Dr Sidney Spencer Kachalola Broomfield's autobiography Kachalola or the Mighty Hunter (1931), I examine his representation of the black female body in Northern Rhodesia (present day Zambia). Broomfield presents the black female body as decadent, demonised and sexualised, accusing it of conquering white men regardless of education, class and religious affiliation. Firstly, I question how the black female body sexuality and reproduction became site of social, political and racial contest and entanglement and contradictorily also the site of collaboration between white and black men; secondly, I examine the ongoing legacies of Broomfield's representation.
Queering Colonialisms and Empire
Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication, 2022
Scholarship engaging queer theory in tandem with the study of colonialism and empire has expanded in recent years. This interdisciplinary area of research draws from queer of color theorizing and women of color feminists who made these links during queer theory's emergence and development in social movements and within the field of women's and gender studies. Together, queer of color, (post)colonial, transnational feminist, and Indigenous scholars and activists have highlighted the centrality of gender and sexuality to colonial, settler colonial, and imperial processes. Among the alignments of queer and (post)colonial inquiry are their emphases on social transformation through critique and resistant praxis. In the communication discipline, scholarship queering the study of colonialism and empire has emerged in critical/cultural studies, intercultural communication, rhetoric, media studies, and performance studies. Two broad thematics defining this scholarship are (a) decolonizing queerness by identifying how queer theory, LGBTQ activism, and queer globalizations have reinforced Whiteness and empire; and (b) queering decolonization by identifying how heteropatriarchal, binary, and normative systems of sex, sexuality, and gender contribute to colonial processes of past and present.
When You Say Queer, I Hear Decolonise: Colonial Archives, Deviant Sexualities and Normative Media
Feminist Review Blog, 2019
When designing the third-year course ‘Race, Cinema and Nation’ for students of the School of Media and Design at the Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University, I learnt of the role that anthropology played in the formation of what Fatimah Tobing Rony (1996, p. 8) has defined as ethnographic cinema—that is, films which situate indigenous people in a ‘displaced temporal realm’. As Rony demonstrates, although the so-called ‘savages’ and civilised men occupied the same space and certainly lived in the same time, filmic renditions of the theory of evolution depicted ‘primitives’ as spatially and historically distant so extensively that we still take the anachronism of natives for granted (ibid., pp. 130–131). Watching King Kong (1933), my students and I directed our attention to the complex configuration of minor tropes: the mist wrapping Skull Island, drums threateningly rolling from distance, unintelligible words being sang to an unknown god and, rather expectedly, scantily dressed men dancing in a circle. This daring actualisation of the voyage theme perfectly visualises how anthropologists’ differentiation of humankind into ‘ethnographiable’ and ‘historifiable’ (ibid., p. 7) relied upon a manufactured hiatus between pre-history and modernity, which was moreover grounded in morality. As Rony (ibid., p. 27) explains, since modernity could not but be thought of as a reflection of ‘civilised’ Western societies, ‘territorial state, monogamous family and private property’ became the standard against which to assess others’ morality. Conversely, primitive societies could not but be ‘nomadic, ordered by blood ties, sexually promiscuous and communist’ (ibid.) As I taught about anthropologists’ stadial ordering of cultural forms into polygamy and monogamy, two insights struck me at once with the strength of a revelation. Firstly, the scientific and aesthetic knowledge that was systematically amassed through colonialism had to be approached as the archive that still informs how non-white and Indigenous subjects are represented via tropes as insidious as the wrapping of an island in mist. Secondly, whereas the aforesaid knowledge formations have subordinated non-white and Indigenous subjects by means of association with women (McClintock, 1995, p. 56), it is through sexuality that they have dispossessed them of humanity and/or sovereignty. Put more simply, non-white and Indigenous subjects have not been just feminised, rather they have been rendered queer.
Syllabus: Theories of Coloniality and Gender (Graduate Seminar)
2022
Course Description: What is the relationship between coloniality and historical and contemporary constructions of gender and sexuality? How are the processes of racialization and gender formation coconstitutive? This seminar takes a critical look at the theoretical intersections of colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, race, gender and sexuality by introducing students to foundational and current writing in decolonial thinking, postcolonial studies, transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and Black trans studies. As we explore the debates between postcolonial and decolonial theories, we will examine the major epistemic interventions and possible futures in the study of how empire and race mediate and shape the gender binary. We will also consider what counts as "theory" as we encounter the theoretical implications of novels, short stories, memoirs and political manifestos. Some key theorists we will read include Maria Lugones, M. Jacqui Alexander, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, Audre Lorde, Jasbir Puar and C. Riley Snorton.
The purpose of this paper is to briefly weave the dialogue of possibilities between the postcolonial studies and queer theory, an approach that is gaining ground in academia. Their fruitful spaces of trans lation have been offering to scholars and activists concepts beyond Eurocentric and hegemonic paradigms apropos of studies on gender, sexuality, hetero and homonormativity where the body emerges simultaneously as a locus of interpretation, violence and resistance.