Patel 2015 Entry on Gender and Sexuality Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies (original) (raw)
Related papers
American Ethnologist, 1989
With sustained challenges to European rule in African and Asian colonies in the early 20th century, sexual prescriptions by class, race and gender became increasingly central to the politics of rule and subject to new forms of scrutiny by colonial states. Focusing on the Netherlands Indies and French Indochina, but drawing on other contexts, this article examines how the very categories of “colonizer” and “colonized” were increasingly secured through forms of sexual control which defined the common political interests of European colonials and the cultural investments by which they identified themselves. The metropolitan and colonial discourses on health, “racial degeneracy,” and social reform from this period reveal how sexual sanctions demarcated positions of power by enforcing middle-class conventions of respectability and thus the personal and public boundaries of race.[sexuality, race-thinking, hygiene, colonial cultures, Southeast Asia]
Marking the Quilt: Veil, Harem/Home, and the Subversion of Colonial Civility
Colby Quarterly, 2001
Zanaanah is a Persian word, derived from the plural, zanaan or women. Zenana is a word that along with women's apartments also means feminine, an effeminate person or womanly. F. Steingass (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1992),623. First edition published in 1892. 2. I use "postcolonial" and colonial here as terms that historically site/cite discussions about gender. These terms have been subjected to a prolonged critique. Although I am uncomfortable with the particular demarcations implied by them, in this paper they serve as areas whose traces I mark so that I can engage in a discussion about them. This paper has been transformed by various people,
‘Onerous Passions: Colonial Anti-miscegenation Rhetoric and the History of Sexuality.’
This analysis revisits Foucauldian conceptualizations of the history of sexuality in order to map the inextricability of race, gender, and sexuality as they emerged in the context of the early American colonies. The salience of such an analysis lies in its ability to extend the terrain of Foucault’s history and brings new considerations to bear regarding the specific configurations of race, gender, and sexual intersections in North American history. If, as Foucault insists, sexuality is a set of effects produced in bodies, behaviors, and social relations, I reorient these claims to consider how these effects were racialized within the rubric of U.S. anti-miscegenation rhetoric. Through such a tracing, it becomes evident that from the early colonial context, sexuality was deployed to produce ‘ideal’ sexuality as a bastion of whiteness – that is, to configure and maintain ‘ideal’ sexuality as white.
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.
Policing native pleasures: a colonial history
The British Journal of Sociology, 2012
The moral modality of colonial power is still with us when it comes to the recreation of sexual norms of traditional or feudal society. We can examine the emergent properties of colonial knowledge anew by exploring how the colonial regime's strategic attention of regulating brothels in India differed from the analytic of power Foucault described for sexuality in European society. It turns out that amongst other things, public anxieties about the failure of adaptation by South Asians are incapable of leaving sexuality aside as a key interpretive device for their culture. The British preoccupation with reproducing the dynamics of the bourgeois matrimonial market on foreign soil in the mid-nineteenth century similarly necessitated a sociological pretext for racial purity. However, the kind of knowledge a typical traveller and employee of the East India Company brought to the Victorian public from his own researches in the brothels and streets of colonial India, which revealed how popular prostitution was as a vice amongst the officer class, was also more than a welcome imaginary relief from Christian morality; it was an alternative vision of modernity.
LGBTQS 183 Queer Settler Colonial Studies: Unsettling Sex, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation
This course asks students to understand how gender, sexuality, and the socio-medical construction of sex are intimately tied to the project of settler colonialism and statecraft in the US. Our course addresses key themes and critical frameworks in the overlapping fields of Settler Colonial Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies, Indigenous Feminist Studies, Black Feminist Studies, Queer Studies, and Trans Studies. This course practices a politics of citation and privileges the work of Indigenous, Black, Trans folks of color, and Queer folks of color. Course readings draw from a variety of disciplines including history, law, economics, biology, media studies, and literary studies to highlight the diverse approaches that have helped construct (and deconstruct) sex, gender, and sexuality amongst people of color and settlers in the US. The course is sectioned into two major parts. In the first, we consider how settler colonialism shaped and continues to shape constructions of gender, sex, sexuality, and intimacy. We practice an attentiveness to how these constructions are tied to the conquest for land and territory and how scientific racism functions as a form of colonial violence. We interrogate the category of “the human” as we discuss settler colonial constructions of class, culture, and dis/ability as nation-building projects. The second section of the course examines the role of criminalization and the carceral state in forming the geographic and social “boundaries” of a settler society and how vulnerable communities have responded to and mobilized against settler state violence. This approach allows us to draw connections between contemporary forms of criminalization in units which encompass questions about citizenship/ nationalism and immigration/borders as we move towards dreaming of liberation via decolonial and abolitionist discourses.
Heat and lust : desire and intimacy across the (post)colonial divide
2016
My thesis focuses on a group of novels dealing with Indo-British interracial marriage, written at the turn of the 20th century. The novels belong to the large corpus of popular literature produced at this time about India by male and female Anglo-Indian writers whose purpose in writing was not only entertainment but also, importantly, instruction.¹ This literature has been neglected by the literary critics but repays close attention for it is a valuable archive for the study of female perspectives on British rule in India. There has been work by historians on Anglo-Indian women recently but the womens’ own fictional writing has been largely neglected. Using a historical materialist approach, one of my aims in this study is also to examine the differences of perspective on British rule evident in male and female writing on India. The narrative trajectory is invariably the same: an ignorant British protagonist marries an Indian with whom s/he sets up home, prompted by desires which ar...