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Colonialism and sexuality sameness, superiority and inferiority, morality and indecency. Most scholars of colonialism do George Paul Meiu not take sexuality to be an unquestionably uni- Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States versal bodily realm or a biological given of human existence. Rather, drawing on the work of Michel Colonialism and sexuality represent entangled Foucault (1926–1984), they take sexuality to refer historical processes that tie together matters of to a modern domain of discourse that posits such economy and intimacy, politics and pleasure, a universal, biological realm in the human body reformist interventions and carnal desires. in order to serve the purposes of the disciplinary Broadly construed, colonialism refers to the and regulatory power of the modern state. expansion and maintenance of the sovereignty of Foucault (1978) argues that, from the nineteenth one group of people over another. Anthropologists century, in Western Europe, the desires and pleas- and historians of sexuality, however, most often ures derived largely from the genital realm came use “colonialism” to refer more specifically to the to be classed together as “sexual” and treated as implications of the conquest, pacification, and natural objects of knowledge. In so doing, dis- control of American, Asian, African, and Pacific course named and classified sexual types, such as territories and populations by Western European the homosexual, the hermaphrodite, and others, states. This specific instance of colonialism began thus enabling modes of control over bodies and in the sixteenth century with the “discovery” of populations. In this way, Foucault argues, moder- new lands and peoples, and their subsequent nity produced sexuality as an effect of its new annexation by a growing network of commerce forms and figurations of power. The expansion of controlled by Europe. In addition to commerce, a Western European colonial powers throughout strong emphasis on reforming the minds and the nineteenth century offered scientists and bodies of the natives gradually became a central moralists an important source of “knowledge,” dimension of colonialism. Starting at the begin- with which to describe, classify, and eventually ning of the nineteenth century, colonial adminis- reform the various intimate practices and desires trators and missionaries increasingly strove to of non-European populations. Deemed sexual, transform the lives of colonial subjects so that such practices and desires fed the colonial imagi- they would desire the moral and material goods nation about other peoples and places, and of “civilization,” commodity consumption, and offered a source of moral legitimacy to colonial Christianity. Certainly, the various agents of the reforms. empire—traders, administrators, missionaries, The language of sexuality played a central and settlers, among others—held different, often ideological role in the making of empire. By clas- conflicting, ambitions and ideological motives. sifying the intimate desires and bodily pleasures Nevertheless, they operated with relatively similar of the colonized as “sex,” colonials could prove frameworks of racial and cultural Otherness. that these deviated from bourgeois standards of Informed at times by the Christian rhetoric of morality and thus required their “enlightened” paganism, at times by scientific theories of evolu- intervention and reform. For example, in the pre- tionism, colonials saw their subjects respectively colonial kingdom of Buganda in East Africa, inti- as “heathens,” “degenerate races,” or, more nostal- mate relations between the king and his male gically, as “noble savages.” pages represented an important mode of assert- Sexuality represented a central domain of colo- ing political obedience. As missionaries reconfig- nial imagination and intervention through which ured these intimacies under the generic category various social actors, who were involved in the of the “sexual” and associated them with the politics of the empire, constructed and contested Christian notion of “sin,” some pages began to arguments about race and culture, difference and refuse yielding to what seemed now to be their
The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality, First Edition. Edited by Patricia Whelehan and Anne Bolin. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2 king’s “unnatural desires.” Consequently, in 1886, And if colonial representations often carried the king burnt 30 pages alive on a pyre. Neville negative messages about the sexualities of the Hoad (2007) reads these historical events to sug- colonized, they often also fueled erotic fantasies gest that the way in which missionaries recoded through which metropolitan audiences could the significance of bodily intimacies as “sex” imagine “paradises” devoid of the constraining gradually eroded political loyalties to the African sexual norms of the European bourgeoisie. Since king and legitimized the “necessity” of British the time of Captain Cook, for example, the paternalism. Here, reorganizing African intima- Pacific Islands were imagined as spaces of sexual cies, desires, and pleasures under the generic freedom (Wallace 2003). notion of “sexuality” of the Euro-American bour- The notions of sex and sexuality also offered a geoisie represented an ideological mechanism of vocabulary for drawing and policing boundaries colonial power. of intimacy between races, tribes, ethnic groups, Colonial representations of so-called “native” or cultures. Most significantly, the seeming fragil- sexualities used a wide variety of textual and ity of boundaries of race sparked deep anxieties graphic motifs to depict the carnal desires of among authorities in the colonies and in the the colonized as devious, whether excessive or metropole. Eugenicists and proponents of the underdeveloped. Deeply fascinated with the “degeneracy theory” posited that miscegenation bodies and sexual practices of racial and ethnic (sexual reproduction between members of differ- Others, metropolitan scientists and popular ent races) would weaken the white race, which audiences read oversized genitalia, protruding was presumed to be superior to other races. In buttocks, and large breasts to be iconic of an various colonial contexts, at particular moments inherent hypersexuality in colonized men and in time, the danger of miscegenation informed women. The case of Saartjie Baartman, the radical legal interventions into the intimate so-called “Hottentot Venus,” is suggestive in this domains of domesticity, family, and sexual life. regard. Born and raised among the Khoisan of Ann Stoler (2002) shows how, for example, by the South Africa sometime before 1790, Baartman end of the nineteenth century, in the Dutch col- sailed for England in 1810. There, her Dutch ony of the West Indies, colonial authorities toler- “master” exhibited her as a prototype of a primi- ated relationships between Dutch men and local tive African woman in so-called “freak shows.” concubines, as these allowed them to avoid the Her body was to speak to large audiences of the costs of bringing Dutch women to the colony. savage sexuality of Africa. After Baartman’s With the rise of the number of metis children, death in France in 1815, her body was bought however, the authorities had to face the threaten- and dissected by scientists and later exhibited at ing possibility of the blurring of the divide the Musée national d’histoire naturelle in Paris between ruler and ruled. As a result, by the 1920s, (Gilman 1989; cf. Magubane 2001). Subjected to European women were encouraged to migrate to a white (male) gaze, the black female body came the colonies, to marry Dutch men, to give birth, under colonial control. and to raise their children to become “Dutch” Similarly, colonial iconography depicted the (Stoler 2002). It was thus through sex that racial conquest of foreign lands as a sexual conquest by boundaries were both threatened and (re)traced European men of the non-European female bod- (see also Nagel 2003; Stallybrass and White 1986). ies. Anne McClintock (1995:1–4) describes a Colonial reforms of bodies and polities, eco- map drawn by a Portuguese trader, Jose de nomic production and social reproduction also Silvestre, in 1590, and reproduced by Henri R. gave rise to new forms of intimacy, desire, and Haggard in his memoir. The map depicts the tra- pleasure, as well as to new sexual subject positions jectory to the treasure chambers of the King (e.g., Ghosh 2006; Sigal 2000). Luise White (1990) Solomon’s mines in South Africa as a journey shows how, with the rise of male labor migration across a female bodily shape. The male explorer in colonial Kenya, there was a simultaneous rise in must pass between the “breasts” to eventually female prostitution in the cities. Various types of find the treasure in the “vagina.” The symbolic prostitution emerged, including streetwalkers moment of penetration serves here as a meta- (watembezi), prostitutes who invited clients to phoric representation of the colonial conquest. their rooms (malaya), and others who called out 3 to potential clients from the doorsteps of their Gilman, Sander L. 1985. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: homes (wazi-wazi). In the absence of pimps, some Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late of these women became powerful landlords in the Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine and Literature.” city. White shows that authorities, at times, toler- Critical Inquiry, 12(1): 204−242. ated prostitution for it was of strategic importance Hoad, Neville. 2007. African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization. Minneapolis: in maintaining a low cost of labor in the colony. By University of Minnesota Press. maintaining prostitution in town, the colonial Magubane, Zine. 2001. “Which Bodies Matter? government could provide male labor migrants Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious with the “comforts of home” and encourage them Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus’.” to keep their wives and children in their rural Gender and Society, 15(6): 816−834. homes, where they subsisted on agriculture rather McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, than the subsidies of the state. In the mines of Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New southern Africa, so-called “boy-wives” (young York: Routledge. men who entered into domestic and sexual rela- Nagel, Joane. 2003. Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: tionships with older male wage laborers) per- Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers. New York: Oxford University Press. formed a similar function. Same-sex relationships Sigal, Pete. 2000. From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The substituted here sex and kinship for male laborers, Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire. while sustaining a cyclical system of labor migra- Austin: University of Texas Press. tion (Epprecht 2004). Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The Politics Sexuality played an important role, among and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell other things, in the representation of the colo- University Press. nized Other, in the drawing and policing of racial, Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial ethnic, and cultural boundaries, and in the ways Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. in which colonial subjects came to produce liveli- Berkeley: University of California Press. hoods and imagine futures. Yet the story is not Wallace, Lee. 2003. Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University over. The historical legacies of colonial sexual Press. politics continue to shape the lived realities of White, Luise. 1990. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution postcolonials, whether through global imaginar- in Colonial Nairobi. Chicago, IL: University of ies of exotic bodies in sex tourism and pornogra- Chicago Press. phy, through racialized notions of excessive sexualities in developmental and health dis- courses, or through arguments that legitimize the Further readings unequal distribution of rights and citizenship by referencing sexual difference. Aldrich, Robert. 2003. Colonialism and Homosexuality. New York: Routledge. SEE ALSO: Discursive Construction of Fanon, Franz. 2008 [1952]. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Sexuality; Eugenics and Sexology; Lyons, Andrew P., and Harriet Lyons, eds. 2011. Globalization; Medicalization of Sexuality; Race Sexualities in Anthropology: A Reader. Oxford: Wiley and Sexology; Social Construction Theory Blackwell. Najamabadi, Afsaneh. 2005. Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties References of Iranian Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Epprecht, Mark. 2004. Hungochani: The History of Stoler, Ann. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa. Montreal: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order McGill-Queen University Press. of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality: An Thomas, Greg. 2007. The Sexual Demon of Colonial Introduction, Vol. 1. New York: Vintage. Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Ghosh, Durba. 2006. Sex and the Family in Colonial Schemes of Empire. Bloomington: Indiana India: The Making of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. University Press.