Colonialism

In the opening chapter of Empire and Sexuality, the historian Ronald Hyam makes the claim that the growth of the British Empire was fueled by the "export of surplus sexual energy" (Hyam 1990). Although this may appear strange to those who think that imperial growth was fueled by the export of surplus capital, it makes an important connection between colonial empires, gender, and sexuality. At a certain level the space of other cultures, of the Other (as theorized by Edward Said in Orientalism [1978]), was always the space of a sexuality denied, fantasized, or projected by European culture. Thus, although the empire is the space of sex, especially the unspeakable sexual practices of the Other, the mechanisms of projection, denial, and fantasy both predate and outlive the period of formal colonialism.

THE EXPORTATION OF SEXUAL ENERGY

What these two areas (the export of surplus sexual energy and its production and projection) share is their gendered nature: The energy being exported is unquestionably male (in the nineteenth century the idea that women had any sexual energy, let alone an internationally exportable surplus, would have been shocking), as are the sexual fantasies and projections. The imposition of an essentially male imagination can be seen through the gendering and sexualizing of geography. Examples range from the early engraving by artist Jan van der Straet (1523–1605) of explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512) confronting America in the shape of a naked indigenous woman to Said's categorization of the discourse of Orientalism as encouraging "a peculiarly (not to say invidiously) male conception of the world" that included the Orient's "feminine penetrability" and in which "women are usually the creatures of the male power-fantasy. They express unlimited sensuality, they are more or less stupid, and above all they are willing" (Said 1978, pp. 206-207).

THE DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL REGULATION OF SEXUALITY

Although gender, sexuality, and sexual preferences and practices are intimately and variously related to colonialism, it can be very difficult in the context of a range of European empires to offer satisfactory generalizations because of the variety of attitudes and behaviors both within and across the different empires during their 400-year history. One thing that is generalizable is the fact that the major period of growth of the colonial empires from the late eighteenth century onward coincided with other developments in European society that had important effects on issues of gender and sexuality in those empires. The elaboration of colonialism as a transnational system of power and control was partnered by and in certain ways depended on a different approach to power and control domestically. As Michel Foucault (1979) argued, this period saw the European states increasingly develop strategies of bio-power as a framework for the regulation of the body, both that of the individual and the collective body of the general population. If the regulation of bodies and behaviors was central to good government at home, it was even more so in the colonies, where the populations were inherently more problematic. In Foucault's work, however, power does not function only in a repressive or controlling manner; it is also productive, inciting or encouraging preferred forms of behavior. That is true for both the colonizers and the colonized, though frequently in very different ways.

Although Hyam would counterpose domestic regulation to a realm of colonial freedom, it is clear that the regulation of male behavior, perhaps even more than female behavior, became more formalized and constraining as the British Empire itself became more formalized. For example, when the British East India Company ruled India, its employees, especially in the military, were encouraged to marry Indian women. In that period even high-ranking officers, bureaucrats, and wealthy merchants openly took Indian wives or mistresses. After the Indian mutiny of 1857 and the assumption of direct control by the British government, however, an altered moral and ideological climate as well as greater government surveillance and regulation produced a reversal of attitude toward India, with its crucial ideological role as the jewel in the imperial crown.

The higher the position one occupied, the greater the regulation and penalties, and cross-cultural relationships became punishable by social ostracism, loss of one's job, or possibly worse: Rudyard Kipling's short story "Beyond the Pale" (1890) ends with the highly symbolic near castration of a British official who ignores the rules and loves an Indian girl. The punishment for the girl is brutal mutilation, and the fact that that act is carried out by an Indian reinforces the supposed universality of the opening statement of the narrative: "A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. Let the White go to the White, and the Black to the Black" (Kipling 1890, p.159). A tragic result of the policy of encouraging and then discouraging cross-cultural sexual relationships was the creation of dual-heritage Anglo Indians whose hybrid nature was not acceptable to either of the pure races from which they sprang.

FEAR OF MISCEGENATION

At the same time the moral climate in India grew more difficult, in other parts of the British Empire, such as Africa and Malaya, attitudes continued to be tolerant toward white men who had relationships with black women. The converse—white women and black men—was never acceptable anywhere in the empire. As far as the colonial regulation of female behavior was concerned, the primal fear of Europeans was racial mixing or dilution of their whiteness, and miscegenation became the great colonial taboo.

All white women in the colonies or in contact with black men at home in the metropolis therefore carried an enormously ideologically value-laden responsibility for the future of the race. Although all societies have controlled access to their female members, especially by male outsiders, that became a very highly charged issue in the racialized power politics of colonialism. As science and pseudoscience contributed to that process in the second half of the nineteenth century, the growth of the eugenics movement intensified the political climate, as everything from the maintenance of social order and hierarchy to the ability to field an army of strong, healthy soldiers was linked to the question of breeding. Proper sexual reproduction allowed proper social reproduction, and that was as true for the colonial empire as it was for the mother country.

If unauthorized access to white women was the greatest transgression colonized subjects could perpetrate, rape represented its most graphic instance, an ever-present menace. The very idea of the rape of white women by colonized subjects could reduce white men to murderous fury. In the Indian mutiny, for example, the possibility that Englishwomen captured at Cawnpore might have suffered a fate worse than death (as well as actual death) was sufficient to make Remember Cawnpore! the battle cry for the English as they carried out a brutal retribution. (A similar spirit of murderous irrationality grounded in unsubstantiated fantasy characterized the period of lynching in the United States.) The fact that rapes did not occur regularly or perhaps at all did not alleviate the obsessive fear that white women were in a permanent state of danger. The central event, or nonevent, of E. M. Forster's novel A Passage to India (1924) is an alleged attempted sexual assault on a white woman by an Indian doctor.

The other side of this ever-present but never-realized threat is the fact that rapes were carried out by white men. That history runs at least from the routine sexual abuse of female slaves by plantation owners in the Americas, through the rape and murder of Indian women by British soldiers in India in the 1930s, to the rape of Kenyan women by British soldiers and colonial functionaries during and after the Mau Mau insurgency of the 1950s. In Kenya rapes by the British were echoed by their African Home Guard subordinates, but Caroline Elkins (2005) argues that failure to emulate the British left one open to the charge of being a Mau Mau sympathizer.

COLONIAL VERSUS COLONIZED MASCULINITY

At the other extreme from this kind of male behavior was the idealized form that colonial power in its productive mode aimed to incite. That was the imperial hero: brave, honorable, truthful, loyal, and restrained, the embodiment of Christian virtue, as analyzed by Graham Dawson (1994). The remodeling of upper-class English masculinity in the nineteenth century, which was carried out in part by the public school system, found its apogee in this figure, which was relayed to the youth of the empire through hundreds of fictional and factual narratives.

The ideological antithesis of this figure lay in various representations of colonized masculinity. Those representations included the Oriental male as effeminate (and therefore no match for his manly English counterpart), as sexually voracious (unlike the civilized and restrained Englishman), and, in Katherine Mayo's Mother India (1927), as the unrepentant brutalizer of pitiful child brides too young for marriage or intercourse. As is frequently the case with ideology, no consistency was required of those negative images so long as they allowed the colonizer to be seen in a good light. As Said argued, "Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with Orient, without ever losing him the relative upper hand" (Said 1978, p. 7). In this way the process of identity formation on the part of the colonizers, whether in terms of gender, sexuality, or nationality, should proceed smoothly, though there is always the possibility of coming up against uncomfortable reality.

POSTCOLONIAL ISSUES

Despite its apparent strength and durability, colonialism was only a phase in the larger global project of imperialism, and the international, transcultural, and imperial politics of sex and gender did not end with the period of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century. Although some practices and policies are specific to and enabled by the possession of colonial empires, they do not necessarily end with the formal ending of those empires, and two topics from the colonial period have a great deal of current relevance.

Female Genital Mutilation

In Kenya in the late 1920s the missionary society of the Church of Scotland set out to ban female genital mutilation. That campaign inevitably evokes comparisons with the British outlawing of sati, in which a Hindu woman cremates herself on her husband's funeral pyre, in early nineteenth-century India and carries the same ideological image Gayatri Spivak sees as epitomizing the whole colonial enterprise: "Imperialism's image as the establisher of the good society is marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind"; this also can be stated as, "White men are saving brown women from brown men" (Spivak 1994, pp. 94 and 92). Although they were actively involved in modernizing and Christianizing male circumcision in Kenya, the missionaries refused to approve of female clitoridectomy and instead tried to stamp it out. Gikuyu people reacted to the perceived attack on their cultural and spiritual identity because along with breaking the profound individual and collective link to the earth created by the ritual shedding of blood, the ban created a group of women who could not be considered clean, disciplined, responsible, or marriageable and thus were nonpersons in Gikuyu terms. Conceptions of what it meant to be a proper man and woman in Africa were deeply opposed, but not simply along racial lines, as Gikuyu converts to Christianity often sided with the missionaries. Gikuyu resistance to the ban fed on and fed back into a more general resistance to British colonial rule and a generation later culminated in the Mau Mau insurgency.

The reemergence of the issue in a wider context in the 1980s and 1990s both in Africa and in diaspora communities in the Europe and North America often was seen in terms of white Europeans attempting to impose their cultural values on others. The fact that the matter is more complex, however, is demonstrated by the film Warrior Marks (1993), which was made by two prominent nonwhite feminists: the African-American novelist Alice Walker (b. 1944) and the British-Asian director Pratibha Parmar. Its vigorous championing of the right of African women not to undergo genital mutilation—supported by moving testimony from African women—was criticized as an example of latter-day colonialist mentality. (Conversely and in some ways ironically, a film on the same subject by the Senegalese male director Ousmane Sembene (b. 1923), Mooladé [2004], was well received.) Although the practice lacks any evident justification other than its asserted traditional nature, it is clung to tenaciously and stands as one kind of limit to a would-be universal discourse of rights.

The Veil

Both in Muslim countries and in Islamic communities in non-Muslim states, the wearing of a veil has been an issue from the colonial period into the postcolonial period. The politics of veiling and unveiling under colonialism were examined by Frantz Fanon (1965) in the context of the Algerian war of liberation from the French. Although the colonizers saw the removal of the veil as part of the necessary liberatory modernizing of their Muslim colonies, for Fanon a darker process was at work: The veil constituted an obstacle to the power of the colonizers to look at whatever they wished, and so "the rape of the Algerian woman in the dream of a European is always preceded by a rending of the veil" (Fanon 1965, p. 45).

In the context of the liberation struggle, however, Algerian women came to use the veil in ways that were directly political and even revolutionary and had profound implications for their gender and sexual identities. Unveiled, women could move in the European part of town unnoticed, carrying messages or bombs in their handbags, as portrayed in Gillo Pontecorvo's (1919–2006) film Battle of Algiers (1963). Veiled, women could hide documents and weapons in their voluminous clothing. Unveiling forced them to experience their bodies in new and disconcerting ways, but the conscious political use of the veil, Fanon felt, stripped it of any repressive traditional power. Even if he was overoptimistic on that point, thinking about the veil could never be the same after his analysis.

In an extensive discussion of colonial and postcolonial veiling in Colonial Fantasies, Meyda Ye?eno?lu concludes, "The veil is a dress, but a dress which we might consider as articulating the very identity of Muslim women" (Ye?eno?lu 1998, p. 119). However, this can be true only in terms of a deliberately constructed identity rather than the essentialist one suggested by the quote in light of the way in which the growth of systematically Arabized or Islamicized societies across the Muslim world, particularly in the postcolonial period, has involved the adoption of the veil by women whose identities previously had not been articulated by it.

Some of the most contentious examples of the politics of postcolonial veiling and unveiling have occurred in Europe, as in the case of l'affaire des foulards in France in the 1990s in which schoolgirls were forbidden to wear Islamic headscarves in the name of state secularism, and the 2006 case of a British Muslim teaching assistant who lost her job for refusing to remove her full-face veil while teaching. In addition to the ongoing politics of the veil, the global panic in the wake of the attack on the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001, has meant that any unapologetic display of Muslim identity carries a price.

Colonialism wielded the power of life and death over its subjects, but not usually through their sexual behavior. The government of U.S. President George W. Bush (b. 1946), however, has made medical aid to African countries devastated by the AIDS pandemic conditional on their promotion of a policy of sexual abstinence rather than sex education and the use of condoms; indeed, condom use constitutes grounds for the withdrawal of funding. The absence of any political or economic benefit for the United States makes this look like colonialism at its most messianic: the embodiment of a supposedly God-given right to control the lives of anyone whom colonial power can reach.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ballhatchet, Kenneth. 1980. Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Their Critics, 1793–1905. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

Dawson, Graham. 1994. Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinity. London: Routledge.

Elkins, Caroline. 2005. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya. New York: Henry Holt.

Fanon, Frantz. 1965. "Algeria Unveiled." In Studies in a Dying Colonialism, trans. Adolfo Willy. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1979. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.

Gill, Anton. 1995. Ruling Passions: Sex, Race and Empire. London: BBC Books.

Hyam, Ronald. 1990. Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Kipling, Rudyard. 1890. "Beyond the Pale." In Plain Tales from the Hills. New York: F. F. Lovell.

Mayo, Katherine. 1927. Mother India. London: Jonathan Cape.

Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1994. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press.

Ye?eno?lu, Meyda. 1998. Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press.

                                        Patrick Williams