Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T19:10:48.230Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

18 - Post-Colonialism and Sexuality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2024

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Mathew Kuefler
Affiliation:
San Diego State University
Get access

Summary

Post-colonialism, an interdisciplinary field that developed in the 1980s, examines the culture of colonialism by re-reading colonial texts through a de-colonizing eye. It provides tools to examine dilemmas of post-colonial societies that are in part tied to their colonial roots, while also offering insights into a spectrum of practices of resistance and accommodation. This chapter outlines some of post-colonial scholarship’s major contributions to understanding sexuality in colonial contexts, including the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Post-colonial scholarship has helped historians write new histories of the discipline and rule of sexual bodies under colonialism. It has emphasized that far from being only a process of economic extraction, colonialism shaped the ways that we see, know, and experience sexuality together with race, gender, and nationality. Post-colonialism continues to provide analytical tools for decolonizing knowledge and debate over sexual issues in formerly colonized societies and their metropoles, including same-sex marriages, transgender identities, and sex as paid labour. It has opened doors for new interpretations of tradition, as many people deploy post-colonial thinking in re-imagining cultural knowledge.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Further Reading

Alter, Joseph. Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arondekar, Anjali. For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Butalia, Urvarshi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Dalrymple, William. White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India. New York: Viking, 2003.Google Scholar
Fisher, Michael, Lahiri, Shompa, and Thandi, Shinder S.. A South Asian History of Britain: Four Centuries of Peoples from the Indian Subcontinent. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007.Google Scholar
Ghosh, Durba. Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Gutierrez, Ramon. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hinchy, Jessica. Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoganson, Kristen L. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Jackson, Ronald L., and Balaji, Murali, eds. Global Masculinities and Manhood. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, Margaret. White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Jordan, Winthrop. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.Google Scholar
Lelyveld, Joseph. Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.Google Scholar
Levine, Philippa. Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire. New York: Routledge, 2003.Google Scholar
Mani, Lata. Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2007.Google Scholar
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. New York: Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade.Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’. In Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Lewis, Reina and Mills, Sara, 4974. Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2013.Google Scholar
Oldenburg, Veena Talwar. Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Oldenburg, Veena Talwar.Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow, India’. Feminist Studies 16, no. 2 (1990): 259–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.Google Scholar
Sculley, Pamela, and Crais, Cliff. Sara Baartman: Publisher, Performer, Prisoner. Cape Town: University of the Western Cape Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Sinha, Mrinalini. Mother India. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2000.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stoler, Ann Laura. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Thomas, Lynn M. Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Twinam, Ann. Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walsh, Judith. Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.Google Scholar
Ward, Kerry. Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
White, Louise. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×