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Postcolonial Studies
Interrogating sexuality as a foundational category of modern Western identity has also been at the center of important work in postcolonial studies since postcolonialism’s institutional establishment in Anglo-American universities in the 1980s, an occurrence aided in no small part by earlier feminist developments. In his classic book, Orientalism, Edward Said disclosed early on how the space of the Orient was repeatedly represented by writers, artists, and travelers from the western imperial metropole as an exoticized and sexual space. The discovery of new lands and the colonization of geographical spaces by western European powers have traditionally been expressed in terms of sexual conquest and an occupation of virgin land, terms that conflate the colonizer’s imperial authority with masculinity and virility. Yet, there was also considerable difference in this gendering and sexing of imperialism, as Anne McClintock points out. Arab women, for instance, were often described in colonial discourse in terms of the veil whereas African women were linked to a domestic register revolving around cotton, soap, and sanitation. McClintock writes, “In other words, Arab women were to be ‘civilised’ by being undressed (unveiled), while sub-Saharan women were to be civilised by being dressed (in clean, white, British cotton)” (31).
Mapping the myriad links between the empire and the metropole, postcolonial studies has demonstrated how colonial discourses on other races have shored up metropolitan conceptions of whiteness, Englishness, and gender and sexual norms. In his study of European and English racial theories in the nineteenth century––theories that often included an elaborate taxonomy of races in which the most primitive were typically described as having a gross and debased sexuality––Robert Young notes how the fear of hybridity and miscegenation expressed in these theories belied an erotic attraction to the racial other. In this way, “[d]isgust always bears the imprint of desire” (149). In Young’s view, colonialism was a “desiring machine” that threw territories, cultures, and