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bodies together: “In that sense it was itself the instrument that produced its own darkest fantasy—the unlimited and ungovernable fertility of ‘unnatural’ unions” (98). The issue of “metissage,” or mixed race unions, is also central to Ann Laura Stoler’s work on Dutch colonialism in the East Indies. Stoler extends Foucault’s methods and (Eurocentric) insights to illuminate the dialectical relationship between the disciplinary methods of a colonial regime regulating race and sexuality in the colonies and ongoing definitions of European national identities and citizenship rights. In her analysis, European “bourgeois sexuality” and “racialised sexuality” are “dependent constructs in a unified field” (97).
In addition to the analysis of the intersections between sexuality and race in colonial discourse, postcolonial scholarship has also been attentive to the constitutive role of sexuality in nationalism(s). Nation-states have traditionally employed a gendered discourse for self-definition (e.g., Motherland, Father of the Nation, etc.) and for inscribing relations between their male and female citizens. Certain sexualities, especially “nonreproductively-oriented sexualities” (Parker et al. 6), are often excluded from the discourse of the nation. Furthermore, the nation––conceived of as a “fraternity” as Benedict Anderson has famously described it––is often dependent upon forms of male homosocial bonding defined in clear opposition to homosexuality; it is also typically silent on the role and place of lesbians in particular. Postcolonial investigations into sexuality and the nation find an echo in social constructivist feminist scholarship engaged in studying heterosexuality as foundational to forms of contemporary social organization. Its status as “normative, privileged and compulsory” (Johnson 5, emphasis added) must be set alongside the realization of its institutionalization as more than just a sexual relation or orientation, however. As Stevi Jackson puts it, heterosexuality is about “who washes the sheets as well as what goes on between them” (18).
As the sense of a postcolonial moment gives way increasingly to a globalized one in the new millennium, however, postcolonial and other