Sexuality and morality in colonial and contemporary spaces

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Sexuality and morality in colonial and
contemporary spaces
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Key questions

• How were racialized, gendered and sexualized
  discourses connected in colonial
  representations?
• How did these shape health and disease?

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Discourses of Desire

• Feminizing, gendering, sexualizing the landscape
• Gender and raced discourses connected in accounts
  by White explorers, traders, missionaries etc
• Jarosz Dark Continent
• Very masculinist language used to describe
  colonies and peoples (by both men and women)
• Language of aggressive, submission, sexual
  domination, ownership is very common
• Eroticizing people and places is a very common
  form of Othering

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• Early colonial adventures
• Christopher Columbus writes in 1492 that
• ancient mariners have been mistaken in thinking
  the earth was round, instead it is shaped like a
  womans breast, with a protuberance upon its
  summit in the unmistakable shape of a nipple
• Africa described as virginal land
• Waiting to be penetrated

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• Places given names denoting erotic female body
  parts
• eg Writings on King Solomans mines and Shebas
  Breasts

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• Paul Du Chaillu Discovery of Gorilla
• From this elevation I enjoyed an unobstructed
  view as far as the eye could see. The hills we
  had surmounted the day before lay at our feet,
  seeming mere molehills. On all sides stretched
  the immense virgin forestsand far away in the
  east loomed the blue tops of the farthest range
  of the sierra de Cristal, the goal of my
  desiresI began to think how this wilderness
  would look if only the light of Christian
  civilization could be fairly introduced among the
  black children of Africa

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• Why?
• New places to conquer and penetrate
• Suggest landscape is seductive, mysterious
• Justifies colonial action
• Male anxiety over female gains in Europe
• Reinscribe male dominance

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2. Feminizing African men

• The depiction of Africans as feminine was a
  potent tool of imperialism, and was used to
  support the notion of its domination by a
  superior Britain coded as masculine
• (McEwan)

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• I will impart to you in strict confidence my
  opinion on the African. He is not half devil and
  half child any more than he is our benighted
  brotherHe is a womanTake the white races, your
  Hebrew and Teuton are masculineTake your
  coloured racesYour negro and Melanesian are
  feminine.
• Mary Kingsleys view of Africans in a letter to
  a friend, 1907 (in reader, 104)

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3. Africans as hyper-sexualized

• Folklore described Asia, the Americans and Africa
  as erotic
• men sport huge penises, women consort with apes
  etc
• Africans are proud, lazy, treacherous,
  thievish, hot and addicted to all sorts of lusts
• The Universal History of Africa 1760s
• Later scientific observation and discourses in
  Victorian age repeated these ideas
• Women viewed as sexually promiscuous, tempting
  white men

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4. Racial and gender discourses around
inter-racial sex and colonial desire

• Race AND gender inequalities vital in maintaining
  colonial racism and imperial authority
• White women restricted from Africa and other
  colonial areas
• employment contracts denied marriage with
  European women before the 3rd tour
• Men to women in colonies 252 times!

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Colonial Desire

• During earlier settlement periods male desire
  usually directed at natives
• White women viewed as paragons of morality,
  parasitic or passive
• Men assumed to have heightened sexual drive
  because of the climate
• Empire viewed as a sexual playground for European
  men
• free from the stifling morality of Victorian
  Britain
• Sexual relationships with locals viewed as
  natural and politically and economically
  important.

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Men encouraged to take native women for
partners
Phillips in reader State and military
regulation of prostitution
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Why?

• 1. Cost
• Of bringing family
• Of health care of children/ wives
• Free domestic care for men alongside sexual and
  labor work for native women
• Cheaper than paying for prostitutes

So salaries could be kept low!
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• 2. Fear
• Wives encourage husbands to return to Europe
• Wives would compete with colonial administration
  in domestic industries
• 3. Class
• Avoid rise of a lower class, white settler
  population
• 4. Health/ wellbeing
• Men protected against risk of venereal disease
• Native women act as guides to local languages and
  customs
• Provide medical knowledge in degenerative
  climates
• Phillips Reading for today

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• ? Discourses around desire and political/
  economic/ health context are closely connected

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Changes in the 1900s

• By 1900s, theories of White acclimatization and
  degeneracy following move to colonies suggested
  that taking a native was problematic
• Young colonial men are often driven to seek a
  temporary companion amongst women of color this
  is the path by which, as I shall presently show,
  contagion travels back and forth, contagion in
  all sense of the world
• Maunier, 1932
• ? Entry of women settlers to the colonies
• Hawaii, Indonesia, Vietnam, Rhodesia (now
  Zimbabwe), and Gold Coast -- amenities and
  climate more suited to women
• Entry of western women brought discipline of
  Europe to colonial life
• ? Formalization of dress codes
• ? Enclosing of housing compounds
• ? Food and social codes reinforced

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• Narrative suggest a rise in accounts of
• Jealousy between white men and native women
• Women taking mixed race children to prevent them
  ? revolutionaries
• Fear of Black Peril and risk to white male
  prestige
• Charges of rape of white women often unfounded
  but brutally disciplined
• Stories of rape ? to Europe
• Used to unify colonizers divided by race and
  nationality
• BUT White male rape and harassment of natives
  was socially acceptable

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2 forms of sexual regulation in colonies

• What were these?
• State and military regulation of prostitution and
  concubinage
• Contagious Diseases Act (1864, 1866, 1869)
• Prostitutes had to be tests for STIs
• Degrading process that targeted women as site of
  disease
• 2. Purity movements
• Resisted this regulation
• Sought to eg raise age of consent in colonies

Reading Phillips
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Conclusions

• 4 key ways that sexual, gendered, and raced
  discourses were connected
• Language rooted in
• Class, gender and racial inequalities, boundaries
  and hierarchy
• European codes of morality
• Worked to regulate and maintain different bodies
  in different ways
• After Foucault
• Black, white, male, female bodies
• Shaped incidence and cultural meanings around
  health and in particular STIs