ABSTRACT
This collection of essays operates from the assumption that modern colonial regimes are never self-evidently hegemonic, but are always in process, subject to disruption and contest, and therefore never fully or finally accomplished, to such an extent that they must be conceived of as ‘unfinished business’. It also presumes that the gendered and sexualized social orders produced by such regimes are equally precarious, and hence offer us unique opportunities to see the incompleteness of colonial modernities at work. Each of the essays included here engages the limited capacity of the state and other instruments of social, political and cultural power to fully contain or successfully control the domain of sexuality, especially as evidenced by the mobility and recalcitrance of women’s bodies (and some men’s as well). In this sense the book is not simply about gender and sexuality as self-evident categories, but about their capacity, as contingent and highly unstable systems of power, to interrupt, if not to thwart, modernizing regimes. This is in part because they are not simply dimensions of the socio-political domain, but represent its productive and uneven effects.1
