ABSTRACT
Much of the scholarship on the intersection of desire with other social structures has explored how sex was a tool of oppression and dominance, maintaining hierarchies of class and race. The chapter explores a small sample of this rich body of work in an effort to highlight some of the different ways historians have tried to see connections between sex and power. Class relations could heighten and give form to sexual desire and sexual desire could cement social relations of dominance and submission. Anne McClintock argues that Said fails to see that gender and sexuality are constitutive not just representative of dominance. One of the few exceptions is Ronald Hyam's study of sex and the British Empire. Much of this work has highlighted the central place of sex in Western anxieties about cultural boundaries. The chapter explores the fraught emotional and sexual character of forms of social domination.
