ABSTRACT
Anxieties about racial and sexual boundaries were expressed most intensely in the colonies. Colonial authorities also wanted to reshape colonized people and manage their sexual and reproductive lives to impose “civilized” mores on them and to get greater productivity, but these intrusions into the most personal, intimate aspect of people’s lives triggered intense resistance. The chapter focuses on anxieties about interracial sex, prostitution, and age-of-consent reform in British India, and sexual commerce, bridewealth, and clitoridectomy in African colonies. It concludes with a discussion of how radical sexologists drew on their fantasies about exotic and primitive sexuality to challenge European traditions.
