ABSTRACT
This chapter pursues the premise that imperial authority and racial distinctions were fundamentally structured in gendered terms. It looks at the administrative and medical discourse and management of European sexual activity, reproduction, and marriage as part of the apparatus of colonial control. The chapter attends more to the dominant male discourse (less to women’s perceptions of the constraints placed on them), arguing that it was how women’s needs were defined, not by but for them, that most directly shaped specific policies. Treating the sexual and conjugal tensions of colonial life as more than a political trope for the tensions of empire writ small but as a part of the latter in socially profound and strategic ways, it examines how gender-specific sexual sanctions and prohibitions not only demarcated positions of power but also prescribed the personal and public boundaries of race.
