Themes

Attitudes toward gender and sex shaped the dynamics of the British empire and helped define the principles through which rule was maintained. Unsurprisingly, the British considered their culture superior and at times saw it threatened by the ‘alien’ cultures and practices they encountered. Gender was a currency through which negotiations were conducted between the colonizer and colonized, often revealing deep fault lines. In the nineteenth century, interracial sexual relationships between white men and native women were treated as threats to the socio-sexual order of the empire, and the hybrid progeny of those liaisons – the so-called Anglo-Indians – were variously seen as a stain on the racially “superior” European. Indian mistresses of white colonizers faced social ostracization within their communities, although British officers did try to provide for their mixed-race children.

Both native and British women were a crucial manifestation of political configurations within the empire. The native woman provided a useful domain of colonial intervention. Portrayed as a victim in traditional practices such as child marriage and sati (widow burning), the colonial state presented itself as bound to “rescue” her. Imperial feminism hinged upon the construction of a global sisterhood, and the campaigns of people like Josephine Butler in the late nineteenth century around prostitution and contagious, sexually-transmitted disease were predicated on the imagery of colonized women as helpless victims. Later, women suffragettes in Britain, for example, used the domination of colonized subjects to draw attention to the gender inequalities in Britain.

The sexuality of the English soldier became an overriding concern for colonial authorities. Legal measures regulating prostitution, and interracial marriages and relations were instituted as a consequence in almost all colonies, and professions like the military and the missionary, with their own discourses and practices around masculinity and gender roles, were also subject to scrutiny. In places like Fiji, discourses about sexual relations among the Indians transported as indentured labour towards the end of the 19^th century were often different from the established discourse on sexuality of colonial subjects. Sexual categories and “permissible” sexual identities began to be formulated.

Homosexuality was seen as a threat to the masculine Empire, and even homoerotic relations hinted at in texts like A Passage to India, were viewed with suspicion. The criminalization of homosexuality in the 1870s, like the campaign against contagious diseases with which it coincided, was in part a response to concerns among imperial administrators, politicians and evangelicals that what they saw as the pervasiveness of male to male sexual relationships in the colonies would lead, if unchecked, to a degradation of the masculine spirit which was at the heart of imperial endeavour.

Robert Aldrich’s Colonialism and Homosexuality demonstrates how homosexuality did not quite fit the European imperialist’s image of himself, whether in Africa or India. JD Kelly’s “Discourse about sexuality and the end of indenture in Fiji” examines the discourses of sexual relations in Fiji is a useful entry point into the subject of imperial sexuality in the region. Durba Mitra’s “Translation as techné” traces the role of translation in the work of imperial sexual discourse. Philip Howell’s “Sexuality, sovereignty and space” studies the legal control asserted over spaces and sexuality in Gibraltar, and Douglas Peers does an equivalent job for India in “Privates off Parade”. Rhonda Semple’s “Missionary Manhood” is a study of Christian masculinity’s role in imperialism.