ABSTRACT
How should historians approach gender, the body, and sexuality from a global perspective? This essay examines the links between colonialism and sexuality, particularly the “intimate frontiers of empire.” This includes distinguishing between different sexual practices and what we mean by “sex,” discussing attitudes toward anal sex in Sex and the City in the late 1990s and “heavy petting” in the 1950s, and exploring how queer sexuality was understood by imperialism as both a space of sexual possibility and as evidence of a lack of “civilization.” Exploring how approaches to sexuality and empire have changed over the last 30 years, particularly regarding sex work, this essay also considers imperial archives, the perspectives to prioritize, and the positionality of historians. Finally, it considers the commodification and sexualization of female bodies through the contemporary legacy of Orientalist colonial photography and its role as an ongoing site of colonial violence.
