ABSTRACT
Writing on the Algerian war of liberation from France, Franz Fanon (1989, p. 42) attributes a sexualized imagery of imperialist conquest to the French: the hoped-for surrender of Algeria is imagined, for example, as ‘the flesh of Algeria laid bare, accepting the rape of the colonizer’. Fanon is not alone in employing metaphors of this kind. War and sex are often used as metaphors for each other: a man ‘conquers’ a woman, who ‘surrenders’ to him.
