April 2, 2003
15: ETHNIC IDENTITY, STATE, AND SEXUALITY
Read: Stoler, Ann, 1991. Carnal knowledge and imperial power, gender, race
and morality in colonial Asia.
Heng and Devan, J 1995 State fatherhood: the politics of nationalism,
xuality, and race in Singapore.
I. Introduction
A. How are ethnicity/race/nationalism and gender/xuality linked?
womanliness
are racialized, ethnicized and
and
1. Manliness
nationalized
a. And xuality, of cour, figures in such images of
manliness and womanliness
B. Common stereotypes ud to depict “us” and “them”?1
1. Positive and negative: hardworking/lazy, clean/dirty;
rational/emotional; smart/stupid; reliable/undependable;
moral/immoral; modest and virtuous/ vulgar and promiscuous;
purity/dirty
2. Often involve gender and xuality: potent and impotent men;
ruled and unruly women; male strength and weakness; female
ductive power and vulnerability; masculine xual desire and
feminine xual desirability
II. Examples of domains in which ethnicity, nationalism and race are linked to gender and xuality?
(how
citizens/members of ethnic groups reprent A. Nationalist
images
themlves and are portrayed by others) often xed
1. Nelson: how xuality in Guatemala is raced
2. Narratives of ladino men/women, Indian men/women differ
significantly—difference integral to image of Guatemala as a
nation
B. Maintenance of ethnic boundaries and stratification
1 First examples taken from Joane Nagel, 2003. Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Interctions, Forbidden Frontiers. New York: Oxford.
15 Ethnic identity, state, OCW and xuality 2003 3/22/04
1. Rules governing contact and interaction and their ideological
justification
marriage
and
x
a. Policing
and
castrations
lynchings
laws,
1) Via
防己茯苓汤miscegenation
birth
influence
rates
2) Trying
to
C. Ethnic armed conflict and gender, xuality:
1. Nazis and white male supremacists in the US
怀孕能吃酸辣粉吗
war,
苹果手机应用加密怎么设置with
a. “Heteronormal”
masculinity
associated
nationalism, patriotism, valor, manly codes of honor
and potency of the male ethnic
heteroxuality
the
b. But
“other” is often challenged
c. Females may be en to be slutty, impure, aggressive,前50位猛兽排名
unfeminine
2. Treatment of collaborators differs
shaved,
public reviling; men executed
heads
a. Women:
cleansing
3. Ethnic
a. “Other” women (Christian, Muslim) raped repeatedly “You
will bear a Serbian child”
b. Sex with a dirty, impure “other” doesn’t make men impure,
just women
III. Conquest and Colonialism
A. Its main project: economic
1. Acquire land for its resources (mineral, agricultural potential)
2. Acquire people as laborers, consumers, and various other purpos
(military conscripts)
3. Other goals as well—military, for example
B. The territory has to be administered
C. Labor has to be recruited and managed by men from the imperial country
1. In the ca of slavery, labor brought from other colonized lands
2. How this was accomplished during the colonial era changed
radically over time and was always gendered
examples
D. Stoler’s
1. She’s particularly interested in the connections between the
colonizing state and xuality, affective attachments
2. In explaining why xual arrangements and affective attachments
were so critical to the making of colonial categories and to what
distinguished ruler from ruled
E. Captivity narratives in colonial America reveal gendered, xual themes2
of (and sometimes by) white women
accounts
with
1. Fascination
abducted by “savage” Indians, if not killed, then turned into
squaws
2. Pocahontas, too, was a captive, but this is always left out of the
story, which is about her willing conversion to Christianity and
marriage to a white man
F. In all cas, gender and xuality are major concerns in the colonial
project
1.On the ground: regulate xual access, interactions between
genders in general, reproduction
2. Symbolically, ideologically: provide justifications for what’s
happening
G. Heng and Devan discuss the state’s interest in making sure that the “right”
people produce more children, or at least maintain the rate, and the
“wrong” people produce fewer
2 See Pauline Turner Strong, 1999. Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narratives. Boulder: Westview. And Rebecca Blevins Faery, 1999. Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, & Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
1. But in some colonial situations state’s interest was producing more
“natives”
历史上谁跑的最快
a. When importation of slaves abolished in US, plantation
owners were concerned to make sure as many healthy
children as possible were produced
2. However, for the most part colonial powers, (and certainly modern
post-colonial states), couldn’t control their populations the way
animal breeders control theirs
3. One way to give the appearance of order, of firm boundaries is to
establish social classifications
4. So we e over and over again a great amount of attention paid to:
a. Parents
practices
b. Parenting
mothers
输赢读后感
c. Nursing
d. Servants
e. Orphanages
children
f. Abandoned
H. But there are many other domains in which the state participates in
manipulating ethnic and national identity in the realms of intimate
relationships
1. Class distinctions and racial demarcations
2. Nationalism and European identity
I. None of the markers distinguishing Europeans from natives was adequate
in itlf
kinds
of colonists, many tensions
were
1. There
veral
2. True for colonial US, too
about ne’er-do-well whites who
concerns
3. There
were
economically, socially and morally do not meet the standards
a. Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness deals with this theme
4. And, as soon as half-breed, half-caste children appeared, the
oppod white man-native dichotomy broke down
弥漫什么意思5. When this happened, states attempted to adjust their “clear-cut,”
fixed classification schemes
6. In the Caribbean, in the U.S. vs. Caribbean (Segal and Handler), in
Spain’s colonies in the New World, elaborate schemes for dealing
with the variety of people living in the colonies were created
7. But as Stoler documents, physical features don’t always work, and
cultural criteria always accompany physical ones—cultural racism J. Gender and xuality employed as symbols in colonialist contexts
1. Stoler: Women as symbols of national superiority, native
inferiority
that
notion
all men are potentially inferior—
the
a. Contains
lustful, tendency to mingle with natives, degenerate
b. As oppod to image of European women as too weak to
withstand rigors of tropical country
2. The colonizer not only as patriotic and manly, but as xual man:
virile
a. Its opposite: images of the heightened xuality of
colonized men; white man threatened
3. European women en to need protection becau men of color had
“primitive” xual urges and uncontrollable lust, aroud by the
sight of white women
laws
rape
a. Establishment
of
b. Rape laws were often race specific
c. Stoler points out that there was virtually no correlation with
actual incidences of rape of European women by men of
color.
d. First, allusions to political and xual subversion of the
colonial system went hand in hand. “Cheeky” without
respect
e. Second, rape charges often bad on perceived
transgressions of social space.
f. Third, accusations of xual assault frequently followed
upon heightened tensions—rved to unify European
communities, restore connsus.
g. Unify the often factionalized European community around
a common threat from the outside
h. And Stoler suggests that accusations incread frequently
followed heightened tensions within European
communities becau of strikes, unrest
i. Fourth, it was a means of controlling white women
1) And always lurking in the background is the fear
that white women cannot be controlled, will
willingly have x with a native
broader
explanation: male natives interacting
a
j. Fifth,验算怎么算
xually with white women subverts the power status quo
k. Example from the U.S.: how many black men were lynched
becau of accusations of rape—or of only whistling at a
white woman?
l. Hysteria about black men’s desire for white women?
more
many
black women were raped by white
m. Yet
how
men? Many tens of thousands more
n. Black women weren’t en as capable of being raped
o. White men raping black women maintains, enacts the
power status quo; but black men engaging in any kind of
xual activity with white women challenges it
man/black woman relations ems to
p. Interest
white
in
appear only when the man is important in some way:
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, for example.
