Women, Gender, Intimacy, and Empire

Women, Gender, Intimacy, and Empire

Elisa Camiscioli

Journal of Women's History, Volume 25, Number 4, Winter 2013, pp.138-148 (Article)

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© 2013 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 25 No. 4, 138–148.

Women, Gender, Intimacy, and Empire

Elisa Camiscioli

This article presents a genealogy of historical studies of women, gender, intimacy, and empire from the late 1970s to the present day, with specific reference to modern European imperial formations. It begins with the problem of “additive histories,” in which empire is merely affixed to a nation-based story and white women are inserted into historical accounts of empire. The article argues that work on intersectionality and colonial intimacy have complicated the additive history paradigm; in the first case, by complicating the rigid binaries of colonizer and colonized to include gender and sexuality, and in the second, by highlighting how corporal-ity, desire, hybridity, and exchange function in imperial narratives. In turn, this historiographic trajectory questions the categories of (colonial) modernity and problematizes the (colonial) archive.

Historical studies of women in European empire began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and since its inception, the Journal of Women’s History

has been at the forefront of this development in the field. In its first year, JWH published two seminal articles on women in colonial India: Anand Yang’s study of sati and Barbara Ramusack’s analysis of the early twentieth-century debate on contraception.1 More than three decades of scholarly production on women, gender, and empire—within the pages of JWH and elsewhere—has yielded a theoretically and empirically rich body of work that has amplified and even challenged the claims of women’s and gender history more broadly.

This article will recount the genealogy of the field of women, gender, and empire with reference to nineteenth and twentieth-century European empires, emphasizing works published in English but also including a foray into French scholarship.2 I draw most of my examples from the British and French imperial enterprises in Africa and Asia, for which secondary literature is most copious, although the historiographic trajectory I trace is applicable to other instances of modern European overseas expansion.3 Thus my account centers on the “New Imperialism” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an expressly modern venture characterized by vigor-ous capitalist markets, liberal political economy, and a racialized vision of European “civilization.”4

Along with this cursory overview of the field, I will discuss two criti-cal developments within it. The first is the notion of “intimacy,” a theme that has invigorated scholarship on empire by its focus on bodies, desire,

Elisa Camiscioli2013 139

hybridity, and interaction. The second is the configuring of metropole and colony as a unified explanatory matrix, thereby highlighting networks of exchange among nations and colonies and the permeability of their bound-aries. Both of these approaches reconfigure the spatial (metropole/colony; public/private), ontological (colonizer/colonized; citizen/subject), and affective (reason/sentiment; material/emotional) dichotomies generated in Western modernity. Moreover, the concept of intimacy, an analytical cat-egory linking ostensibly private practices to larger strategies of rule, enables us to rethink the “national” and the “colonial” as well as the relationships between these categories.

I begin with an observation: colonial history, women’s history, and the history of women in empire share a common methodological genealogy in their origins as “additive histories.” By this I mean the mere addition of empire to a nation-based story; the addition of women to male-dominated historical narratives; and, more specifically, the addition of white women to historical accounts of empire. While the additive paradigm might serve a purpose in the early stages of a field’s development, colonial history is most il-luminating when it moves beyond the “methodological nationalism” implicit in this “process of addition or aggregation.”5 In a similar vein, the shift from women’s history tout court to the study of gendered bodies and gendered ideologies in the colonies has complicated our understanding of imperial taxonomies and the racialized regimes of power which undergird them.

Many early studies on women and empire can be described as additive histories. Written in the 1980s by Anglo-American scholars working on the British Empire, these works tended to limit their scope to documenting the lives and deeds of white women in the colonies.6 Analyses by South Asian scholars, in contrast, focused more squarely on colonized women.7 Key topics included sati, settler wives, Victorian lady travelers, social reformers, and female missionaries.8 Unsurprisingly, scholarship in the 1980s recalled the early years of women’s history more generally, seeking to add women to male-dominated historical narratives and recover unheard voices. This additive approach often meant that European women were studied at the expense of other actors in the colonies, including women of color them-selves. A significant revision to this trend came with Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel’s 1992 edited volume, as its contributors argued against a simplistic reading of white women in the colonies as either “heroic op-ponents of imperialism or complicit agents in it,” thereby underscoring the dynamic tensions of colonial society and the contingency of imperial women’s lives.9

The trajectory for French and Anglo-American studies of French Empire roughly follows that of the British, although lagging about a decade behind. Imperial history has enjoyed a more established place in the British academy

Journal of Women’s History140 Winter

than in France, where this problem is compounded by the marginalization of women’s and gender history more broadly.10 Yvonne Knibiehler and Régine Goutalier’s pioneering La femme au temps des colonies appeared in 1985, although much of the historical work by French scholars on women, gender, and empire has been published since 2000.11 Anglophone interven-tions include the landmark 1998 volume edited by Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, whose focus on the French and Dutch Empires was meant to counter British hegemony in the field.12 English-language studies of French Empire have become more commonplace over the years.13 Several more anthologies on women, gender, and empire were released in the late 1990s, reflecting the vibrancy of an increasingly well-defined group of scholars working on related themes.14 Since 2000, the anthology has remained an invaluable forum for disseminating research on these topics.15 Among these collections of essays, Philippa Levine’s 2004 Gender and Empire was issued subsequently as a “companion volume” to the five-volume Oxford History of the British Empire, first published in the late 1990s. It is astonishing that the Oxford compendium accorded almost no space to women, gender, or sexuality even though these topics were integral to the “new imperial his-tory” in Britain (in contradistinction to an earlier imperial history, which focused on high politics, the economy, and military expansion).16 Thus one may wonder how fully the “imperial turn” has been gendered among practitioners in the wider field.

If accounts from the 1980s and early 1990s provided a richer view of the colonies by adding white women to the story, this remained a rather undifferentiated social taxonomy. Two overlapping theoretical currents—and subsequent critiques of them—encouraged modifications to the “ad-ditive approach”: gender history and postcolonial studies, both of which employed poststructuralist theory to analyze the discursive construction of identity and power. Much of this work was dedicated to revealing and deconstructing the binary relationships generated in modernity, such as colonizer/colonized, masculinity/femininity, public/private, and nation/colony. Gender history was part of a greater reflection in the Western acad-emy about the discursive dimensions of social life and how power was embedded in and enabled by them.17 Moreover, because gender history considered all historical actors to be gendered beings, it opened up space for studies of colonial masculinity.18

The juncture of postcolonial studies and gendered accounts of empire is less straightforward. Because the earliest incarnations of postcolonial studies focused on the binary of colonizer and colonized, the gendered dimensions of these identities were overwhelmingly neglected. This was initially true of the Subaltern Studies Collective, as well as works by and indebted to Edward Said.19 Postcolonialism, moreover, has generally ignored the cri-


tique of the subject put forth by feminist theory, women’s history, and the women’s movement.20 Its paradigm was therefore dichotomous (colonizer/colonized, Occident/Orient, etc.) rather than intersectional. Throughout the 1990s, in contrast, gender history was becoming progressively more intersectional, thus attending to the multiple dimensions of social relation-ships and subject formations along axes of gender, race, class, sexuality, etc. Because intersectionality also sought to document the interrelated nature of various forms of oppression, including race- and gender-based identities and hierarchies, it was an invaluable tool for scholars working on questions of women and gender in the colonies.

Ann Laura Stoler’s 1989 article “Rethinking Colonial Categories” is an early example of an intersectional analysis that highlights multiple and compound identities, for it depicts the heterogeneity of colonial society, the manifold interactions between European settlers and colonial subjects, and the various hybridities that resulted from these interactions.21 In such accounts as hers, women are part of a larger script that conceives of national-imperial space as a “contact zone,” a network of negotiation and exchange, and, importantly, as the medium through which raced, sexed, and gendered bodies interact with one another and with systems of domination.22 In turn, this emphasis on intimacy, intersectionality, and exchange promoted and was promoted by such work on sexuality in the national-imperial context as Ronald Hyam’s 1991 Empire and Sexuality and Anne McClintock’s 1995 Imperial Leather.23 This literature revealed how contact zones were danger zones onto which metropolitan anxieties were projected.

Studies of colonial intimacy emerging in the mid- to late-1990s relied on intersectional readings that explicitly marked bodies with gender, race, class, and sex, in contradistinction to the previously undifferentiated categories of “colonizer” and “colonized.” Thus scholars have examined how, in both colonial and metropolitan contexts, bodies served as sites of regulation, surveillance, and discipline while also being embedded in net-works of relationships ordered by social hierarchies.24 By exploring colonial medicine, commercial sex, interracial relationships, mixed-race progeny, and the education of children, for example, they have revealed fascinating parallels between the management of empire and attempts to manage the body, sexuality, and domestic space.

Intersectionality and intimacy thus challenged the writing of additive histories of women in empire by complicating the binary of colonizer and colonized and highlighting the intersubjective and embodied quality of relationships among historical subjects. Yet there is another binary pertinent to this genealogy. The starkly dichotomous construction of metropole and colony, when left untroubled, also tends to produce additive histories that uncritically affix empire to a nation-based story. In response to this prob-


lem, three important essays appearing in the mid- to late-1990s called for a veritable remapping of national-imperial space: Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler’s 1997 research agenda, which highlighted the “social and political reverberations between colony and metropole”; Antoinette Burton’s 1997 “Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating ‘British’ History;” and Mrinalini Sinha’s 2000 article entitled “Mapping the Imperial Social Formation: A Modest Proposal for Feminist History.”25 Each of these interventions pro-vocatively addressed the porosity of metropole and colony by underscoring networks, reciprocity, and co-implication to insist that the nation was always already imperial. For example, Sinha proposed a “global social analytic,” a method that “engages with ‘national’ and ‘local’ histories as they are imbricated in a world system fashioned by imperialism and colonialism.”26

How might Sinha’s “imperial social formation” look in practice? Con-sider the case of colonial prostitution. Philippa Levine’s work on the British Empire and Christelle Taraud’s on the Maghreb have demonstrated how ideologies and practices about race, gender, sex, and social hygiene traversed metropolitan and colonial space.27 Both authors consider the metropolitan context governing the wider debate on prostitution: the Contagious Diseases Laws in Britain, and the doctrine of regulationism in France. They both attend to multiple imperial sites (Hong Kong, India, Queensland, and the Straights Settlements for Levine; Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco for Taraud). But these ideologies and practices, as well as the bodies upon which they were enacted, extended even more globally. For example, feminists world-wide convened at the League of Nations and other international conventions to call for the abolishment of regulated prostitution. The related question of the “traffic in women” similarly spanned North and South America, Europe, and the colonies, and from its inception, it was framed with reference to a globalized racial lexicon that invoked “white slavery” and abolitionism.28

Other studies that engage a “global social analytic” include Sanjam Ahluwalia’s account of contraceptive use and population management in India, which weaves together debates on nationalism, eugenics, demogra-phy, and sexology in the United States, Britain, and India; Jennifer Boittin’s portrayal of Paris as a “colonial metropolis” in which the trajectories of white feminists crossed with those of African, African-American, and Antillean men; and Mrinalini Sinha’s history of the global reception of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, in which Sinha masterfully combines the contribu-tions of Indian nationalists, American imperialists and missionaries, and British, American, and Indian feminists.29 And it is worth recalling that in 1978—decades before such work was praised as methodologically innova-tive—Anna Davin’s “Imperialism and Motherhood” brilliantly analyzed the reverberations between British domestic policy and colonization in South Africa, the pertinence of imperial ideology to class and race hierarchies


within Britain, and the significance of demography as a biopolitical form of knowledge.30 All of these studies demonstrate that questions of intimacy are not antithetical to global histories, although the challenge lies in delineating the precise relationship between the global and the local.31

There is an intriguing parallel in the way that feminist theory has reconfigured the divide between public and private as permeable and mu-tually constitutive and the way that, since the late 1990s, imperial histories have done the same with regard to metropole and colony.32 The terrain of “colonial intimacy” connects these developments by delineating a space that transcends the binary of public and private while highlighting how affective ties, moral sentiments, sexual relations, and a nation’s demographic calcu-lus were implicated in strategies of imperial rule.33 The intimate therefore delineates a porous zone of experience and relationship, and also a site of intervention; it attends to questions of agency, desire, and resistance as much as those of regulation, anxiety, and prohibition.34 Exemplary work in this vein includes Durba Ghosh’s study of the sexual and familial re-lationships of Indian women and men from the East India Company, in which she demonstrates the centrality of the family to debates on colonial governance as well as the agency of Indian women as they dealt with the judicial system. Emmanuelle Saada’s analysis of the “métis question” in the French Empire addresses similar concerns, as it elucidates both the colonial state’s definition of citizenship and the way that as parents, French men and Indochinese women shaped the hearts, minds, and destinies of their mixed-race children. Another germane example is Elizabeth Thompson’s illuminating account of the gendered nature of colonial and postcolonial citizenship in the French mandates of Syria and Lebanon. Her attention to spatial politics transcends the constraints of the public/private divide as she explores the veiling and unveiling of female subjects, how cinema and the press functioned as reordered instantiations of the public, and, of course, the blurred boundaries of state and civil society.35

Studies like these illuminate the interstices between metropole and colony, public and domestic space, and citizenry and subjecthood. They dif-fer from earlier narratives of recovery that merely added women and their voices to the historical record. Thus the erasure of women from (imperial) history—indeed, the starting point for scholarship on women and empire in the 1980s—has prompted scholars in the past decade or so to interrogate the very process of archival recovery.36 This was, after all, the gist of Gayatri Spivak’s warning that the colonial archive, as the voice of the liberal impe-rial state, is a problematic site from which to recover the subaltern subject.37 Anjali Arondekar observes that despite the impact of Spivak’s pioneering work, this “additive model of subalternity” lingers, concomitant with our desire to “fill in the gaps with voices of other unvoiced subalterns” and to


“write in a female subject.”38 Instead of composing narratives of recovery, then, recent work on colonial intimacy suggests that we turn our attention to the scene of erasure to elucidate the micropolitics of imperial rule.

When binary logics are not fully denaturalized, they tend to yield additive histories: the colonies are framed as ancillary rather than integral to the metropole; the intersectionality and intersubjectivity of historical ac-tors is downplayed; and the private sphere is represented as a “contained household” for the nuclear family even though domestic arrangements were typically far more complex.39 The best work on colonial intimacy, in contrast, bridges these spatial and corporeal dichotomies by recognizing that national histories are inseparable from empire and that both European and colonized women were integral parts of the larger fabric of colonial society, itself fragmented along race and class lines. Attention to intimate spaces, relations, and connections among historical actors stresses the em-bodied and affective qualities of social life while also permitting a broader definition of the colonial archive.

Notes

Thanks to Teresa Meade and Jaime Wadowiec for their comments on this essay.

1Anand A. Yang, “Whose Sati? Widow-Burning in Early Nineteenth-Century India,” Journal of Women’s History 1, no. 2 (1989): 8–33; and Barbara N. Ramusack, “Embattled Advocates: The Debate over Birth Control in India, 1920–1940,” Journal of Women’s History 1, no. 2 (1989): 34–64.

2Because the scholars under discussion defy disciplinary taxonomies, they have not been identified by field.

3Although the comparisons are suggestive, the modern imperial projects of the United States and Japan are not treated in this brief article. For an introduction to themes of gender and empire in the United States, see Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). On Japan, see Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno, eds., Gendering Modern Japanese History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). For a discussion of women, gender, and empire in Latin America, the Middle East, and China, see the special issue of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial His-tory 4, no. 1 (2003).

4Hence I have not included works on European imperialism between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries nor works dealing with the slave and indentured labor regimes, despite a burgeoning literature on women, gender, and imperial intimacies in the early modern world.

5Gary Wilder, “From Optic to Topic: The Foreclosure Effect of Historiographic Turns,” American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (2012): 723–45, quotation on 738.


6Margaret Strobel, European Women in the Second British Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); and Durba Ghosh, “Gender and Colonialism: Expan-sion or Marginalization?” The Historical Journal 47, no. 3 (2004): 737–55.

7See, for example, Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1986); and Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989).

8This list includes but is not limited to: Pat Barr, The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian England (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1976); Dea Birkett, Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture, and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1987); Nupur Chaudhuri, “Memsahibs and Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century India,” Victorian Studies 31, no. 4 (1988): 517–36; Geraldine Forbes, “In Search of the ‘Pure Heathen’: Missionary Women in Nineteenth-Century India,” Economic and Political Weekly 21, no. 17 (1986): WS2–WS8; Mary Ann Lind, The Compassionate Memsahibs: Welfare Activities of British Women in India, 1900–1947 (New York: Green-wood Press, 1988); and Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” Cultural Critique 7 (Autumn 1987): 119–56; Yang, “Whose Sati?”

9Nurpur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperi-alism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). Of course, complicity/resistance is another overwrought binary.

10On the British academy, see Durba Ghosh, “Another Set of Imperial Turns?” American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (2012): 772–93. On the case of France, see Anne Hugon, “Introduction,” in Histoire des femmes en situation coloniale. Afrique et Asie, XXème siècle, ed. Anne Hugon (Paris: Karthala, 2004), 7–15.

11Yvonne Kniebiehler and Régine Goutalier, La femme au temps des colonies (Paris: Stock, 1985). For an introduction to French work on the French Empire, see Hugon, “Introduction”; and Christelle Taraud, “Les femmes, le genre, et les sexualités dans le Maghreb colonial (1830–1962),” Clio: Histoire, femmes, et sociétés 33 (Spring 2011): 157–191.

12Frances Gouda and Julia Clancy-Smith, “Introduction,” in Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism, ed. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 1–20. See also Jennifer Anne Boittin, Christina Firpo, and Emily Musil Church, “Hierarchies of Race and Gender in the French Colonial Empire, 1914–1946,” Historical Reflections 37, no. 1 (2011): 60–90.

13See, for example, Sarah Curtis, Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Carolyn Eichner, “La citoyenne in the World: Hubertine Auclert and Feminist Imperialism,” French Historical Studies 32, no. 1 (2009): 63–84; and Patricia Lorcin, Historicizing Nostalgia: European Women’s Narratives of Algeria and Kenya, 1900–Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

14In addition to the anthologies already cited, see Antoinette Burton, ed., Gender, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities (London: Routledge, 1999); Nancy Rose


Hunt, Tessie P. Liu, and Jean Quataert, eds., Gendered Colonialisms in African His-tory (Malden, MA.: Blackwell, 1997); Claire Midgley, ed., Gender and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); and Ruth Roach Pierson, Nupur Chaudhuri, and Beth McAuley, eds., Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

15Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi, eds., Women in African Colonial Histories: An Introduction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Ballantyne and Burton, eds., Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and relevant selections from Cath-erine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, eds., At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

16See, for example, Antoinette Burton’s review in Victorian Studies 44, no. 1 (2001): 167–69.

17See, of course, Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053–1075. On the “dialogic tension between ‘women’ and ‘gender’” with particular reference to empire, see Jean Allman and Antoinette Burton, “Destination Globalization?: Women, Gender, and Comparative Colonial Histories in the New Millenium,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, no. 1 (2003).

18Examples include Raphaëlle Branche, “La masculinité à l’épreuve de la guerre sans nom,” Clio: Histoire, femmes, et sociétés 20 (Spring 2004): 111–122; Mrinilini Sinha, Imperial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); and Catherine Hall, White, Male, and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (London: Routledge, 1992).

19See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Gary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313; Rosalind O’Hanlon, “Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia,” Mod-ern Asian Studies 22, no. 1 (1988): 189–224; Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996); and Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

20Antoinette Burton, “South Asian Women, Gender, and Transnationalism,” Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 4 (2003): 196–201; Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), 360–82.

21Ann Laura Stoler, “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, no. 1 (1989): 134–61. See also Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995).


22On “contact zones” see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).

23Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995). For a useful sum-mary, see Philippa Levine, “Sexuality and Empire,” in At Home with the Empire, ed. Hall and Rose, 134–55.

24Much of this work is indebted to Michel Foucault. See also Ballantyne and Burton, “Introduction: Bodies, Empires, and World Histories,” in Bodies in Contact; Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao, eds., Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporality, Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); and Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

25Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Cooper and Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56; Antoinette Burton, “Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating ‘British’ History,” Journal of Historical Sociology 10, no. 3 (1997): 227–48; and Mrinalini Sinha, “Mapping the Imperial Social Formation: A Modest Proposal for Feminist History,” Signs 25, no. 4 (2000): 1077–1082. Sinha elaborated these points in Imperial Masculinity.

26Sinha, “Imperial Social Formation,” 1077. The degree to which scholars have successfully transcended the additive history paradigm is disputable. See Wilder, “From Optic to Topic,” and his “‘Impenser’ l’histoire de France. Les études coloniales hors de la perspective de l’identité nationale,” Cahiers d’histoire 96–97 (October-December 2005): 91–119.

27Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (London: Routledge, 2003); and Christelle Taraud, La prostitution coloniale: Algérie, Tunisie, Maroc, 1830–1962 (Paris: Payot, 2003).

28See also Elisa Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in Early Twentieth-Century France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); and Stephanie Limoncelli, The Politics of Trafficking: The First Interna-tional Movement to Combat the Sexual Exploitation of Women (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

29Sanjam Ahluwalia, Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Jennifer Boittin, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010); and Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

30Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop Journal 5 (Spring 1978): 9–65.

31See also Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner, “Introduction: The Global and the Intimate,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 34, nos. 1–2 (2006): 13–24; and Judith Surkis, “Sex, Sovereignty, and Transnational Intimacies,” American Historical Review 115, no. 4 (2010): 1089–96.


32The feminist critique of separate spheres is well articulated in Nancy Fraser, “What’s Critical About Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender,” in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Min-neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 113–43.

33See Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colo-nial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 7; and Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen,” in Haunted by Empire, 1–22.

34See also Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: The Unfinished Business of Colonial Modernity,” in Gender, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities, ed. Burton, 1–16.

35Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Emmanuelle Saada, Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Colombia University Press, 2000).

36Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); and Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Cf. Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company: 1720–1840 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

37Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives,” History and Theory 24, no. 3 (1985): 247–272; Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

38Arondekar, For the Record, 6–7.39Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and Law in the

North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

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