Week 2 Blog Post: Sex and Control

“Sexual control was both an instrumental image for the body politic, a salient part standing for the whole, and itself fundamental to how racial politics were secured and how colonial projects were carried out” (Stoler, 31).

Alloula’s article, “Women’s Prisons,” and Stoler’s article, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race and Morality in Colonial Asia,” both serve to highlight the link between sex and the control of politics, sexual access, society, and the general population by the Europeans within colonized communities. 

Alloula’s article analyzes the depiction harem culture with the photographs of Algerian women.  These women were pictured as being imprisoned, like animals at a zoo—locked away as if they were on display.  They were imprisoned, thus were further unapproachable and not relatable; in essence, these women were “Othered.”  Later postcards started to reveal the nakedness of these women; which not only connotes a sexualized, erotic, and sexually frustrated native, but also reinforcing the “savagery” of the native.   As the photographer reveals the woman’s nakedness, his power grows, especially as the positioning of the camera reveals itself to be inside the place of confinement.  The photographer’s sexual access to the woman reveals his control over her as well as over his own fulfillment.

In a similar context, one of the main aspects of colonial rule that Stoler analyzes in her article is the sexual relations of the European men with the native women.  European men had free sexual access to the native women of the colonized land, forcing them to become concubines.  These men were also prohibited from marrying these women.  Preventing the legalization of “mixed” unions comment upon the establishment and maintainability of institutional control over not only the colonized, but also the colonizers.  These laws aided the advancement of racial politics, such as maintaining “White prestige” and White superiority and social class.  Such prevention of intermarriage also helped preserve European identity and nationalism. 

Both articles, I believe, relate to Faucault’s theory regarding sexuality and power.  One of the arguments of Faucault’s theory that I felt really spoke to these articles was how institutional knowledge about sex and sexuality was conceived and utilized in order to establish control or perceivably “normal” social constructs, which oftentimes are prejudiced or racist. Stoler’s article beautifully captures this usage of institutional knowledge as a method of control and manipulation; examples include:

“In metropolitan France, a profusion of medical and sociological tracts pinpointed the colonial as a distinct and degenerate social type, with specific psychological and physical features” (Stoler, 24),

“Colonial medicine…affirmed this…Neurasthenia was…a mental disorder identified as a major problem in the French empire…a phantom disease…encompassing psychopatho…conditions and intimately linked to sexual deviation and to the destruction of social order itself…caused by a distance from civilization and European community and by proximity to the colonized” (Stoler, 25), and

“Medical experts and women’s organizations recommended strict surveillance of children’s activities and careful attention to those with whom they played” (Stoler, 29). 

These quotations speak to how institutional knowledge provided by medicine and “experts” preserved racial segregation and promoted European nationalism and identity.  This “expert” knowledge as well as the boundaries and limitations surrounding sex and sexual access and relations of the colonizers with the colonized aided in the European control of these people through the domination of their land, bodies, as well as through the establishment of racial politics and social constructs vis-à-vis the inferiority and segregation of the colonized.