ANTH 425 Power and Change
18 October 2011
Identity politics: Micro and macro politics of race, class, gender
Read Stoler, Ann (1989) "Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures."American Ethnologist 16(4): 634-660. JSTOR
- examines colonization through the lens of race, class, and particularly gender and sexuality, over time, especially in French Indo-China and Dutch East Indies
- note how colonial policy aimed to control European and colonized people’s gendered sexual intimacies in order to, first, keep costs low, and, later, try to maintain barriers between colonized and colonizers
- thus, first, prevention of marriage by lower ranked European colonial and corporate officials was intended to support lower wages, keep the amount of time they spent in the colony to a minimum, and led to concubinage
- then, arrival of large numbers of European women was part of a project to address challenges to European domination
- European women were assumed to require specific protection and were charged with maintaining specific moral and middle class standards.
- political economy perspective, but also shows bio-politics.