Gender, Sexuality, and Empire

Course content

The course is organized around three modules

Module 1: Manhood and Empire

Module 2: Sex(uality) and Empire

Module 3: Women and Empire

Module 1: Manhood and Empire

Examine in what ways empire building was represented as a masculine enterprise

How the gendering of the space of the empire and the activities of empire building as a masculine sphere was related to social and political problems in Europe

Paradoxes of civilization – progress and threat of degeneration

The empire as site of degeneration and regeneration

The making of the imperial race restoration of manhood athletic activities, scouting movement, adventuring, the Big Game

Manhood and Empire

White hunters as imperial heroes

Frederick Selous (1851-1917) Famous hunter in South Africa Inspiration for the fictional hero Allan Quatermain , African big-game hunter character in Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines

Module 2: Sex(uality) and Empire

European practice of gendering the colonies as female – use of gender and sexual metaphors to manage relationships with the colonies and the colonized

Case study: Orientalism – constructing the “Oriental woman” as the Other of the masculine West e.g. Puccini’s Madame Butterfly

The oversexed native versus the effeminate native

Interracial sexual relationships between European men and native women and European women and native men

Sex(uality) and EmpireGendering the Other

Sex(ality) and empireFrom Madama Butterfly to M Butterfly

Module 3: Women and Empire

Women’s conditions as index of civilization–> evidence of European superiority and backwardness of colonized

White women’s emigration to the empire

Myth of the destructive female

White woman’s double burden – to civilize both the white men and the natives

Women and Empire