This lecture examines gender and sexuality as an important lens through which to understand questions of empire, colonialism, and anti-colonial nationalism. By so doing the lecture brings the perspectives of historians of gender, who have highlighted the importance of issues such as marriage, domesticity, respectability, and of female enfranchisement to the study of imperial governance. Thus the course addresses the relationship between ideological and material structures of power and historical experience, and examines the relationship between categories such as race, class, religion, and sexuality in imperial contexts.
In particular, we will examine contentious issues that shaped debates about women and gender including: domesticity; religion and secularism; demands for political rights and citizenship; cultural violence, and sexuality. The lecture course is organized around three broad periods: 1) the development of ideas of domesticity and conjugality in conjunction with the rise of racial states during the nineteenth century; 2) the development of gendered ideologies in colonial locales during the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, and 3) the impact of colonial configurations of gender and sexuality in shaping the “woman’s question” during and well after decolonization.
