Week 3: Gender and Empire

This seminar examines the role of gender in empire. The texts for this session cover the diverse ways in which gender appeared as an object and instrument of imperial power, the ways in which colonial administrations managed social conflicts arising from gender, and the ways in which colonized actors - including anticolonial nationalists and social reformers - responded to colonial rule as well as indigenous social practices, and constructed new discourses around the status of women.

The seminar discussion will centre on three broad themes, each connected to the questions raised by the core readings. One of the texts for this week - by Ann Laura Stoler - provides the basis for a general survey of the links between imperial history and gender. The other three texts (Chatterjee, Sarkar, Spivak) enable a 'deep dive' into some of the key debates that deal specifically with gender in colonial India. Additionally, Spivak's extraordinarily influential text opens up a pathway for considering the question of women's oppression and gendered discourses in colonial India in relation to a central question in post-colonial theory: how can we think about the 'voice' or self-activity of subaltern social actors and groups?

Seminar Questions

1. How did gender in imperial contexts intersect with other forms of socially constructed difference, such as race, class, subjecthood, and sexuality?
2. What is specifically gendered about imperial cultures and practices?
3. How did colonial rule in India handle questions of gender? Discuss in relation to sati abolition.
4. How did nationalists who challenged colonialism construct their own discourse around gender? Discuss in relation to Chatterjee's argument about India.
5. What is at stake in Spivak's question "Can The Subaltern Speak?"

Core Readings

Ann Laura Stoler, <em>Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule</em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 41-78.

Tanika Sarkar, "A Just Measure of Death? Hindu Ritual And Colonial Law In The Sphere of Widow Immolations", Comparative Studies Of South Asia, Africa And The Middle East, 33:2, 2013, pp.159-176.

Partha Chatterjee, "The Nationalist Resolution of The Women's Question", in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, ed., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, Delhi: Kali For Women, 1990, pp. 233-252.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can The Subaltern Speak?", in: Rosalind C. Morris (ed.), Can The Subaltern Speak? Reflections On The History of an Idea, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, pp. 237-283. (Please note that the book in question contains two different versions of Spivak's text - at the beginning and in the appendix. You are welcome to read both, but for the purposes of the seminar it is the text in the appendix - which is the original version - that you should read).

Further Reading

Anooshar, Ali, 'The King who would be Man: the Gender Roles of the Warrior King in Early Mughal History', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 18.3 (2008), pp. 327-340. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Arondekar, Anjali, For the Record: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Ballantyne, Tony, and Antoinette Burton, Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Booth, Marilyn, Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010).

Chaudhuri, Nupur, and Margaret Strobel (eds.), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Cooper, Frederick, and Ann Laura Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Finn, Margot, 'The Female World of Love & Empire: Women, Family & East India Company Politics at the End of the Eighteenth Century', Gender and History 31.1 (2019), pp. 7-24. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Fuentes, Marisa J., Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). LinkLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window.

Ghosh, Durba, 'Gender and Colonialism: Expansion or Marginalization?', The Historical Journal 47.3 (2004), pp. 737-755. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Hall, Catherine, and Sonia O. Rose, At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Hathaway, Jane, The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power-Broker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Hathaway, Jane, 'The Ottoman Chief Harem Eunuch in Ceremonies and Festivals', Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 6.1 (2019), pp. 21-37. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Lal, Ruby, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Lal, Ruby, 'Historicizing the Harem: The Challenge of a Princess's Memoir', Feminist Studies 30.3 (2004), pp. 590-616. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Levine, Philippa, 'What's British about Gender and Empire? The Problem of Exceptionalism', Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27.2 (2007), pp. 273-282. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Lewis, Reina, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996).

Lewis, Reina, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004). LinkLink opens in a new window

McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). LinkLink opens in a new window.

O'Hanlon, Rosalind, 'Manliness and Imperial Service in Mughal North India', Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 42.1 (1999), pp. 47-93. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Paton, Diana, “The Flight from the Fields Reconsidered: Gender Ideologies and Women’s Labour after Slavery in Jamaica,” in Gilbert M Joseph (ed.), Reclaiming the Political in Latin America: Essays from the North (Durham: Duke University Press 2001), pp. 175-204.

Peirce, Leslie P., The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Peirce, Leslie P., Empress of the East: How a Slave Girl became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (London: Icon Books, 2018). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Ray, Carina E., ‘Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of Anticolonial Nationalism in the Gold Coast’, The American Historical Review, 119 (2014), pp. 78-110.

Rothschild, Emma, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Scott, Joan Wallach, 'Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis', The American Historical Review, 91.5 (1986), pp. 1053-1075.

Scott, Joan Wallach, ‘Gender: Still a Useful Category of Analysis?’, Diogenes, 225 (2010), pp. 7–14.

Sinha, Mrinalini, Colonial Masculinity: The 'Manly Englishman' and the 'Effeminate Bengali' in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).

Stoler, Ann Laura (ed.), Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Thomas, Lynn, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (London: University of California Press, 2003), Chapter One: Imperial Populations and ‘Women’s Affairs’, pp. 21-51.

Twinam, Ann, Public Lives, Private Secrets. Gender, Honour, Sexuality and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

White, Luise, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

Woollacot, Angela, Gender and Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Yegenoglu, Meyda, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). LinkLink opens in a new window.