Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power

[Dave Monroe]

Stoler, Ann Laura.  Carnal Knowledge and Imperial
   Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule.
   Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.

Why, Ann Laura Stoler asks, was the management of
sexual arrangements and affective attachments so
critical to the making of colonial categories and to
what distinguished ruler from ruled? Contending that
social classification is not a benign cultural act but
a potent political one, Stoler shows that matters of
the intimate were absolutely central to imperial
politics. It was, after all, in the intimate sphere of
home and servants that European children learned what
they were required to learn of place and race.
Gender-specific sexual sanctions, too, were squarely
at the heart of imperial rule, and European supremacy
was asserted in terms of national and racial virility.

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9446.html

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