Webbed Connectivities This page intentionally left blank The Imperial Sociology of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality Vrushali Patil Webbed Connectivities University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London Portions of chapter 1 are adapted from “The Heterosexual Matrix as Imperial Effect,” Sociological Theory 36, no. 1 (2018): 1–26. Copyright 2022 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401–2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu ISBN 978-1-5179-1107-2 (hc) ISBN 978-1-5179-1108-9 (pb) Library of Congress record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016227 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. UMP BmB 2022 To Edward and Emmett This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments ix Introduction Where Is the Transnational (and the Imperial)? 1 Chapter 1. The Heterosexual Matrix as Imperial Effect 15 Chapter 2. The Biopolitics of Binary Bodies 57 Considering Scale, Race, and Empire Chapter 3. The Special Oriental Vice, the Savage Vice, 89 and the Sexual Furor Racial-Imperial Webs and the Invention of “Modern” Sexuality Chapter 4. The Reordering of Empire and the 125 American Invention of Gender Conclusion Locating the Transnational and the Imperial 167 Notes 173 Bibliography 179 Index 197 Contents This page intentionally left blank The almost decade it has taken me to write this book has been a time of many ups and downs. To Edward and Emmett—my heart of hearts— thank you for the unconditional love, encouragement, and support that enabled me to keep going. Without you, very simply, this book would not have happened. Thank you also to Mom and Dad for your support. To Bandana Purkayastha, Jyoti Puri, and Ghassan Moussawi, thank you for the countless ways in which you have kept me sane over the years. Your friendship has helped me stay the course and keep perspec- tive. Together, you have given me models of resilience, grace, and pas- sion that I will continue to draw on as I move through this academic life. To Ghassan Moussawi, Jyoti Puri, and S. Crawley, thank you for your willingness to read drafts of different chapters, for your generos- ity, and for your tough feedback. I appreciate your pushing me, and this work is so much better for it. To our Sexpots Writing Group, Ghassan and Jyoti, and Patrick Grzanka, Emily Mann, Evren Savci, and Sinikka Elliott, thank you for your feedback on the drafts that eventually became chapter 1 and chap- ter 2. The work benefited from the start from your smart, sharp, and thoughtful reviews. To the gender-journal editors who agreed to speak with me about your journals, I so appreciate your time and your generosity. Finally, to Sinikka Elliott, although our paths crossed only briefly, thank you for your kindness and your warmth. I will miss you. Acknowledgments This page intentionally left blank One of the oldest, most persistent issues in gender and sexuality studies is the dominance of white, northern theorizing and its consequences for what we know about sex, gender, and sexuality. This problem has long been named and variously addressed. One of the earliest approaches, transnational feminist and sexuality studies (e.g., Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan; Chandra Mohanty and M. J. Alexander), has been quite successful, though in somewhat uneven ways. It has especially been taken up in interdisciplinary gender and sexuality studies, and to a lesser extent in social sciences like sociology. It has been impactful particularly in its critical interrogation of ideas and assumptions about the other (other women, other queer people) in contemporary politics and policy, popular culture and media, and human-rights discourses. In recent years, newer approaches (i.e., “southern theory” and decolo- nial theory) have also highlighted northern dominated structures of knowledge and power and their consequences for whose voices shape knowledge. The success of such approaches notwithstanding, this book is con- cerned with a particular process that occurs within the current politi- cal economy of knowledge production in statist and presentist sites like U.S.-based sociology: the continual displacement of the transnational and the colonial elsewhere. 1 In this displacement, cross-border rela- tions of power are readily conceded for the global south (the other), while their relevance for “us” (i.e., the heart of the global north) remains unclear. Thus, in response to critiques of Eurocentrism and methodo- logical nationalism, the sociologies of gender and sexuality have incor- porated the cross-border primarily in terms of work that explores the impact on the global south of such processes as neoliberal globaliza- tion, structural adjustment, the behavior of multinational corpora- tions, and stereotypes of the “Third World other.” Critical transnational Introduction Where Is the Transnational (and the Imperial)? - 2 - Introduction feminist and sexualities sociological work has also emerged especially in terms of ethnographies of particular sites outside the United States or global north. While such work on the global south is of course deeply necessary, one inadvertent consequence of the focus on the south is that white feminist and queer scholarship about white people in the global north goes on undisturbed (one exception here is work on immi- gration). In other words, while critiques of race, the transnational, and coloniality have gone a long way in correcting problematic approaches to the other, they have been less successful in transforming dominant approaches to the white, northern self. While approaches like southern theory begin with power relations and argue that we have to make more space for southern approaches, they are less focused on the adequacy of the assumptions of white/northern approaches for white/northern groups and spaces. The basic problem is that white, northern spaces are disconnected from histories of race and coloniality. These processes be- come displaced onto Black and Brown bodies and spaces, while the he- gemony and unmarked status of white, northern knowledges continue. A central part of the problem is the political economy of knowl- edge production in which transnational works circulate and gain value, and within which northern and southern works are positioned in fundamentally different ways. When it comes to theorizing on gen- der, sexuality, and sex, the global north is still the unnamed center and universal, while sites outside are the particular. In this frame, work on India or Mexico is specifically about India or Mexico, while work on the United States is applicable not only there but also somehow else- where. Producers of work on India or Mexico are in a sense burdened with space, while scholars in the center are generalists, unburdened by particular spaces. Unburdened by space, the generalists in the center become emptied of space (and time). On the other hand, scholars writ- ing on other spaces must contend with time and space. One impact is that generalists in the center are still overwhelmingly white, while ra- cialized theorists theorize about other groups or spaces. Thus, in global structures of knowledge production and circulation, U.S.-based work flows globally as foundational knowledge that must be reckoned with, while work based elsewhere becomes optional. 2 In sociology, important approaches like southern theory have emerged in response to some of these structures of power. However, the gesture to look at others does not seem to disrupt the spaceless, timeless, generic theory of the center. Introduction - 3 - Approaches from the south are still of the south, and still burdened by space in the larger political economy of production and value. To my mind, the issue is not quite or only that our theories are north- ern and we need to pay attention to other theories; such an approach can miss the deep histories of entanglements within which northern and southern theories both emerge. The issue is that the relations and connections between north and south, the putative West and non-West, here and there, are elided. The ways in which our basic theoretical ap- paratus for thinking gender, sexuality, and sex is based on imperial histories and contemporary neocolonial and neoimperial processes are invisible. This is why, although there has been an opening up to the transnational and global, the transnational and the global are them- selves repeatedly displaced elsewhere. A sustained consideration of how these processes might matter for here—for the global north—has been much slower. Fundamental, then, are the ways in which space organizes the social sciences, and sociology in particular. We are disciplined by modernist spatial-societal boundaries. While we deconstruct gender, sexuality, and sex, we continue to assume different spaces have their own sex-gender-sexuality regimes. 3 We spatialize sex-gender-sexuality, and emerging transnational work gets slotted elsewhere. This elsewher- ing empties global north spaces of the transnational, while global south spaces become burdened with the transnational. Transnational work, then, is transnational about particular topics and particular spaces. One central reason for this politics of space in sociology is the dis- cipline’s presentist focus, which elides colonial histories. 4 When time and temporality are considered, this spatial thinking disciplines the imagination of time. The result is histories of particular, preconstituted spaces, rather than a historical perspective that is allowed to interrupt preconstituted spaces. These histories may incorporate colonial pro- cesses to the extent that they can be shown to impact the site under examination, but the cross-border itself is still disciplined/displaced to show only how it matters for this already-constituted space. Webbed Connectivities: The Imperial Sociology of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality disrupts this way of thinking about space (and so time) when it comes to sex, sexuality, and gender. The book disrupts this disci- plining and disappearing of the cross-border and the resultant hege- monic geography of the transnational. In its stead, it offers the frame of “webbed connectivities,” my term for historic imperial, racial, and - 4 - Introduction colonial networks (I discuss this frame in greater length below). It ar- gues that we should move from society as the basic spatial metaphor for how we organized knowledge on sex, sexuality, and gender to webbed connectivities. Building on the wealth of feminist and queer scholar- ship on race and empire, the book offers a global historical sociology that situates the emergence of the northern-based conceptual cate- gories of gender, sexuality, and sex squarely within historic webbed connectivities. Why concepts? While we have become quite adept at critical analy- sis of the experiences of those marginalized (or privileged) by patriar- chal, heteronormative, and to a lesser extent, cis-normative relations of power, we have often not subjected our concepts to the same level of scrutiny. In some basic ways we have essentialized the concepts of sex, sexuality, and gender, even as we engage in analyses of social construc- tion. In other words, even though these concepts clearly have a time and a space, as all social formations must, they are often treated as timeless and spaceless. The book is concerned, thus, with examining the emergence and eventual hegemony of these concepts as events to be explained rather than merely descriptive terms or analytical tools to be assumed. It is interested in how time and space matter for the emergence and hegemony of these concepts within the broader context of imperial histories and webbed connectivities. I will argue that our supposedly neutral analytical (i.e., universalizable) concepts are bur- dened by imperial temporalities and spatialities, a point that highlights the impossibility of the impetus to elsewhere the transnational and the colonial. To be clear, the argument is not to throw out these concepts, a feat very close to impossible in any case. Indeed, I work with these concepts even as I seek to probe their limits. The goal is to focus on the contexts of their emergence and ascendance in order to enable conver- sations about their proper scope and application. Due to my interest in concepts, the book is less focused on subjectivi- ties and experiences. Rather, I examine medical, scientific, economic, philosophical, cultural, and other kinds of racial-imperial discourses situated within the institutions and structures of imperial webbed connectivities. As sex, gender, and sexuality are English-language con- cepts, the bulk of my focus is on the British and U.S. imperial metro- poles. I argue that the concepts of sex, sexuality, and gender emerge in the times and spaces of the hegemonies enjoyed by these two empires Introduction - 5 - and dominate global knowledge production today due to their ongoing power (even after hegemonic decline). Such an approach may seem to recenter the West/north, especially given the very important work hap- pening right now that is about provincializing Western and northern knowledges. However, I see my project here as complementary to this critical work. Examining how race and empire matter for the produc- tion of theoretical concepts in the heart of empire, my goal is to prob- lematize and provincialize concepts that still flow from north to south through global knowledge structures. While such knowledges can of course be translated and adapted, and while they can certainly flow from south to north as well, the fact that interlocutors around the world cannot avoid grappling with northern-produced knowledges points to structures of power that cannot be ignored. Thus, the goal here is to show how empire matters for the inven- tion of concepts that are often treated as analytically neutral or uni- versalizable. The focus on the British and U.S. empires also places some clear limits on the kinds of claims I advance. However, given that these English-language concepts have been globalized through the historical and ongoing impacts of British and U.S. imperial power, the book is also relevant beyond these specific empires. Thus the book argues that these imperial histories are not just his- tories of what happened long ago, but continue to shape our basic as- sumptions and concepts about gender, sexuality, and sex today. I show how historic webbed connectivities have helped circulate, produce, and place seemingly disconnected sex-gender-sexuality regimes since the sixteenth century. I show how these deeply historical processes have shaped how we continue to spatialize and temporalize sex, gender, and sexuality even today. One important contribution of treating the concepts of sex, sexual- ity, and gender as historical events emergent of imperial webbed con- nectivities, is that each of these events also then becomes a lens onto shifting productions of race and imperiality. For example, while much critical scholarship writes about empire in general ways, my approach here allows me to situate and historicize productions of imperial white- ness. I identify multiple such productions from the Enlightenment, to the emergence of British imperial hegemony, to its eclipse by U.S. hege- mony. I argue that the concepts of sex, sexuality, and gender materialize - 6 - Introduction within particular racial-imperial formations and are also a lens onto the racial-imperial exigencies of these formations. Decolonial Relationality: Thinking Sideways across Webbed Connectivities While the sociologies of gender and sexuality have long employed a rela- tional approach, nonrelational and substantialist approaches are ongo- ing in various ways (i.e., in how sociologists write about culture, society, and states, and hence about sex, gender, and sexuality as these relate to culture, society and states). In short, relational insights tend to be fo- cused on certain scales and not others. 5 Webbed Connectivities develops a multiscalar relational framework that emphasizes the cross-border and transnational scale for situating gender, sexuality, and sex. The book does not eschew the local or the national, but reframes the local and the national within broader, cross-border processes. Beyond sociology, this sort of multiscalar, relational framework can also be helpful in fields that have focused more on the transnational within historical gender and sexuality studies (i.e., history, English, cul- tural studies). While a relational approach at the transnational scale, such as I am arguing for here, is sometimes implicit in such work, it is often not clearly articulated or elaborated. In addition, while such fields are more likely to explore cross-border, racialized histories, analyses are often still limited by site or preconstituted spaces and groups. I argue here for a broader, comprehensive framework grounded in im- perial histories that gives analytical tools for analysis, and also makes room for ongoing historical developments. Thus, Webbed Connectivities seeks to intervene in how space con- tinues to discipline the transnational in gender and sexuality studies. Webbed Connectivities makes a case for why we need to change our fundamental spatial-societal metaphor for the social construction of gender, sexuality, and sex from society to webbed connectivities. With the organizing framework of webbed connectivities, the book advances a multiscalar, relational approach that highlights the web of impe- rial networks that connect spaces and seemingly discrete sex-gender- sexuality regimes from the protocolonial period forward. What are webbed connectivities? 6 First and foremost, they are his- torical formations: networks of relations forged within protocolonial Introduction - 7 - and colonial processes. Formed via the actions of multiple structural, institutional, collective, and individual actors (what I call “agents/ agencies”) operating within long-term structural, medium-term con- junctural, and more immediate temporalities, they do not themselves singularly act and are not actors. Rather, webbed connectivities are the sustained and dynamic outcomes of these complex historical processes. Though they are themselves outcomes, as networked formations, webbed connectivities have consequences or impacts in the world (i.e., the production, circulation, and placement of seemingly disconnected regimes). Additionally, as formations subject to changing conditions, the connections they forge can have ongoing consequences for the sites that are brought into relation, even after the connectivities themselves have shifted. By highlighting cross-border historical formations that have conse- quences over time, a central goal of this book is to challenge the ongo- ing ways in which assumptions about society—typically understood as coterminous with the nation-state—continue to organize knowledge production on sex, gender, and sexuality. In this sense, although webbed connectivities are not themselves merely metaphor, one goal is to make them speak to the inadequate spatial metaphors currently in use. Finally, in addition to being historical formations that have conse- quences over time, webbed connectivities can also form the basis of a historically situated theoretical framework for analyzing cross-border relations connecting seemingly distinct regimes of gender, sexual- ity, and sex. By beginning with webbed connectivities as a theoretical framework, the goal is to move the starting point for analysis from an assumption of nation-states as ahistorical containers to nation-states as historically consolidated sites within cross-border networks of re- lations. The framework of webbed connectivities insists on these rela- tions, though where within these connectivities one begins one’s analy- sis will depend on one’s goals. Rather than focusing on a priori sites, thus, Webbed Connectivities traces relations, networks, and connections that cross sites. It does so with the methodological tactic of thinking sideways. Critically, thinking sideways does not align with a positivist conceptualization of methods as a set of formal procedures that must be followed in a particular way. Thinking sideways is rather a tactic or sensibility that emphasizes the - 8 - Introduction need to transform the basic assumptions one brings to analysis, what- ever methodological procedures one eventually adopts. Again, while a formal set of procedures does not align with this ap- proach, we can outline certain broad guidelines: thinking sideways begins with cross-border imperial and other histories. It begins with agents/agencies that have historically crossed borders that one rec- ognizes as relevant to one’s subject matter. It insists on following the movements of these agents across received borders and tracing their productions, circulations, and impacts as these likewise move across borders. Critically, following the movements of these agents and their productions means allowing these entities to disrupt a priori under- standings of boundaries between what constitutes one’s subject matter and what does not. Such following may also reveal additional agents/ agencies as relevant for one’s project. One entry point into these processes is secondary sources that deal with seemingly disconnected materials, sources that, in light of a side- ways sensibility, can be brought into productive relation with each other. For example, in chapter 2, I bring together the British racial- colonial state’s (and related agencies’) productions of the figure of Black women with its productions of the figure of the Indian hijra over the 1700s and 1800s. These two subjects and sites tend not to be read in re- lation to each other. However, situating both within a broader scale of empire and the strategies of an encompassing racial-colonial state (i.e., beginning with cross-border imperial histories) allows me to do so here. My entry point is the large amount of scholarship already done on both sites, though separately. From such an entry point, one can then iden- tify separate discourses, datasets, and archives, which can themselves be brought into productive relation. Reading across discourses, datasets, and archives not intended to be brought together in this way opens up new avenues for exploration. It allows for questions on the particular agendas, interests, and other con- ditions of production for each; situated within cross-border imperial and other histories, such particularities can then be examined within a broader context and in relation to each other. One objection to the charge to read across discourses, datasets, and archives in this way is the potentially unmanageable mass of empirical material such an approach can produce. I do not deny that bounding one’s materials for analysis in a way that makes sense for one’s subject Introduction - 9 - matter is also necessary in this approach. Indeed, the work of defining a subject of research analysis always entails some kind of bounding, depending on one’s goals. However, colonial modern thinking has dis- ciplined what kinds of crossings we have paid attention to and what kinds we have not. This is why so many of our knowledges, like the bulk of our reading practices regarding gender, sexuality, and sex, are orga- nized and hence bounded by an a priori delineation of particular sites. Bringing previously separated discourses, datasets, and archives into productive relation can allow for a different kind of bounding. For ex- ample, in my discussion in chapter 2, while the racial-colonial state’s interpellations at the scale of empire in the time period I focus on in- volve more subjects than the ones I focus on (for example in the Pacific and Middle East), I choose to focus on sites that enable me to explore the gendered and sexualized relational formation of what I believe are two of the most consequential racializations in the English-speaking world. Other, related racializations also exist of course, awaiting their own excavations. A second challenge to this charge for a sideways sensibility is the ongoing significance of south–south tensions and/or tensions between differentially racialized groups and sites. Given such tensions, as well as assumptions of disconnection, critical approaches to race and racisms typically focus on the construction of the racialized other in relation to whiteness or a particular site in the global south in relation to the global north—to the neglect of potential connections with other racial- ized groups and sites. One effect is that, while important works often address related or parallel concerns on either side of a particular line, they often do not look at each other or speak to each other. In contrast, thinking sideways enables the tracing of the always historically specific relations among differentially racialized groups and sites. Such an ap- proach shows how distinctions and tensions and alignments and com- monalities are produced in broader processes of empire, slavery, and colonialism, which often work together and in relation to each other. In doing so, Webbed Connectivities troubles the production of assumed differences not only in the workings of race and empire but also in contemporary critical scholarship that neglects the historicity of such demarcations today. Thus, thinking sideways and tracing webbed con- nectivities across sites of racialization in the ways I argue for here can both help to examine such tensions, frictions, and power relations and