concept of whiteness. 30 Peggy Pascoe stated that ‘For scholars interested in the social construction of race, gender, and culture, few subjects are as potentially revealing as the history of interracial marriage’. 31 Thus, the history of interracial
marriage can reveal how race and sexuality have been regulated and constructed
over time. Laws prohibiting interracial marriage in the United States were often
justified on the basis of maintaining and preserving racial purity. Furthermore,
Michael Foucault argued that the recognition of the population as a distinct entity
transformed the significance of the family from a model of state to an instrument of governance. 32 The family became a crucial “segment” for accessing, regulating and reforming the population, and managing sexuality came hand in hand with this. 33
Foucault’s perspective is significant in colonial contexts as it highlights the ways in
which colonial powers attempted to manage and control the populations they sought
to govern. By viewing the family as a crucial segment through which the population
could be regulated, colonial powers could implement policies not only to control
individual bodies and practises but also entire populations. This gave colonial
powers the ability to manipulate the social and demographic makeup of their
colonies in ways that furthered their political and economic interests.
The European representations of racial ‘others’ that became intimately linked
to racial inferiority and deviant sexual behaviour, were considered different from
‘normal’ European sexuality. This included same -sex encounters. This is particularly
visible in the representations of non-European peoples in European art, literature,
and science, which often depicted them as sexually promiscuous and morally degenerate. 34 Historian Rudi Bleys argues that stigmatisation of male homosexual identity in Europe is linked to theories of racial degeneration and the perceived perverse sexualities of non-European peoples. 35 This reinforces the idea that the
regulation of sexuality was a tool of colonial domination that was used to reinforce
the ideas of European cultural superiority. In addition to controlling interracial sexual
30 Tony Ballantyne, ‘The Changing Shape of the Modern British Empire and its Historiography’, the Historical Journal, 53.2 (2010), 429 – 452, pp. 434. 31 Birthe Kundrus, pp. 219. 32 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 13. 33 ibid. 34 Robert M. Buffington, Donna J. Guy, and Eithne Luibheid, pp. 64. 35 Rudi C. Bleys, ‘The Geography of Perversion: Male -to-male Sexual Behaviour Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination 1750 – 1918, The Journal of Asian Studies, 56.4 (1995), 1044- 1047, pp. 1045.
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