Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Colonial Modernity: Towards a Sociology of Webbed Connectivities

Abstract

In recent years, scholarship on the relationship between sex, sexuality, and race in a transnational context has grown considerably. Within this broader arena, scholars across a number of (inter)disciplines including history, philosophy, gender studies, and sexuality studies have argued that Euro-American colonial relations were key in circulating, privileging, and solidifying racialized, heteronormative sex, and gender binaries across colonies and metropoles (see for example Lugones Reference Lugones2007; Woollacott Reference Woollacott2006). This chapter has two main aims. First, I make an assessment of, and contribution to, the development of this historical-transnational lens. I do so by developing a relationally oriented, “connected histories” historical sociological account (see Bhambra Reference Bhambra2010; also, Introduction of this volume) of the transnational connections this approach emphasizes. I center a number of overlapping and interconnected agents, including global capital, post/colonial states, material culture, the western sciences, and the Catholic Church, highlighting the relationships they collectively establish among multiple, often divergent, and seemingly discrete sex, gender, and sexuality regimes. I term this a webbed connectivities approach to sex, gender, and sexuality, and I argue that such an approach takes seriously the ways in which coloniality, or the complex, multiple, and multidirectional cross-border colonial processes, circuits, and formations, have shaped and continue to shape racialized notions of sex, gender, and sexuality in different locales today.