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The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire
The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power is a political, cultural, and intellectual study of race, sex, and Western empire. Greg Thomas interrogates a system that represents race, gender, sexuality, and class in certain systematic and oppressive ways. By connecting sex and eroticism to geopolitics both politically and epistemologically, he examines the logic, operations, and politics of sexuality in the West. The book focuses on the centrality of race, class, and empire to Western realities of "gender and sexuality" and to problematic Western attempts to theorize gender and sexuality (or embodiment). Addressing a wide range of intellectual disciplines, it holds out the hope for an analysis freed from the domination of white, Western terms of reference.
200 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 4, 2021
People dismiss critiques of gender and sex categories as “postmodernism.” They argue that trans people are “erasing” the “reality” of sex with “theory.” But this is not about theory, this is about history. Dr. Greg Thomas argues that the need to challenge gender and sex categories begins with decolonization and accounting for the legacy of chattel slavery. Modern gender and sex categories are not natural, they were created specifically in the context of Western empire as a way to naturalize slavery and colonialism. It’s not just that gender is a “social construct, it is a culturally specific, Western bourgeois social construct” (49). The real erasure that is occurring is of Black, Indigenous, colonized knowledge systems outside of the Western sex binary.
Despite the fact that gender and sex posture themselves as universal systems that exist across the world, they are actually particular, culturally and geographically specific ways of organizing people and society. In 2000 renowned Jamaican philosopher Dr. Sylvia Wynter argued that “from the very origin of the modern world…there were never simply men and women.” Thomas elaborates on Wynter’s work, demonstrating how historically Black people were always rendered outside of gender and sex categories. The definitions of “man” and “woman” were formalized and codified into law and science in the context of race, empire, and anti-Black racism. For Thomas, “there is no universal man socialized in opposition to a universal woman; there is a white man and a white woman specified over and against Black Africans” (42).
Western gender categories were developed as a metric to demonize Black people and ‘civilize’ white people who were defined against the “savagery” and “sexual ambiguity” of Black and Indigenous people. Gender and sex were not universal, they were race-specific. Excluding Black people from the gender system was central to the dehumanization of Black people and the justification of their captivity.
Thomas writes, “One cannot quality as a human if one is not identified as a man or a woman…since manhood, womanhood, and humanity are not apolitical notions…but very political notions of empire” (28). For example in her book Reconstructing Womanhood (1987), professor of African American Studies Dr. Hazel Carby shows how piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity were four main features of Victorian womanhood barred to Black people. The exploitation of slavery created the material conditions of leisure and domesticity necessary for white womanhood. Black people were not permitted domesticity, they were all expected to work.
In the 18th and 19th centuries the sex binary – the idea that there were only two distinct sexes with opposite anatomies – was defined as a civilizational accomplishment exclusive to the white race. Introducing Black and Indigenous people to the Western sex binary was part of the “white man’s burden,” the so-called obligation to bring “civilization” to the “savage” races across the world. Colonists sought to annihilate Black and Indigenous practices of kinship and embodiment and impose new genders and sexualities “molded in the image of the colonial mother and family” (64).
Thomas argues that there are never merely men and women, without race and class. Instead, there are a “legion of genders and sexualities” that cannot be reduced to anatomy. Thomas cautions that the danger of taking Western categories for granted means that resistance to domination becomes defined as “gaining access to such things rather than as rejecting them out of hand for an old, new, or different way of life” (29). In order to do justice to the legacy of slavery, there must be a “critical rejection of all European discourses of sex and gender and all the alien tongues in which they have been violently imposed” (30).
Despite the fact that gender and sex posture themselves as universal systems that exist across the world, they are actually particular, culturally and geographically specific ways of organizing people and society. In 2000 renowned Jamaican philosopher Dr. Sylvia Wynter argued that “from the very origin of the modern world…there were never simply men and women.” Thomas elaborates on Wynter’s work, demonstrating how historically Black people were always rendered outside of gender and sex categories. The definitions of “man” and “woman” were formalized and codified into law and science in the context of race, empire, and anti-Black racism. For Thomas, “there is no universal man socialized in opposition to a universal woman; there is a white man and a white woman specified over and against Black Africans” (42).
Western gender categories were developed as a metric to demonize Black people and ‘civilize’ white people who were defined against the “savagery” and “sexual ambiguity” of Black and Indigenous people. Gender and sex were not universal, they were race-specific. Excluding Black people from the gender system was central to the dehumanization of Black people and the justification of their captivity.
Thomas writes, “One cannot quality as a human if one is not identified as a man or a woman…since manhood, womanhood, and humanity are not apolitical notions…but very political notions of empire” (28). For example in her book Reconstructing Womanhood (1987), professor of African American Studies Dr. Hazel Carby shows how piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity were four main features of Victorian womanhood barred to Black people. The exploitation of slavery created the material conditions of leisure and domesticity necessary for white womanhood. Black people were not permitted domesticity, they were all expected to work.
In the 18th and 19th centuries the sex binary – the idea that there were only two distinct sexes with opposite anatomies – was defined as a civilizational accomplishment exclusive to the white race. Introducing Black and Indigenous people to the Western sex binary was part of the “white man’s burden,” the so-called obligation to bring “civilization” to the “savage” races across the world. Colonists sought to annihilate Black and Indigenous practices of kinship and embodiment and impose new genders and sexualities “molded in the image of the colonial mother and family” (64).
Thomas argues that there are never merely men and women, without race and class. Instead, there are a “legion of genders and sexualities” that cannot be reduced to anatomy. Thomas cautions that the danger of taking Western categories for granted means that resistance to domination becomes defined as “gaining access to such things rather than as rejecting them out of hand for an old, new, or different way of life” (29). In order to do justice to the legacy of slavery, there must be a “critical rejection of all European discourses of sex and gender and all the alien tongues in which they have been violently imposed” (30).
July 27, 2020
Black folks have long been enduring an identity crisis. And while in America, we’ve been moving towards abolitionist frameworks to develop pathways to liberation, we hold on so dearly to the constructs of sex and gender that we essentially undermine all of our work.
The mind is the most fundamental tool weaponized for colonialist benefit and it is through a system of states of being that we are out in our place. How do we interrogate a language that has been normalized and set as the standard and the end all be all? How do we rename something using the same language that has us mentally shackled?
This book lays the foundation for understanding just how insidious gendering is towards the detriment of Blackhood. It speaks to our willingness to hold on for dear life for something that we think situates is in this society. But it further alienates us and undermines our movements and in our current work with grappling through gendered violence, we only seek to restructure oppression within the system rather than get rid of it altogether.
Definitely gonna chew on this more but this book truly was brilliant and left me with so much more homework. I will admit that it starts to lose me towards the end after the Fanon chapter but before then, it was pure brilliance.
The mind is the most fundamental tool weaponized for colonialist benefit and it is through a system of states of being that we are out in our place. How do we interrogate a language that has been normalized and set as the standard and the end all be all? How do we rename something using the same language that has us mentally shackled?
This book lays the foundation for understanding just how insidious gendering is towards the detriment of Blackhood. It speaks to our willingness to hold on for dear life for something that we think situates is in this society. But it further alienates us and undermines our movements and in our current work with grappling through gendered violence, we only seek to restructure oppression within the system rather than get rid of it altogether.
Definitely gonna chew on this more but this book truly was brilliant and left me with so much more homework. I will admit that it starts to lose me towards the end after the Fanon chapter but before then, it was pure brilliance.
June 18, 2015
Really my only problem with this book is the tendency to take "the particular suffering of the black diaspora" as the crux of all suffering caused by colonialism. This isn't to say that it wasn't a tremendous form of suffering or a historical crime perpetuated by Europeans but rather to point out that often the only weakness to a lot of critical work on race/sexuality/gender is to act as though without being *the worst* suffering ones suffering is not being given its proper due and then there is an implicit or explicit hierarchy which i think leads to really weird arguments i have no real place in between oppressed groups about whose oppression is primary (rather than questions of how oppression is structured and maintained). This quibble out of the way: Thomas does a really excellent job summarizing a number of complex questions about sexuality, gender, colonialism and racialization woven together with critiques of both AADS and Gender/Sexuality/Queer studies for ignoring questions of racial difference in the construction of gender/sexuality and visa versa.
January 23, 2020
The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power makes two controversial intellectual claims: first, it declares that concepts of "manhood" and "womanhood," "masculinity" and "femininity," and "homosexual" and "heterosexual," are Western conceits that cannot be applied when thinking about Black and non-Western articulations of gender and sexuality; second, that hegemonic disciplines of feminism, gender and sexuality studies, and (though unstated) queer studies are complicit in maintaining hegemonic Occidental frames of gender and sexuality, frames that posit Africa and the non-West as sexually savage, and the West as sexually-liberated.
To make such an analysis Thomas carefully reads texts from Black scholars and activists, both critiquing sexual or gendered complicity and pulling from their analyses modes of sexual or gendered resistance. Most-provoking are Thomas's critiques of, in the second chapter, Angela Davis, and in the sixth chapter, Marlon Riggs. Through these critiques, Thomas articulates a radical way of re-thinking and re-imagining, one that has the potential to, "...subvert the sexual demon of white power in 'America' and beyond" (153) through a rejection of Western, middle-class/elite categories of gender and sexuality.
Thomas's monograph is a key work in Black gender and sexuality studies, one that critiques not only the naturalization of long-held categories of gender and sexuality, but the role of these categories in making difference. Every gender and sexuality studies or feminist theory course should include this in the syllabus. Period.
To make such an analysis Thomas carefully reads texts from Black scholars and activists, both critiquing sexual or gendered complicity and pulling from their analyses modes of sexual or gendered resistance. Most-provoking are Thomas's critiques of, in the second chapter, Angela Davis, and in the sixth chapter, Marlon Riggs. Through these critiques, Thomas articulates a radical way of re-thinking and re-imagining, one that has the potential to, "...subvert the sexual demon of white power in 'America' and beyond" (153) through a rejection of Western, middle-class/elite categories of gender and sexuality.
Thomas's monograph is a key work in Black gender and sexuality studies, one that critiques not only the naturalization of long-held categories of gender and sexuality, but the role of these categories in making difference. Every gender and sexuality studies or feminist theory course should include this in the syllabus. Period.
April 12, 2008
This book is really awesome. It's a little tough but def. worth the effort.
April 24, 2023
Incredibly eye opening and important book. The only slight thing for me was the very dense academic writing which made it hard to zone in to, though I came to this book with no background in the field so that's also slightly on me
January 30, 2022
“The West mobilizes the concepts of human sexuality and sexual historicity in its mission to present itself as the epitome of culture and civilization” (156)
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews