2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

In colonial settings, women’s bodies—on public display, in sexual encounters, and biological reproduction—constituted key sites where the meanings and contours of biopower and racialized hierarchies of power could be negotiated and reconfigured. The objective of this panel will be twofold. First, it will analyze global and comparative measures deployed by states and societies to regulate the intimate, prostitution, marriage, and motherhood. Second, it will examine citizens’ and colonial subjects’ resistance to these top-down impositions on their personal lives and public mobility, and how in doing so, they contributed to shaping ideas and practices about respectable marriages, appropriate sex, and the family. The papers explore how pious African women in twentieth-century Cameroon formulated their own vision of family-building and women’s rights; and how soldiers, colonial subjects, and women in twentieth-century India and in the French empire helped to redefine the contours of transactional sex away from colonial visions. In doing so, historical actors debated the meanings of moral and social progress, racial equality, and the freedom to marry and have sex with a partner of their own choosing. Through their—at times subversive—personal choices, male and female citizens and subjects thus destabilized and transcended established hierarchies of race, gender, and class.