Colonial fear of miscegenation fuels the sexualized violence of imperial settings

Evidence

Young utilizes the same analytic to argue that colonialism required similar ‘violent physical and ideological procedures’ as well as the damming up, diverting, and reterritorialization of desire that Deleuze and Guattari describe for capitalism. The ‘endlessly repeated colonial fantasy of the uncontrollable sexual drive of the non-white races and their limitless fertility,’ for example, ‘only took on significance through its voyeuristic tableau of frenzied interminable coupling, of couplings, fusings, coalescence, between races.’ Colonialism’s endless preoccupations with miscegenation (a preoccupation shared in slave regimes) and the policing of sexual boundaries through violence resolve the ambivalence in the moment, only to have it threaten to overwhelm colonial subjects again and again. It is in this ambivalence, and in the violence that it gives birth to, that we find the tracks for what happens at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and similar settings. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 175

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing interest in sexualized domination and how boundaries produce violence — parallels the midwife’s/narrative-of-violence threads and the moral-panic material on policing boundaries. — connects to: Customary anti-miscegenation attitudes hardened into formal colonial policy — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1413