Colonial governance positioned white men as executors and white women out of the colonies

Evidence

It is important to recognize here that the racial state trades on gendered determinations, reproducing its racial configurations in gendered terms and its gendered forms racially. Bodies are governed, colonially and postcolonially, through their constitutive positioning as racially engendered and in the gendering of their racial configuration. White men enacted the “dirty” governance of colonialism; white women, excluded from the formalities of colonial governance almost altogether, in very large part were excluded also from the colonies, or from those colonial spaces least like Europe. Largely ripped from traditional forms of labor, “non-European” men were put to work manually, where they were employed at all, under grueling, debilitating, ultimately crippling conditions. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1661

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the gendered division of colonial labor described in Said’s Orientalism and Mohanty’s postcolonial feminist critiques.