Colonial power was symbolically encoded as masculine mastery over a feminized land

Evidence

The very language of exploration, conquest, and domination was strongly marked by gender distinctions and drew much of its subconscious force from sexual imagery. In “Europe,” the colonizer stands bold and upright, a commanding male figure, his feet firmly planted on terra firma. Around him are the insignia of power: the standard of Their Catholic Majesties of Spain, surmounted by a cross; in his left hand, the astrolabe that guided him, the fruit of Western knowledge; behind him, the galleons, sails billowing. Vespucci presents an image of supreme mastery. Hulme comments that, “in line with existing European conventions, the ‘new’ continent was often allegorized as a woman”—here, naked, in a hammock, surrounded by the emblems of an exotic landscape: strange plants and animals and, above all, a cannibal feast (see Hulme 1986, xii). — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 619

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the gendered/Orientalist allegorical coding of the colonized territory as a feminized, sexualized Other — a core mechanism of the symbolic construction of difference.
• XREF: connects to: Woman’s subjugation symbolizes the mastery of nature that defines civilization — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 255; When agriculture turned creative, man claimed generative power over both land and heirs — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 167; Colonial pressures shaped Caribbean gender relations and blocked feminism as a spiritual force — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 353