Control of women’s sexuality intensifies when communities feel they are losing control

Evidence

There is little doubt that both arranged and forced marriages spring from an impulse to control women’s sexuality, and that such controls are exercised more vigorously when communities feel themselves to be losing control. In other words, the patriarchal features of the practice cannot be denied. To consider this particular patriarchal practice, we need to see migrant Muslim communities in context. First, instead of seeing them as composed of foreign newcomers and uninvited guests, we might view them as populations displaced by colonialism and now under siege in late capitalism. As communities, they struggle for survival in an increasingly racist context. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 325

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that sexual controls intensify under perceived loss of community control is worth tracing further — does it generalize beyond Muslim migrant communities to other contexts, e.g. colonial settings where women’s bodies were regulated as carriers of group identity?
• XREF: Connects to the known cross-cultural pattern that patriarchal communitarian control tightens under siege — akin to how colonized groups symbolically load women’s purity with collective honor, as discussed in Things Fall Apart. — connects to: Widespread contraceptive availability increases women’s sexual freedom and premarital experience.; Women are denied sexual reciprocity because dependency, not reproduction, still motivates control. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1630; Modern women may still use their bodies as capital for sexual-economic exchange — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 297