Dani's Response Week 2

The theme that emerged for me out of Alloula's and Stoler's articles was the colonization of the body. The images Alloula writes about provide a visual example of the colonization of the female body, and display how the female body is depicted as "accessible, credible, and profitable" (18). All three of these ideas are incredibly problematic, yet clearly pervasive in the world of colonialism.

Stolers' piece on concubines clearly ties in with this idea of the colonization of the body, as she describes the laws that trap Europeans and colonists into these relationships of power. However, "Colonial Studies and the History of Sexuality" also overlaps with this theme. Here, she introduces the idea of racial power as well as just sexual power. She challenges Foucault's work in sexuality for "discounting practice that racialized bodies" (7). I find the overlap between racial power and sexual power to be quite interesting, as I have studied both separately but clearly colonialism provides a context to study them together.

Stoler's assertion that the racial configurations of the imperial world were essential to the development of the bourgeois rather than a peripheral aspect of it is something I would like to discuss further.