Week 2 Response (Robin)

Most interesting to me about Both Malek Alloula’s “Women’s Prisons” and Ann Laura Stoler’s “Colonial Studies and The History of Sexuality” is their focus on how various forms of knowledge are employed as a tool in the creation and maintenance of a colonial system of power. Using colonial postcards of the harem as the subject of her analysis, Alloula argues that in creating a hyper-real representation of the harem, the photographer is able to fufill his desire for the unavailable “other” while virtually reconciling the center/margin dichotomy (Alloula, 26). Stoler focuses on Foucault’s History of Sexuality working to complicate the dominant representation of Foucault’s work. And calls for an analysis of Foucault’s conception of colonial sexuality which would focus on the ways in which Western colonial sexuality was formulated not only within the confines of the West, but also within the “Orient”. Inserting discourses of race into Foucault’s discourse of sexuality, Stoler argues that while the discourse of bourgeoisie sexuality is founded on a “grid of intelligibility” as Foucault states, the importance of the racial other is minimized in Foucault’s further representation of modern sexuality (Stoler, 11).

What was interesting was that when reading these two texts in the context of Edward Said’s Orientalism, the relationship between sexuality, racial identity, knowledge and power addressed in these two texts takes on a more complex conceptualization. Just as Said argues that a discourse of knowledge was employed as a means of colonial domination, both Alloula and Stoler illuminate distinct ways in which knowledge was enacted as a means of coloniality. Alloula purports that in creating a replication of the harem, the photographer and the recipient are able to “know” the racial other represented in the image. Yet, this “knowing” is not one based on equality, but one which works to dominate the racial other represented. This domination is due to the fact that the “other” represented is still indeed a creation of the photographer and thus a manifestation of what that photographer imagines the harem to be. Not only does the postcard in this context create a knowledge based on the projection of the photographer, but it also portrays itself as an authentic representation of the harem itself.

Finally, Stoler’s text complicates the relationship between knowledge and power in relationship to sexuality. Building on Said’s argument in which the “Oriental” became an object of study, Stoler argues that these technologies of knowledge were then implemented within the West through discourses of sexuality, which in turn worked to regulate not only sexual practices, but also racial and national identities within the West. This then, raises several important questions. Was the West aware of the ways in which their use of knowledge and systems of domination were imbricated when they were applied to discourses of bourgeoisie sexuality? And if so, how did they justify/rationalize their implementation within the West? How did the relationship between power and knowledge change when discourses of sexuality moved from the “Orient” to the West?

Malek Alloula. 1986. "Women's Prisons" in The Colonial Harem. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 17-26.

Ann Laura Stoler. 1995. "Colonial Studies and The History of Sexuality" in Race and the Education of Desire. Durham: Duke University Press.