Foucaultian biopower is an excellent lens through which this week's readings can be viewed. Foucault defines biopower as "[A]n explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations…”* The proponents of colonialism were unanimous in "attempting to make something more real"* than reality, and the mysticism attributed to the Orient was the vector through which this paradox was transferred. Women are ubiquitously inferior in the realm of sexuality, in part because any urges or desires a woman had were considered pathological, but primarily due to the inverted power structure in which women are imprisoned in their own homes yet bear the responsibility of maintaining cultural integrity and European morality through their reproductive efforts. Essentially, "the imprisonment of women becomes the equivalent of sexual frustration."*
A question central to this issue is "how seemingly shared vocabularies of sexual and social reform may sometimes remain the same and sometimes diverge and/or transpose into distinct and oppositional political meanings." The practice of concubinage serves as a potent example addressing the social and cultural hypocrisy that was rampant during European colonization. While European males were initially encouraged cohabitation with the indigenous women they were simultaneously forbidden from entering into any contractual union, essentially facilitating the colony as a petri-dish of moral erosion. Despite the fact that concubinage was retroactively eliminated as an impetus of colonization, the inevitable proliferation of cultural distortion had already rooted itself in the progeny of these relationships.
*Foucault, History of Sexuality vol. 1, pg. 140
*Women's Prisons
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