Stoler and Concubinage

Pardon me for this late entry! here are my thoughts on Stoler's article...

Stoler argues that the colonizer-colonized categories and labels were layed out by "forms of sexual control" and "defined the domestic arrangements of Europeans and the cultural investments by which they identified themselves"(42). Hence, she says that inperial authority is structured in highly gendered terms, and this sexuality and gender to a large extent gave the colonial system its order and manner.

I find this interesting because it assumes that the women were of a subordinate position, when i would instead propose that women in fact had an upper hand in a system like this, whether they realised it or not. They were being instrumental in shifting the colonial system of meaning from self-interest and moral superiority, making clear the weak links in narratives of colonial legitimization.

When stoler says, "most of these women remained servants... but some combined their service with varied degrees of independence and authorit"(49), the point here is that women had a way out, or rather, a way to manipulate their position and manipulate their men to their benefit, and we do see an example of this in May in Burmese Days.

So while Stoler seems to talk aboout "reinforced hierarchies" due to concubinage, i think the more important issue is how these hierarchies are problematised. There is a definite shift from the twice colonized subaltern woman(by patriarchy and by the colonizer) to the subaltern woman with agency and upon whom the colonizing sommunity was deeply dependent on.

Performativity; Power and a little Gender

The idea of theatricality or performativity is seen again in Woolf’s Growing. His open admittance that “in Ceylon [they] were always, subconsciously or consciously, playing a part, acting upon a stage.(Woolf24-25)” suggests that the role of the colonized is one that is not so much assumed as it is acted out. The underlying notion of having expectations to meet in the eyes of colonial standards by the establishment suggest that the relationship between colonizer and colonized was not only set up by expectation (and recognition) of a master-slave(power-powerless) dynamic, but also perpetuated by it. Stoler’s idea of “who counted as “European” and by what measure”(43) then becomes something that is vague in terms of actual personality traits, but becomes a much more vague label recognized by virtue of the way the colonizers and colonized act. This can be seen in Woolf’s autobiography where his dog defecates someone’s clean white clothes and no one takes notice and also when the Charles, his dog is sick all over the native owned place in Jaffna and no one took notice. The fact that the white man (and the whiteman’s dog) can behave in such a manner without consequence signals the obvious power positions.

While Stoler’s article of Gender suggest that sexual images illustrate the iconography of rule(45), what remained curious to me is Woolf’s illustration of women(white or non) in the excerpts, from the nonchalant way he says he “spent the night”(I forget the page) with a local woman to his merciless, descriptions of Miss Beeching with the “face rather like that of a good looking male Red Indian”( Woolf 26)and Mrs Lewis as “large, plump and flordly good-looking”(I forget which page), he seems to embody that colonial ideal of European “hypermasculinity”(cant find the page in Stoler) in his power of gender over the figures of Others; women and perhaps the most “othered’ the native women (who supposedly are “useful guides”(Stoler 49)