European women in native lands

Stoler’s essay talks about the role of women in colonialism, and how sexual politics can be seen in relation to racial policies. Although the presence of European women in native lands enforced the boundaries and social spaces drawn between the white community and the natives, this reinforcement of racial differences was a continuation from previous tensions in the interactions between colonizers and colonized. European women are however chided for several things: racism, jealousy of Euro-Asian unions, and if they are assaulted by natives, they are often blamed for provoking their desires.

Similarly, the women in the novels read in this course have been portrayed as naïve, racist and unable to adapt to native cultures. Have we been reading them wrongly? That we fault these women for perhaps not being more open-minded and less racist, when in fact, they had a gendered-specific role to play in the colonial lands. As Stoler argues, “what European women had to say had little resonance and little effect until their objections coincided with a realignment in both racial and class politics in which they were strategic” (57). Do we perhaps take on the position of a White male colonizer with certain expectations of how European women were to behave, in ways which are also “strategic” to our own understandings of colonialism?

If colonialism is predicated on colonial difference, then European women could either be perceived as the bearers of these differences or they could transgress their roles. Either way, they must be read in ways aligned with particular ideologies and value systems. As much as European women, like the natives, are policed by the white male colonizers, they are policed by readers too.