Histories of Sexuality and Imperialism: What's the Use?

Fig. 1.

City of Liverpool heritage plaque, 96–98 Upper Parliament Street.

Fig. 2.

Butler in stained glass, Ladies Chapel, Anglican Cathedral.

Postcolonial criticism is structured and sometimes strained by a dual interest in histories of imperialism and interventions in and against the colonial present. Setting up a dialogue between these spheres, this paper asks how histories of imperialism bear upon and can be useful within political interventions today. It does so with reference to a growing sub-field of postcolonial criticism, concerned with relationships between imperialism and sexuality.

Following Kenneth Ballhatchet's early work on India, reacting to Ronald Hyam's provocative review of the sex life of the British Empire and guided by Michel Foucault's histories of sexuality, a number of influential postcolonial critics and historians across and between a number of disciplines – history and geography, sociology and gender studies – have investigated relationships between global power, sexuality and/or intimacy. Following the publication of two landmark books on the subject – Ann Laura Stoler's Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2003) and Philippa Levine's Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (2004) – now is a good time to take stock of where this broadly historical work has taken us and can take us yet, intellectually and politically.¹ Building upon other attempts to develop a 'useable past,' including Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's work on radicalism in the Atlantic sphere and David Scott's analysis of the uses of colonial memories and histories,² I will use this paper to reflect on the uses of histories – and, closer to the subject of my own work, historical geographies – of imperialism and sexuality: on how these histories have been used; how they can and should be used; and how we might anticipate this in the stories we tell, the knowledge we produce.

My point of departure for this has been the completion of a book about sexuality politics in the British Empire. In the conclusion to Sex, Politics and Empire: a Postcolonial Geography (2006), I speculated on the legacies of Victorian sexuality politics and their lessons for the present day. I traced echoes of Victorian debates and interventions, echoes for instance of British women's advocacy for female prostitutes in India in expressions of solidarity by western gay and human rights activists for Jamaicans in same-sex relationships. The preliminary nature of those comments led me both to think more about relationships between past and present, and also to act: to try to turn the histories I had written to the contemporary cross-cultural and international sexuality politics. This paper describes where these thoughts and acts led, and seeks to develop connections between past and present. It bridges the writing and the mobilization of my own historical research and reflection on imperial and postcolonial sexuality politics, while it also addresses broader questions about the uses of histories of sexuality and imperialism. Though it begins by asking how historical knowledge can be politically useful, it quickly develops into a critique of instrumentalism, moving towards the productive question posed by Doreen Massey, 'not . . . of how to use the past in any utilitarian sense, but how to make the past within political struggles'.³

Making the past within political struggles is sometimes a matter of making 'past places within such struggles'.⁴ Massey explains that, 'In many political struggles, writ large or small, and in many aspects of daily life, the issue of identification and characterisation of places is a significant component'.⁵ To unpack these broad claims, I begin by turning to the memory of Josephine Butler – a key figure in imperial sexuality politics – in a place once regarded by many as the second city of the British Empire: Liverpool. Later in the paper, this discussion of the uses of histories of sexuality and imperialism shifts from Josephine Butler's work in Liverpool to Peter Tatchell's interventions in Jamaica, and thus from historical to contemporary activists...