Gender, History and Imperialism: Anne Wheeler's Loyalties

Abstract

Reads Anne Wheeler's film, Loyalties (1984), as a reflection of contradictions that emerge in feminism when it takes up the trope of the feminizing of colonial territory to critique a patriarchal narrative of imperial history. It is shown that the race & class differences between the two main characters are overcome through an essentializing notion of sexual differentiation, which marks an originary site of patriarchal violence in the history of imperialism. The ideological effect produced by this movement is taken to be a residual mark of competing material forces between or among the capitalist mode & hunter/gatherer mode of producing sexual difference. Contradictions between these modes of producing sexual differences are likened to similar effects produced by the passage of Bill C-31 in Canada, which both set a precedent for sex equality & unleashed a set of contradictions among native organizations & communities. D. M. Smith