Suchergebnisse

Imperial Leather chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power

The question is still open: what is the purpose of Guantanamo Bay? Why torture people whom the government and the interrogators know are innocent? What kind of U.S. empire now extends its filaments throughout the global gulag of interrogation prisons, torture-ships and internment camps? The U.S. state, I argue, has entered the domain of paranoia, for it is only in paranoia that one finds simultaneously both deliriums of omnipotence and forebodings of perpetual threat. I trace the flashpoints of paranoid violence into the labyrinths of torture to explore three crises: the crisis of violence and the visible; the crisis of imperial legitimacy; and what I call `the enemy deficit. What is the relation between photography and forgetting? What accounts for the persistent presence of photography in the scene of torture? I critique the `pornography-made-them do-it" narrative and explore the torture photographs not for what they reveal, but for what they conceal and what they allow us to forget about the now established but concealed circuits of global imperial violence.

Résumé Sans rejeter tout à fait la perspective de Bhabha (qui voit dans l'imitation des colonisés et l'ambivalence du discours colonial le lieu d'une faille structurelle du colonialisme, lequel travaillerait ainsi à sa propre subversion), l'auteure refuse de considérer que le repérage de telles failles structurelles suffise à déterminer les sources de la puissance d'agir politique des dominés ; en conséquence, elle en appelle à une analyse historique serrée des situations politiques et historiques, qui notamment mette en relief l'articulation concrète et les dynamiques indissociables du genre, des sexualités, de la race et des appartenances de classe. Elle montre 1) que la colonisation n'était pas, du point de vue des métropoles coloniales, une affaire extérieure ou un accident historique, étranger à leur essence historique, et 2) que la colonisation et les processus de transformation socio-politique en métropole étaient fondamentalement imbriqués (et qu'en eux se trouvaient aussi imbriqués les transformations des rapports de classe, de genre, de race, etc.).

Analisando a relação sadomasoquista de um casal vitoriano, a autora argumenta que o travestismo de Hannah Cullwick e seu fetichismo eram tentativas sistemáticas de negociar os perigos do que, segundo ela, foi um dos atos de desaparecimento mais bem sucedidos da história moderna - a ocultação do trabalho doméstico das mulheres. Recusando-se a trocar a sua força desordeira da classe trabalhadora pelas rédeas da respeitabilidade, Hannah se adornou com seus próprios grilhões simbólicos, pondo em questão, de modo dramático, a narrativa vitoriana de progresso e a família humana heterossexual.