musings on gender and imperialism

Margot Canaday’s  The Straight State  offers a history of the institutionalization of heterosexuality within the United States as witnessed primarily through policies of welfare, immigration, and the military during the twentieth century. Homosexuality and nonconforming bodies were increasingly policed during this time, especially after the Second World War, as homosexual acts gave way to homosexual status in marking the sexual deviant. Sexual identities, especially when conceived of as part of a rigid homo-hetero binary, were not named and recognized as existing  a priori  but were co-constitutive and came into being during the bureaucratization of the state. In fact, the constituting of an “abject” to delineate exclusions in the construction of the ideal citizen involved weaponizing state mechanisms such as surveillance and distribution of welfare benefits in order to define and control sexual minorities that were ultimately unified as “homosexual” regardless ...

In Silvia Federici’s  Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women,  two seemingly disparate historical events are shown to be inextricably linked: the phenomenon of witch-hunting and the advent of modern capitalism. With an eradication of communal land ownership, stymied local economic relations, a loss of connectivity to the natural world, and growing impoverishment of the widowed and elderly, women in societies that had been based in subsistence agriculture were increasingly dehumanized and estranged from their communities by accusations of practicing witchcraft. Much was susceptible to “enclosure” during this time—not only the land enclosed as privatization was on the rise, but also the histories, labor, communal wisdoms, human relationships, and commitment to the natural world that had been central to communitarian living for generations. [1]  As people became increasingly alienated by the global economic order, the rights to their bodies, their lands, their pasts, and the...