Get Your Government out of My Bedroom!

It is no shock that my project is built around exploring the relationship between sexuality and Empire, a relationship I've sometimes phrased as "exploring the intersection between queer theory and post-colonial theory." I've been trying to make it clear why I think this relationship is an important one to explore by outlining some of the benefits this project has for the scholarly community.

But one problem I am facing is that I think some sense of urgency for Americans is always lost through my explanations. After all, I am looking at British literature, British laws, and British culture. How could the lessons I draw from across the pond ever apply over here?

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said has a way of articulating the colonial contest that makes it not just a contest over land but a contest over culture. The influence of colonialism in Britain ensured that the British cultural scene at the time (1880-1947) was a thoroughly imperialistic cultural scene. What happened in Britain was influenced by what happened in its colonies, a relationship Said describes as existing between metropole and colony. Said says that this same dynamic also exists in France (though with a few different flavors), and that it was inherited by America. He argues that what makes America different is that it did not have the colonial history Britain had (meaning it never explicitly had colonies of its own similar to Britain's), but its cultural dominance has always existed in an imperialist form.

Hottentot Venus

Said's point should be no shocker. Many people have argued that America is a sort of empire in its own right. Wars in the Middle East and neocolonial policies in Latin America have been interpreted time and time again as America's attempt at asserting dominance over another nation without having to physically set up camp.

Along with these policies abroad, there has always been a movement at home to normalize the culture. This movement is where I am most interested. This attempt at normalization is often also an attempt to define the nation through opposition. One easy example comes from the British Empire. In Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock highlights several ways the Brits saw themselves as fundamentally different from their colonies. One such difference is the "invention of race," and another is differences in thought. The Brits had a faith in science and reason, and they projected the opposite nature onto the colonies (McClintock's focus is on Britain's African colonies in particular). In the cultural imagination, while John Bull was busy at his microscope, his African counterpart was superstitious. Through these differences emerged a sort of British identity or nationalism (I don't think McClintock ever used these terms) so that if you wanted to be British you had to be white and scientific or logical (among many other things).

Meet the Cleavers: A "Normal" American Family

In America, a similar form of cultural identity emerged. The process is less clear, but its products are astoundingly evident. Think about the Cleavers. This family became a foundation of American familial identity. The family should have a mother and father and angelic children, it should be white, it should be middle class, and it should be fairly patriarchal. If you didn't have a similar nuclear family, you didn't have an American family. This Americanizing image created an idea of normalcy that pressured Americans into being "normal" and shamed them if they were anything less. 

This attempt at normalizing functions through shame, and it plays a part in nearly every aspect of national culture, including sexuality. Michael Warner articulates how it works in American sexual politics in The Trouble with Normal, but I would argue that a similar process occurred in imperial Britain as well. The fact that people feel pressure to behave sexually in a certain way at the risk of jeopardizing their national identity is a form of state intrusion into sexuality. 

State control over sexuality is everywhere. We rely on the State to sanction our relationships through marriage, we listen to the State when it tells us where we can and cannot have sex, the State influences sexual expression when it restricts pornography, etc. State control is blindingly obvious by examining the State's relationship to any form of sexuality outside of monogamous heterosexuality. Gay marriage is just one example of State control over sexualities other than heterosexuality. Other examples include sodomy laws, using the "gay panic" excuse as a legal defense, the government's response to the AIDS epidemic, and a lack of gay representation in the media.

This State control over sexuality existed in Britain at the time of Empire, and it continues to exist in America. I believe that it depends upon a colonial dynamic that was established in Britain and then translated to America. Sometimes this dynamic is obvious. Gay men are frequently depicted as retrogressive, superficial, and oversexed degenerates. Think of Sacha Baron Cohen in Bruno or Nathan Lane in The Birdcage (see above). These characters are meant to be seen as odd, Other, and less than their straight counterparts, in the same way that natives were depicted in, say, the image of the Hottentot Venus. In an even more astoundingly colonial remark, Marcus Bachmann referred to gays as "barbarians" in a 2010 interview when he said, "Barbarians need to be educated. They need to be disciplined."

So to say that Americans have no stake in British colonial culture would be ignorant. Anyone who has a sexuality (and I would say that this means all of us) should take an interest in the State's attempts to influence our sexual lives. My bedroom is meant for the person I love, not the person I elect. The plight of homosexuals in both Britain and America is sad proof that we continue to practice the colonial system we inherited, whether we know it or not.