Andrew's Wiki
Imperial Leather

Intro

• The Three Themes
  • “the transmission of white, male power through control of colonized women”
  • “the emergence of a new global order of cultural knowledge”
  • “the imperial command of commodity capital” 3
• Three orders: male control over reproduction and family, over economic order, over geopolitical order (women and the home, money, the globe)
  • Connex occur between “imperial and anti-imperial power; money and sexuality; violence and desire; labor and resistance” 4: Gender, Race, and Class
  • Race, Gender, Class inseparable b/c “they came into existence in and through relation with one another” but not of course the exact same (“intimate, reciprocal, and contradictory”)
• Method
  • “A sustained quarrel” with imperialism, ideology of domesticity, and industry
  • “imperialism is not something that happened elsewhere” 4 that is WITHIN creation of Western modernity (for example discourses of race)
  • imperialism “not as the unfolding of its own inner destiny but as untidy, opportunistic interference with other regimes of power” 6
    • “haphazard shape from myriad encounters with alternative forms of authority, knowledge and power” 16
    • perhaps that’s why they needed to create such a discourse?
  • Gender not just a metaphor: Said argued that “the sexual subjection of Oriental women to Western men ‘fairly stands in for the pattern of relative strength between the East and the West’” but she says we can’t just reduce gender to a metaphor for something else. Let’s see gender as gender.
  • “how the categories of whiteness and blackness, masculinity and femininity, labor and class came historically into being in the first place” 16
  • does talk about some stuff that has been “stalwart themes of colonial discourse: the feminizing of the land, the myth of empty lands, the crisis of origins, domestic colonialism, the soap saga and the emergence of commodity fetishism, the reordering of land and labor, the invention of the idea of racial idleness” 17

Topics

• 1: Lay of the Land
  • “male travel as an erotics of ravishment” 22: “male penetration and exposure of a veiled, female interior”
  • “imperial progress is consumed at a glance—as panoptical time” 32
    • depends on Darwin (see below)
    • all the illustrations that would put three skulls and three heads side by side: the Greek for the European head; an Africanized head; then an ape head
  • “anachronistic space:” with “full authority as an administrative and regulatory technology in the late Victorian era” 40
    • women, the working class, and the colonized “are disavowed and projected onto anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic, and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity”
      • ex: Hegel saying that Africa “is no Historical part of the world…it has no movement or development” qtd 41
      • ex: eugenicists seeing women as atavistic
    • so when you move across to imperial space, you go backwards in time (anachronistic space): not all spaces are at the same “time”
    • seeing what is old helps you find out what’s modern about modern: as Benjamin says, “the use of archaic images to identify what is historically new about the ‘nature’ of commodities” 40; cf museum
• 2: ‘Massa’ and Maids
  • Arthur Munby, a lawyer with a fetish for working class women, especially miners (women who acted as drawers) whom he sketched as African; secretly married his maid (d. 1910)
• 3: Imperial Leather
  • Invisible servants: had to do dirty labor early or late, had to use back passageways, had to change into clean clothes if summoned to the master, and cleaning instruments hidden away
    • Why? servant ruins the public/private distinction b/c receives pay (job) for what’s supposed to be done freely by wife: “the odor of cash” into the home 165
• 4: Psychoanalysis, Race, and Female Fetishism
• 5: Soft-Soaping Empire
  • “shift from scientific racism—embodied in anthropological, scientific and medical journals, travel writing and ethnographies—to what I call commodity racism. Commodity racism—in the specifically Victorian forms of advertising and photography, the imperial Expositions and the museum movement—converted the narrative of imperial Progress into a mass-produced spectacle.” 33
  • imperialism “coming into being” through domesticity 32 (cf cleansing commodities deployed by women: the “dirt” of the native and the native land requires our commodities and our cleansing)
    • Africa “Became a theatre for exhibiting, amongst other things, the cult of domesticity and the reinvention of the patriarchy” 17
    • tied to commodities: “the mass-marketing of empire as a global system was intimately wedded to the Western reinvention of domesticity, so that imperialism cannot be understood without a theory of domestic space and its relation to the market” 17
    • However b/c it’s in the empire, it’s without women: “The commodity fetish, as the central form of the industrial Enlightenment, reveals what liberalism would like to forget: the domestic is political, the political is gendered. What could not be admitted into male rationalist discourse (the economic value of a woman’s domestic labor) is disavowed and projected onto the realm of the ‘primitive’ and the zone of empire. At the same time, the economic value of colonized cultures is domesticated and projected onto the realm of the ‘prehistoric.’” 32
    • domesticity turned into a global narrative: domesticity allows you to control the colonized
    • can’t understand domesticity w/out imperialism: “as domestic space became racialized, colonial space became domesticated” 36

Network

• Intersection of discourses about race and gender alongside imperialism, where colonized races are assigned a lower place in the evolutionary process; colonized men are feminized, colonized women are sexualized; working women are seen as men and also as African; etc
• Colonialism via commodities, commodity spectacle, photographs, postcards, novels, pornography, travel writing
• Darwin: “secular time as the agent of a unified world history” inaugurating “massive attempt of reading from a discontinuous natural record…a single pedigree of evolving world history. Now not only natural space but also historical time could be collected, assembled, and mapped on to a global science of the surface” 36
  • Also time becomes spatialized by the social evolutionists: taxonomy; “time became a geography of social power” 37 b/c time now can be seen along “axis of space” 37 and “history took on the character of a spectacle”
• Metropolis
  • “The invention of race in urban metropoles…became central not only to the self-definition of the middle class but also to the policing of the ‘dangerous classes:’ the working class, the Irish, Jews, prostitutes, feminists, gays and lesbians, criminals, the militant crowd, and so on” 5
• Women’s Work
  • “cult of domesticity was a crucial, if concealed, dimension of male as well as female identities…and an indispensable element both of the industrial market and the imperial enterprise” 5

The Labor of Leisure

• “In a century obsessed with women’s work, the idea of the idle woman was born.”
• Common Story
  • “middle class Victorian woman’s life as a debauch of idleness”
  • during 18th c, the woman loses her work (spinning, candle-making, tailoring, dairy/poultry), and by the end, she has “permanent uselessness” 160
  • repressive, did watercolors and embroidery, had fainting fits and swoons, hysteria, bored and irrational, inconstant, “mass of trifles” (latter is Patricia Branca’s term)
  • Nancy Armstrong, The Ideology of Conduct
    • “economic man” and “domestic woman”
    • man creates, woman prserves
• But are these representations in novels true?
  • Until 1970s critics accepted them
  • Now, Patricia Branca looked at the stats, and only a TINY elite minority (upper middle class and above: some professional men, doctors, clergymen, managers), not middle class itself, that could employ the three servants that had previously been assumed (cook, parlormaid, housemaid)
    • Actually, the average middle class woman would’ve had AT BEST one poor maid-of-all-work
      • incl. wives of plumbers, clerks, small tradesmen
• “Arguably, then, neither the typical bourgeois lady nor the typical domestic servant really existed. Little regard has been given to the representational discrepancy between Victorian (largely upper middle class) portrayals of women and the myriad, middling domestic situations that took contradictory shape across the span of the century.” 161
  • Hence, “idleness was less a regime of inertia…than a laborious and time-consuming character role performed by women who wanted membership in the ‘respectable’ class.” (“prestige” in appearing idle)
    • How? By making their work INVISIBLE
    • Thus the disappearing middle class housewife: “skilled erasure of every sign of her work” 162 laboring but appearing not to
  • Leisure must be performed, not experienced: “ritualized moment of appearing fresh, calm and idle before the scrutiny of husbands, fathers, and visitors” 162
    • my question: but these men KNOW you don’t have servants…so…?
    • “a conspicuous labor of leisure”
• Parlor: public/private threshold, where you perform your idleness and display your stuff, with “shabbiness, overwork, and anxiety” hidden 162
• Result: women’s work undervalued

Notes

• Random: me: maybe I can use this interconnex between race, class, and gender under imperialism as a way to explain realism and its eccentricities b/c visionary moments of texts or anti-realist moments might just be when the repressed elements of this interconnex come through (for ex, St John Rivers talking about his colonial mission to convert as Jane herself escapes his own attempt on HER and her subjectivity