Gender, Colonialism, and the Colonial

Gaze
KALPANA RAM
Macquarie University, Australia

Colonial domination forged an intrinsic relationship with gender, exercised in great

part through modalities of sustained scrutiny and intervention. These dimensions have
been described as constitutive of a “gaze” that frequently found its object in women and
their status. In ordinary parlance, a gaze is a term that conveys a look that has inten-
sity and sustained duration. But in postcolonial theory, the gaze has acquired far more
consequential dimensions. It has meant an unequally constituted right to scrutinize, to
represent what is gazed at, and, if judged necessary, to intervene and alter the object of
the gaze.
Representation and intervention are fundamentally connected in this understand-
ing of the colonial gaze. The representations create the pretext for intervention.
Colonized societies have been typically represented as static as well as uniquely
oppressive to women. Christian missions, for example, described the women of India
as “unwelcomed at birth, untaught in childhood, enslaved when married, accursed
as widows, and unlamented at their death” (India’s Women and China’s Daughters
1880, 3). Change cannot, in this representation, emerge from within since women
are incapable of exercising agency while men are the perpetrators of this lack and
can hardly be expected to bring about change. The basis and pretext for European
intervention are already implicit in such representations: it has to come from outside
and it has to be from a dynamic, modern society such as Europe saw itself. Interven-
tions based on such representations could be religious or secular and the meanings
intermingled. Christian missionary intervention, for instance, sought conversion
not just as salvation for the soul but as a form of modern economic and political
progress.

The colonial gaze as predicated on political and existential

distance

Attempts at reforming gender relations are not new in themselves. The most hierarchi-
cal of societies can throw up invocations of the essential equality of men and women,
if only in the name of a divine order that transcends the human-made one. What was
distinctive about the colonial gaze is that it used the very process of reform to simulta-
neously establish a political, social, and existential distance between itself and societies
being reconstituted as colonies. This distance took many forms. One was temporal.

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1873
2 GE ND E R , COL ONI A L I S M, A ND T HE COL ONI A L GA ZE

Non-European societies were located in an entirely different time to that of Europe.

In many ways they were located in terms that had been set up for Europe to distinguish
itself from its own superseded past. The dichotomies which shaped Europe’s narrative
about its own modernization—oppositions between past and present, between stagnant
feudal economy as opposed to dynamic expansionist capitalism, between religious Mid-
dle Age and secular modernity—were all transposed to the present of non-European progress has to come from
European society.
societies. To be in a colonial relationship with European states was thus to be consigned
to past history, awaiting outside intervention to bring about progress. Postcolonial crit-
icism has not been slow to point out the continuities with postwar discourses that have
designated entire societies as awaiting “development.”
Of particular importance to the representations of gender relations and the perceived
status of women has been the modern polarization between freedom and un-freedom.
Yet the emergence of such representations also coincided with Europe’s own involve-
ment in new forms of un-freedom. The typification of gender relations in other soci-
eties and cultures as “un-free” has therefore been integral to what Johannes Fabian has
described as “the denial of coevalness” between the west and the rest (1983). The denial
of coevalness has meant that patriarchal relations not so very dissimilar in underly-
ing assumptions to the ones that pertained in European societies have been held up
for scrutiny and pronounced variously as backward, uncivilized, and primitive. The
propensity to sequester upper-class women in the home and family is a case in point.
It was to be found in nineteenth-century Europe as much as in other societies with a
developed class hierarchy. In both Europe and its colonies, working-class women and
women who could not afford such sequestration have suffered not only from their class
status but all over again for having to remain outside the norms of female virtue and
respectability. Yet Victorian England could represent its own upper-class woman as “the
angel in the house” while representing similar practices in regions such as South Asia
and the Middle East as the immurement and enslavement of women.

The veil and seclusion as an obstacle to the untrammelled

purview of a colonial gaze

To some extent distance is built into the gaze as an embodied structure of looking. To
gaze at something is still to be a relationship with it, but it requires a distance from which
to look at it—too close and it becomes a blur. In this sense, a gaze is predicated on bod-
ily distance between the gazing subject and the object of the gaze. We may contrast this
with the sense of touch, where it is impossible to tell subject from object. This embodied
quality of the gaze has been elaborated in modern philosophies of “the look.” In devel-
oping existential philosophy, Jean-Paul Sartre ([1943] 2003) argued that the gaze of the
other can “freeze” us into object-like status. An example familiar, at least to women,
would be the everyday experience of being reduced to the shape and size of their body,
or even to particular parts of the body such as breasts, by the power of men to casu-
ally exercise their right to scrutinize, evaluate, and selectively approve or disapprove
the bodies of women.
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One of the earliest to elaborate such existentialist arguments about the gaze from the
perspective of the colonized was Frantz Fanon. Born in Martinique and educated in
France, Fanon was trained in medicine and psychiatry and worked in a French hospital
in Algeria between 1953 and 1954, witnessing firsthand the effects of torture and repres-
sion on Algerians during the anticolonial uprising. In the essay “Algeria Unveiled,”
Fanon reverses the entire movement of the colonial structure of representation which
made the veil a barrier to women’s liberation. Instead, the veil becomes a barrier to
the male colonial right to an unchecked gaze: “The European faced with an Algerian
woman he wants to see. He reacts in an aggressive way before this limitation of his
perception” (Fanon 1970, 30). The free and untrammelled sweep of the gaze of the male
colonizer, his right to survey all his possessions is frustrated by this obstacle. The nature
of this desire to see, as he describes it, is complex and ambivalent in the same way that
Sigmund Freud describes the drives and desires that fuel a dream. The colonial male
gaze eroticizes and desires what is hidden but is aggressive when its overvaluation of
the hidden treasure is inevitably disappointed if revelation is achieved. The resistance
to full occupation elicits further violence. Fanon is also alert to the way the seclusion
of elite women is used selectively to shame those men who seem equipped to cross
the barriers of race. Fanon describes the particular targeting of educated professional
Algerian men who are doctors and lawyers, with whom the European man may oth-
erwise have to concede some form of nearness or proximity. The peasant is no threat
in this respect. Class establishes the requisite distance. But intellectuals, especially if
they have received Western education, come dangerously close to claiming equal sta-
tus. Shaming them for not bringing their wives out of seclusion allows colonial society
to reassure itself that “for all that he is a doctor … he still remains an Arab” (Fanon
1970, 26).
Fanon’s formulation prefigures a later analysis by Gayatri Spivak in the 1980s. In an
influential paper, she critically examines the desire to “let the third world woman speak”
and finds it is already scripted, prefigured by a repetitive and monotonous colonial
refrain which she characterizes as: “White men are saving brown women from brown
men” (Spivak 2010, 48). This repetitive imbrication of female liberation in the colonial
script features all over again every time there is major Western intervention undertaken,
as in contemporary wars against terrorism. This particular formulation of Spivak omits
the involvement of white women in saving brown women. The history of white women
in colonialism has been one of the most painful challenges to second-wave feminism.
The renewed surge of awareness of colonial and racial forms of domination in the 1970s
was in some ways also a response on the part of “women of color” to the renewal of
feminism as a political philosophy during this period. Prominent in this response were
women whose histories were marked by slavery and racism, such as African Ameri-
can women in the United States, as well as diasporic women from Asia and the Middle
East settled in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Many of them have
been scholars actively challenging ongoing calls to save brown women. Analyzing Laura
Bush’s radio address in 2002 in justification of the American military intervention in
Afghanistan, Lila Abu-Lughod writes of the failure to distinguish between “the very sep-
arate causes in Afghanistan of women’s continuing malnutrition, poverty, and ill health,
and their more recent exclusion under the Taliban from employment, schooling, and
4 GE ND E R , COL ONI A L I S M, A ND T HE COL ONI A L GA ZE

the joys of wearing nail polish” (2002, 784). The tendency to blame a local patriarchy,
at the expense of issues to do with class, as well as postcolonial legacies of colonialism
itself, indicates a continuity in the structures of representation.

The past as an archive for the present

The understanding of colonialism as an archive for present pronouncements was set

forth in what became the locus classicus for subsequent discussions of the colonial
gaze—Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Said traced not so much a history of the
present, but a genealogy that performs as an archive for current pronouncements on
Islam, Arabs and the “East,” and, of course, women’s oppression. The archive is like
a reserve bank of statements that have ever been made on these and related themes.
They do not originate with colonialism. Said traces statements as far back as ancient
Greece and its portrayal of the defeat of Persians at Greek hands. An archive such as
this does not dictate what is said today in any mechanical fashion but it is a reservoir
that can be dipped into and modulated to current contexts, offering immediate support
and authority for anyone who wishes to make use of it as a shared heritage. Thus a
Laura Bush can effortlessly draw on the authority not simply of her own geopolitical
positioning in the present but of endless previous statements by missionaries, colonial
states, colonial doctors’ commentaries on dirt, danger, and lack of hygiene for women
in childbirth, or commentaries by colonial travelers (e.g., see Ram and Jolly 1998). She
will be equipped just as fully by the synchronic spread of contemporary discourses in
apparently such diverse spheres as commentaries by tourists, the discourse of Western
development experts on empowering women in “developing societies,” and so on.

The gaze of colonial classificatory rationalism

In this understanding of an archive as a live resource, we witness the early effects of the
philosopher Michel Foucault on Said and subsequent discussions of the colonial gaze.
Although often criticized for not integrating colonialism into his account of modern
power, Foucault provided a new frame for understanding what was specifically modern
about colonialism—the will to know the subject population and not exclusively rely on
repressive domination. But these new forms of knowingness were equally marked by
the gaze of distance and objectification. New modes of inquiry such as surveys, census
operations (both quantitative and qualitative in the form of ethnological and ethno-
graphic monographs), cartography, demography, and photography made little distinc-
tion between land, natural flora and fauna, and the people surveyed, quantified, and
classified. If people were distinguished from flora and fauna as equipped with “manners
and customs,” these too emerged as static and as incapable of individuality and agency
as the characteristics of a natural species. Fanon’s description of the colonial gaze that
demands the unilateral authority to range freely is pertinent here as well. But this partic-
ular gaze is characterized by the aspiration to be calm, rational, dispassionate, enumer-
ative, and scientific. Instead of saving brown women, now their gender and sexuality
 GE ND E R , COL ONI A L I S M, A ND T HE COL ONI A L GA ZE 5

become discrete entities that can be measured, displayed, organized into hierarchies of
racial types, forensically investigated, and then exhibited for viewing by different kinds
of publics eager to see scientific reconfirmation of their own superiority in a hierarchi-
cally ordered structure of difference. The case of Sara Baartman has become exemplary
of this kind of degrading objectification in the early 1800s—working as a slave in Cape
Town; “discovered” by a ship’s doctor; taken to Britain where her buttocks and genitalia
were exhibited as signs of oversexed racial inferiority; and investigated by French scien-
tists such as Georges Cuvier who removed her organs for preserving and display even
after her premature death from disease and shame.

Emotions and different kinds of colonial gaze

and reassertions of agency

Baartman’s remains were reclaimed and buried in her homeland in 2002 where there are
many public memorials in her name, including a center for women and children sur-
vivors of violence. A poem written in 1998 by her descendant Diana Ferrus reverberates
with pride, love, and respect and is said to have played a major role in helping mobilize
action in South Africa. The fact that it took emotions such as these to bring Baartman
back to a sphere of shared subjectivity instead of the object status she was consigned to
by European colonialism alerts us to the moods and emotions that in fact underlie all
supposedly scientific enterprises as much as any human endeavor. More work needs to
be done on the centrality of emotions in shaping colonial and postcolonial social rela-
tions. It allows us also to make clearer distinctions between different types of colonial
gazes. Said’s treatise on the colonial gaze deals largely, not with the scientific gaze of
surveys and classification, but the scholarly passion for ancient languages and texts and
the romantic “high cultural” gaze of literary orientalism in the nineteenth century. All
are problematic for the societies in question but in different ways. Scholarly orientalism
bypasses contemporary practices in favor of the past and living contemporary members
of the society are liable to find themselves adjudged poor substitutes for the rich tradi-
tions of the past, requiring tutelage to recover its proper ancient truths. It has meant
colonial states could consult textual religious statements to decide on the validity of
contemporary practices affecting women. Writers such as Gustave Flaubert and Gérard
de Nerval or Charles Baudelaire, on the other hand, exceeded the conventions of both
scientific and textual knowledge production. Instead they sought to infuse themselves
with the vitality and color of the Orient as an antidote to the bourgeois order they lived
in, often through relationships with women (Said 1978, 84–91). Flaubert celebrates the
Egyptian courtesan Hanem Kuchuk for her sexual fecundity, while Baudelaire’s poetry
inhales, through the breasts of his “creole” mistress Jeanne Duval, the “parfum exotique
(exotic perfume)” of tamarind and the lazy monotone of tropical life. The beauty of
the language all the more effectively robs the women of their agency as we become dis-
tracted from the fact that they have become reduced to bodily bearers of an essence that
is external to their own lives and individuality.
Intimacy and distance may also be mediated by the complex intersection of race, gen-
der, and sexuality. White women in colonial relationships—the “memsahib” in India,
6 GE ND E R , COL ONI A L I S M, A ND T HE COL ONI A L GA ZE

the drover’s wife in Australia, the missionary wife in Vanuatu—were more liable to con-
stitute relations of domination in terms of mother–daughter relations, in relations of
“detachment and agonized intimacy” (Jolly 1993, 115).
The reclamation of agency may equally be differentiated by moods. If the reclama-
tion of Baartman’s integrity of body and mind is marked by a heightened mood of love
and respect, other reassertions of agency have been marked by irreverence, play, and a
sense of satire. The contemporary Indian artist Pushpamala N. stages works that entail a
careful assemblage of props and costumes, in which she dresses, poses, and gets herself
photographed or filmed in a number of different genres of colonial and postcolonial
images of Indian women. When viewed in galleries, seeing the artist in the place of the
original colonial image disrupts the capacity of the viewer to draw automatically on the
visual archive of “native women.” In the Pacific context, Shigeyuki Kihara photographs
herself in order to catch colonialism in its characteristic modes of internal ambivalence,
desiring at once to cover up bodies with missionary garb as well as stripping them of
clothes in studios for poses such as the “dusky maiden.” Foregrounding her own sta-
tus as a fa’afafine, or third gender, Kihara destabilizes the colonial imposition of gender
binarisms on Samoans.
The varied forms of counteragency against the colonial gaze do not, however, alter
the fact that there have been enduring and debilitating legacies of this discursive and
political history. Closely related dichotomies of subject and object, of freedom and
un-freedom, agency and victimhood continue to structure virtually all evaluations
of non-Western women’s lives, to the exclusion of experiences that lie outside or in
between such polarities.

SEE ALSO: Alterity; Colonialism and the Museum; Coloniality of Power; Display,
Anthropological Approaches to; Feminism and Anthropology; Feminism, First-,
Second-, and Third-Wave; Foucault, Michel (1926–84); Gender; Gender and Islam;
Gender and Race, Intersectionality Theory of; Indigeneity in Anthropology; Mas-
culinities; Missionaries and Anthropology; Postcolonialism; Postcoloniality; Power,
Anthropological Approaches to; Representation, Politics of; Sexuality

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2002. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections
on Cultural Relativism and Its Others.” American Anthropologist 104 (3): 783–90.
Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York:
Columbia University.
Fanon, Frantz. 1970. “Algeria Unveiled.” In A Dying Colonialism, 21–52. Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin.
India’s Women and China’s Daughters. 1880. Journal of the Church of England Zenana Missionary
Society. Vol. 1. Birmingham: Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham.
Jolly, Margaret. 1993. “Colonizing Women: The Maternal Body and Empire.” In Feminism and
the Politics of Difference, edited by Sneja Gunew and Anna Yeatman, 103–27. Sydney: Allen &
Unwin.
Ram, Kalpana, and Margaret Jolly, eds. 1998. Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and Postcolo-
nial Experiences in Asia and the Pacific. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 GE ND E R , COL ONI A L I S M, A ND T HE COL ONI A L GA ZE 7

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1943) 2003. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.
Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. London: Routledge.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2010. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Reflections on the History of
an Idea. Can the Subaltern Speak? edited by Rosalind C. Morris, 21–78. New York: Columbia
University Press.