759382

research-article2018
STXXXX10.1177/0735275118759382Sociological TheoryPatil

Sociological Theory

The Heterosexual Matrix as

2018, Vol. 36(1) 1­–26
© American Sociological Association 2018
DOI: 10.1177/0735275118759382
https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275118759382

Imperial Effect st.sagepub.com

Vrushali Patil1

Abstract
While Judith Butler’s concept of the heterosexual matrix is dominant in gender and
sexuality studies, it is a curiously aspatial and atemporal concept. This paper seeks to
re-embed it within space and time by situating its emergence within colonial and imperial
histories. Based on this discussion, it ends with three lessons for contemporary work on
gender and sexuality and a broader theorization of sex-gender-sexuality regimes beyond
the heterosexual matrix.

Keywords
historical sociology, webbed connectivities, sociology of gender, sociology of sexuality,
empire

Philosopher Judith Butler’s work on bodies, genders, and sexualities has been deeply influ-
ential across the academy as well as within the sociologies of gender and sexuality. In Gender
Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler (1990:208) introduced readers to
her notion of the “heterosexual matrix,” which

designates that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, gender and desires
are naturalized . . . a hegemonic discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility
that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex
expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses
female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through compulsory practice
of heterosexuality.

Butler interrogates this grid, critiquing essentialist and universal notions of patriarchy,
women, and bodily sex as well as the ways sexualities and identities become simplified as a
consequence.
Since the publication of Gender Trouble and related work, her framework of the hetero-
sexual matrix has become central in feminist and queer scholarship and activism across the

1Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA

Corresponding Author:
Vrushali Patil, Associate Professor of Sociology, Florida International University, 11200 SW 8th St., DM 212, Miami, FL
33199, USA.
Email: patilv@fiu.edu
2 Sociological Theory 36(1)

world (see e.g., Breen and Blumenfeld 2005; in sociology, see e.g., Meadow 2010; Valocchi
2005). Yet, although critical in deconstructing binaries of sex, gender, and sexuality in con-
temporary scholarship, the heterosexual matrix is a curiously aspatial (and atemporal) con-
cept. Firmly embedded within and in conversation with the western canon on feminism,
gender, and sexuality (e.g., Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, and Lacan), the framework itself
eschews imperial histories and their consequences for western canon formation. My primary
goal here is thus to demonstrate the significance of cross-border processes having to do with
colonial and postcolonial histories specifically and space and spatial politics more generally
for the emergence of the grid of intelligibility named by the heterosexual matrix. In doing so,
I seek to re-embed this grid within space and time. In this vein, I go back to a significantly
earlier moment than Butler, to the early-modern proto-colonial and early colonial period,
and excavate alternative, cross-border, imperial, and colonial cartographies that matter for
the heterosexual matrix.
I do this with my theoretical framework of webbed connectivities, a relational concept
that highlights the web of imperial networks that connect spaces and seemingly discrete sex/
gender/sexuality regimes from the proto-colonial period forward (for a fuller discussion, see
Patil 2017). Relational approaches have an important history in the sociologies of gender
and sexuality. Masculinity and femininity have long been seen as relational concepts, that is,
they are defined and have meaning in relation to each other (Connell 1995). Intersectional
scholars have also written about the relations between ideas of gender or sexuality and race
(see e.g., Collins 2000; Ferguson 2004; Glenn 1992). Connell (1995) has also used this
framework to talk specifically about imperial masculinities. Yet within the broader field of
the sociologies of gender and sexuality, the predominant focus is still within the nation-state
or within one site. The significance of empire—particularly its ongoing and spatial nature—
for the ideas of gender, sexuality, and bodies that many of us are concerned with today—is
typically not centered or even acknowledged. By situating the emergence of the heterosexual
matrix squarely within the webbed connectivities of proto-colonial and colonial networks, I
seek to show the significance of histories of empire for gender, sexuality, and sex.
I further contend that the tendency of work on gender, sexuality, and bodies to focus on
particular sites is premised on the tacit acceptance of spatial-societal boundaries and an
examination of social processes, or the unfolding of social change, within these boundaries.
I submit that the bulk of our knowledge regarding gender, sexuality, and sex is organized in
terms of a priori demarcations of particular sites or collectivities (i.e., the social construction
of gender or sexuality within particular societies, cultures, countries, regions, areas, or eth-
nic, cultural, or religious groups).
In contrast, to explore relations, networks, and connections that cross sites, I advance the
methodological tactic of thinking sideways. Simply put, thinking sideways emphasizes trac-
ing connections across received sites. For example, rather than focusing only on the social
construction of gender in the indigenous Americas, or in southern Africa, or on the Indian
subcontinent, thinking sideways traces significant and constitutive links among these sites.
Transnational feminist approaches underscore the significance of situating the social con-
struction of gender and sexuality transnationally (see e.g., Patil 2013). Thinking sideways
builds on this insight to claim that in addition to the critical step of situating particular sites
transnationally, tracing linkages among sites is also important—not just between southern
Africa and the metropolitan center, for example, but also among the racialized sites of the
indigenous Americas, southern Africa, and the Indian subcontinent. Given that so much of
our knowledge regarding gender, sexuality, and sex is organized and hence bounded by site,
the seemingly simple tactic of thinking sideways may be an epistemologically difficult and
affectively uncomfortable process as one must read across sites not typically brought together
Patil 3

in this way. Thinking sideways, however, makes not just the political case but also the onto-
logical case for solidarity (Patil 2014).
In this article, I think sideways and follow early-modern webbed connectivities across
borders of geopolitical space, religion, culture, language, and genres of writing. Thinking
sideways allows me to trace how webbed connectivities link, produce, and place different
sex, gender, and sexuality regimes in the early modern period. I point to the constitutive
relationships that various agents collectively establish among multiple, often divergent, and
seemingly discrete sex, gender, and sexuality regimes in different spaces. I focus on the
webbed connectivities that produce and place the so-called modern, western regime of the
heterosexual matrix. In doing so, I contest the universalizing deployment of the matrix
regardless of time and space. I highlight the key relational and network insight that the asso-
ciation of particular characteristics with particular nodes in a network is a deceptive network
effect, or an effect of the broader network itself (Go 2013). In this vein, tracing the early-
modern webbed connectivities within which the heterosexual matrix emerges and becomes
placed (i.e., associated with the so-called west) demonstrates that the substantialist associa-
tion of this matrix with the culture or society of the west is deeply problematic. Rather, this
association itself is an effect of the broader network of early-modern webbed connectivities.
The matrix thus cannot be used to merely study the west, nor deployed in a universal manner
regardless of time and space. Rather, it must be situated within early-modern, imperial
webbed connectivities.
In the context of the early modern period, the term webbed connectivities highlights a
number of overlapping and interconnected agents that cross geopolitical and other borders
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including merchant capital, imperializing/colo-
nizing states, the Catholic Church, material culture, and the emerging western sciences. I
begin by focusing on three examples of material culture in the early modern period: the texts
Della Descrittione dell’Affrica (Description of Africa), published in Italian in 1550 by Leo
Africanus; Itinerario, voyage ofte schipvaert van Jan Juygen van Linschoten near Oost ofte
Portugaels Indiën (Itinerary, Voyage, or Ship’s Passage by Jan Huygen van Linschoten to
the East or Portuguese Indies), published in 1596 in Dutch by Jan Huygen van Linschoten;
and L’histoire notable de la Floride, contenant les trois voyages faits en icelles par des capi-
taines et pilotes français (Notable History of Florida, Containing Three Trips Made by
Certain French Captains and Pilots), published in 1586 in French by René de Goulaine de
Laudonnière. These texts have a broad and long-standing significance in Eurocentric under-
standings of Africa, America, and Asia. Thinking sideways and tracing the emergence and
circulation of these texts within a broader constellation of webbed connectivities formed by
early modern merchant capital, Christian missionary work, metropolitan science, and state
policy, I examine how they construct notions of sex, gender, and sexuality regarding a series
of non-European peoples for their intended European audiences.
I start with the early modern period, a time when territorial borders and binaries having to
do with sexed bodies, gender identities and practices, and sexual desire were more fluid
compared to their later modernist incarnations (in the west) (Laqueur 1990; Ruggie 1993). I
move next to how such circulations were taken up and put to work in a few now canonical
Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment texts. In particular, I examine British physician
James Parsons’s (1741) A Mechanical and Critical Enquiry into the Nature of Hermaphrodites;
French naturalist Comte de Buffon’s (1785) multivolume Histoire Naturelle, générale et
particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi (1749–1804); Scottish conjectural histo-
rian/social theorist John Millar’s (1771) Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks
in Society; and British feminist writer and sociologist Harriet Martineau’s (1838) How to
Observe Morals and Manners. These texts do not necessarily represent their genres, nor do
4 Sociological Theory 36(1)

they point to some sort of homogeneity in Enlightenment writing. Rather, these texts dem-
onstrate the growing tendency in the period to draw on newly available data from travel
texts, such as the ones I examine here, to produce universal knowledge regarding the human
body, desire, nature, history, and civilization.
Variously constructing European (and nationalist) sex, gender, and sexuality in relation to
a series of non-European (and other) foils, such works are a window into the cross-border
construction of national sexed-gendered-sexualized space. They demonstrate the deeply
spatial, relational, and historical character of the grid of intelligibility that would come to be
named the “heterosexual matrix” in the so-called west. Furthermore, these canonical texts
themselves move across a variety of borders via numerous reprintings and translations across
European languages, creating further reverberations within a larger web of connectivities.
These works, along with the travel texts they draw on, push us to recognize the significance
of a variety of historic border crossings for emerging nationalist and statist projects as well
as the sociologies that develop in their wake.
I elaborate three lessons that the aforementioned discussion has for contemporary sociolo-
gies of gender and sexuality. First, exploration of early-modern webbed connectivities expands
the imagination of the transnational, cross-border, and imperial in the sociologies of gender
and sexuality. In particular, taking these webbed connectivities seriously demonstrates that the
heterosexual matrix cannot be extricated from imperial histories. Second, early-modern
webbed connectivities directly contradict a central assumption in the sociologies of gender and
sexuality: that the transnational and the cross-border are recent phenomena. I argue that histori-
cal work on gender, sexuality, and bodies must take cross-border, imperial dynamics into
account. Third, thinking sideways along webbed connectivities and following their imperial
routes brings new ontological and political objects into view. This has consequences for soli-
darity. I end with a more general theoretical discussion of embodiments, desires, and identities
beyond the heterosexual matrix that takes racialized, imperial histories into account.

Early-Modern Circulations: Situating Three Travel Texts

and Their Authors
The authors1 of the three travel texts under consideration here were fundamentally border-
crossing figures. Singly and together, they crossed borders of nation, empire, religion, lan-
guage, and culture; such complexities within their biographies thus defy easy associations or
allegiances in terms of the dominant identity categories of the day (Kamps 2001; Zhiri
2001a). For example, religious and imperial tensions were important features of the early-
modern backdrop of the life of the author of Della Descrittione dell’Affrica, known today as
Leo Africanus. Born Hasan Ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan in the Muslim kingdom of Granada
in the 1490s, he moved with his family to Fez, Morocco, after the Spanish takeover in 1492.
He became a student and young official in the administration of the Wattasid dynasty then in
power. In this capacity, he traveled extensively across Morocco, the Maghreb, and Egypt;
other travel took him to the sub-Saharan countries of West Africa. In 1518, he was captured
by Sicilian pirates who took him to Pope Leo X. He converted to Christianity and was given
the new name Johannes Leo de Medicis. The Pope’s interest in him as a source of informa-
tion on North Africa likely spared him the fate of other Muslim captives (Masonen 2001).
He remained in Italy, becoming a prolific writer. In 1550, the Venetian geographer and pub-
lisher, Giovanni Battista Ramusio, published Leo Africanus’s text on Africa, with consider-
able changes, in a larger collection of travel accounts, Delle navigationi e viaggi (Some
Voyages and Travels). This edited version of Africanus’s work became the basis of subse-
quent translations, including the highly influential 1600 translation into English, A
Geographical Historie of Africa (Zhiri 2001b).
Patil 5

Jan Huygen van Linschoten, author of the Itinerario on Portuguese India, grew up in a
primarily Catholic town in the Netherlands and identified as a Catholic when he moved to
Spain for employment in 1576. He eventually made his way to Lisbon in the wake of the
Spanish takeover of the Portuguese Crown. In 1584, in the employ of the archbishop of Goa,
he traveled to India, where he remained until the archbishop’s death. Returning to Europe in
1589, he renounced Catholicism and joined the Dutch Reformed Church. Subsequently, he
collaborated with another former Catholic, Bernardus Paludanus (Berent ten Broecke), on
the Itinerario. Van Linschoten published the original version in Dutch in 1596 in Amsterdam,
with rich maps and illustrations of social life. The Dutch engraver and publisher, Theodor de
Bry, translated the text into Latin for the series India Orientalis (1598 to 1601) and published
it in Frankfurt. Van Linschoten’s text underwent further translation into English in 1598 and
French in 1610. Richard Hakluyt, a promoter of English colonization and commerce, and his
successor, Samuel Purchas, would also anthologize sections of the text.
Finally, Laudonnière, author of L’histoire notable on the Americas, was a French
Huguenot merchant who led a French expedition to Florida in 1564, establishing Fort
Caroline (named for Charles IX of France). The Spanish soon attacked, and Laudonnière
was one of the few to escape. In 1586, he published an account of his experiences, L’histoire
notable de la Floride, contenant les trois voyages faits en icelles par des capitaines et pilotes
français. This text saw a number of reprintings and an almost immediate translation into
English, in 1587, by Hakluyt, as A Notable Historie Containing Foure Voyages Made by
Certayne French Captaynes into Florida. The Dutch engraver and publisher, Theodore de
Bry, also adapted Laudonnière’s text with illustrations. The text came out in Latin and
German as the second volume of de Bry’s Great Voyages series, Brevis narratio eorum quae
in Florida Americai provincia Gallis acciderunt (A Brief Narration of Those Things which
Befell the French in the Province of Florida in America).
All three texts enjoyed tremendous popularity with numerous reprints, translations, and
borrowings across European languages and borders. Such circulations did not leave them
unchanged. The Venetian publisher Ramusio, for example, significantly altered Africanus’s
book on Africa prior to publishing it (Zhiri 2001b). Indeed, the purpose of translation during
this time was not to create a new text faithful to an original but rather to appropriate the
original for the needs of the target audience (Russell 2001). The popularity and success of
these texts lay in translators’ and publishers’ ability to continually appropriate them for vari-
ous imperial, capitalist, national, religious, scholarly, and other interests.
I examine constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality in the English language translations
of each work, Africanus’s A Geographical Historie of Africa (published in 1600), van
Linschoten’s Iohn Huighen van Linschoten, His Discours of Voyages into ye Easte [and]
West Indies: Deuided into Foure Books (published in 1598), and Laudonnière’s A Notable
Historie Containing Foure Voyages Made by Certayne French Captaynes into Florida (pub-
lished in 1587). The chosen versions of the texts do not, of course, represent any of the other
versions in the traditional sense. I argue, however, that they are better seen as singular threads
within a larger web of cross-border connectivities. Mobile and dynamic, they comprise the
simultaneity and interpenetration of the local-global and heterogeneous-homogenous
(Robertson 1997). As such, they are examples and exemplars of historical processes of glo-
balization and transnationalism.

Constructing Non-European Sex, Gender, and Sexuality for European Audiences

Leo Africanus’s text on Africa, A Geographical Historie, offers key descriptions of trade
routes and geography as well as the social and cultural practices of North and West African
peoples (Africanus 1600). Regarding sex, gender, and sexuality, the text makes several
6 Sociological Theory 36(1)

Figure 1.  Illustration from Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, His Discourse of Voyages.

characterizations of “Mahumatans.” For example, the text describes women who “will not
refuse the dishonest company of any man” (pp. 189–90), men who “goe apparelled like
women, and shaue their beards, and are so delighted to imitate women” (p. 130), and “the
horrible vice of Sodomie” (p. 88) among women and men. Indeed, the text’s central con-
struction of “Mahumatans” concerns “sodomie,” gender deviance, and “whorish” women.
In a section titled “The Land of the Negroes,” sodomie is again relayed (p. 294), and women
are again “harlots” (p. 42), but the central characterization is distinct: There is “no nation
vnder heauen more prone to venerie” (p. 38), and people are “liuing after a brutish manner,
[and having] . . . wiues and children in common” (p. 293).
In van Linschoten’s text on India, Iohn Huighen van Linschoten (Linschoten 1598), many
of the elements discussed previously reappear, if in somewhat transmuted form. Here, too,
Indian women are “whores,” and this “fault is common throughout all India, no place
excepted” (p. 28). The practice of widow burning and sati, long a focus in texts on India,
receives particular treatment here: The text links this practice specifically to Indian women’s
sexual treachery. Indian women, the text declared, in their need to fulfill their lust, poisoned
their husbands; this prompted the king to invent the practice of widow burning to prevent
such treachery (p. 71). The text includes an illustration of sati (see Figure 1). In another sec-
tion on Malabares and Nayros, they are “the most leacherous and vnchast nation in all the
Orient” for “they may freely lie with the Nayros daughters, or with any other that liketh
them” (p. 77). Elsewhere, Pegu women’s nakedness is characterized as an attempt to prevent
men from engaging in “that most abhominable & accursed sinne of Sodomie . . . for the
Peguans in time past were great Sodomites” (p. 31).
Laudonnière’s A notable historie includes descriptions of the life and customs of the
Timucua Indians of Florida (Laudonnière and Hakluyt 1587). Of particular note here are the
descriptions of hermaphrodites in the New World: “There are in all this Countrey many
Hermaphrodites, which take all the greatest paine and beare the victuals when they goe to
warre” (p. 3). The text also mentions the existence of sodomites (p. 3). From the earliest
times of Spanish conquest, sodomy was an ongoing theme in descriptions of the new world,
but mention of hermaphrodites was somewhat less common. Laudonnière’s claim that “there
are in all this Countrey many Hermaphrodites” is one of the earliest such descriptions in an
Patil 7

Figure 2.  “Hermaphroditorum officia XVII,” from Brevis narratio eorum quae in Florida Americae Provicia
Gallis acciderunt, secunda in allam Navigatione (Frankfurt: Theodor de Bry, 1591).

English text. The existence of “many Hermaphrodites” in the Americas and the association
of hermaphrodites with physical labor continue in the de Bry adaption, Brevis Narratio,
which also includes several engraved copperplate illustrations of hermaphrodites (for one
example, see Figure 2).
This text contains less of the opprobrium evident in the other two texts, but it is still sig-
nificant. The association of hermaphroditic bodies with the New World along with its visual
representation in the de Bry text comprise some of the first visual images of indigenous
peoples in the Americas. These constructions were also some of the earliest images of her-
maphrodites associated with the Americas to circulate across Europe.
These works thus construct African, American, and Asian gender, sex, and sexuality pri-
marily in terms of exoticism and transgression for their European audiences. They bring up
the “accursed sinne of Sodomie,” particularly for “Mahumatans” but also for groups within
the Indian subcontinent as well as some within the “Land of the Negroes” and the New
World. Indeed, from the beginnings of the colonial encounter, sodomie is a mainstay of
European constructions of the non-European world. In addition, the texts consistently con-
struct non-European women as “harlots” and “whores.” One of the most damning construc-
tions has to do with uncontrolled sexuality: “Negroes” have “wives and children in common,”
and the Malabares and Nayros are “the most leacherous and vnchast nation in all the Orient”
for “they may freely lie with the Nayros daughters, or with any other that liketh them”
(Linschoten 1598:77). Finally, hermaphrodites are “very common” in the New World.
The evident commonalities among these three texts emerge in part from the deeply inter-
textual nature of early-modern travel writing. Authors freely borrowed from one another—
often without citation—and texts describing one place were often simply reprinted for
another, as in early American texts that were reprinted for Africa (Morgan 2004; Traub
2002). But the commonalities also point to dominant views of sex, gender, and sexuality
within European Christendom. National traditions and customary practices led to some vari-
ation (King 2013; Laqueur 1990; Park and Nye 1991), but we can outline certain broad
contours.
The dominant humoral theory understood the body to be made up of the four humors of
blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile, which created a balance in the individual between
8 Sociological Theory 36(1)

hot, dry, wet, and cold characteristics. Humoral transformations meant the components of
the body could change, and degrees of heat marked male and female. Everyone was thought
to be on a gradient from male to female characteristics, depending on the quality and quan-
tity of the humors they possessed. In his elaboration of humoral medicine, the Roman physi-
cian Galen saw women as simply imperfect, inverted versions of men: Whereas male heat
pushed the penis and scrotum outside the body, female cold kept the homologous vagina and
ovaries inside. The humors were instable, and thus the sexed body was not stable. Women
were considered more lustful, but this capability for transformation “undermined certainty
about the corporeal basis of sex. . . . [Consequently] the lines between women and men were
not entirely clear” (Crawford 2007:111; see also Hitchcock 1997).
Sodomy was also an “utterly confused category” (Foucault 1978:101). There was some
condemnation of sodomy, but it was not clearly defined and was regulated depending on
who was committing it. Sodomy was not entirely about sexual behavior; rather, such behav-
ior became transgressive in association with other concerns. Hence, a sexual act did not
necessarily translate into an identity (e.g., homosexual) in the early modern period, nor did
the gender status of one’s partner define one as homosexual or heterosexual. In other words,
contemporary western notions of homosexual and heterosexual as particular types of people
were largely absent (Dolan 2003; Karras 2005).
Parallel to this ambiguity within conceptualizations of sodomy, notions of the hermaph-
rodite also ranged from the spiritual fantasy of harmonious plentitude to a disturbing reality.
The idea of the hermaphrodite was linked to ambiguousness, promiscuousness, and effemi-
nacy and pointed more generally to concerns regarding social, sexual, or gender deviancy
and transgression. Thus, the hermaphrodite could be associated alternately with monsters,
gods, marvels, man, woman, transvestites, and sodomites (Gilbert 2002).
Given such ideologies, there was a long history in Europe of constructing internal and adja-
cent others in terms of their aberrant and excessive sexuality, the uncontrolled sexual behavior
of women, “sodomy,” and hermaphroditism. Older sources like Pliny the Elder connected the
notion of the hermaphrodite with monstrosity, transvestitism, bisexuality, and homosexuality
(Gilbert 2002; Long 2006). The medieval text The Travels of Sir John Mandeville also associ-
ated hermaphrodites with exoticized others (Gilbert 2002). Medieval notions of the wild man
and woman and witches were understood as naked, lustful, monstrous, and sexually deviant
(Mason 1990). Such images were projected onto the Irish (Suranyi 2008) and heretic groups
within the Catholic world, such as marranes and moriscos (Bleys 1995).
The Crusades had long helped create stereotypes that linked Islam to a variety of sexual
crimes, including sodomy and bestiality (Nocentelli 2013). At home, Jews and Christians
who engaged in sodomy were believed to have learned the behavior in Egypt or Arab Spain,
as it was seen as a Muslim or Turkish vice (Bleys 1995). The construction of Mahumatans
in The Geographical Historie perpetuates the discourse on Muslims that had existed in
Europe for centuries. This kind of othering—on the Timucua Indians of Florida, West
African “Negroes,” and “India”—was not particularly new. What was new is that early-
modern webs of political, economic, cultural, religious, and academic relations extended
this very old discourse of sex, gender, and sexuality transgression to new spaces and peoples.
Over time, this web produced new discursive elaborations.

Circulations, Connectivities, and the Emergence of the

Heterosexual Matrix
These texts personify many of the intersections of different transnational institutions and struc-
tures of the early modern period. In the case of Africanus’s text on Africa, Catholic-Muslim
and European-Ottoman political rivalries on the Iberian Peninsula and in North Africa were
Patil 9

key. The two superpowers of the time, the Spanish Hapsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire,
fought for control over North Africa, and Africanus’s text initially became significant in this
context. European interests in African exploration and colonization also contributed to the
popularity of this text. In 1738, for example, Francis Moore of the Royal African Company
retranslated parts of Della Descrittione dell’Affrica with such aims in mind.
In terms of popular tastes, journey narratives had been of interest in Europe at least since
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville in the medieval period. Columbus’s trip to the “new
continent” encouraged even more publications. By the mid-1500s, so many travel stories
were circulating around Europe that publishers now put out not just one account but collec-
tions of reports. Venetian geographer and publisher Giovanni Battista Ramusio, for instance,
with his keen interest in travel and exploration, propelled the popularity of these accounts
with collections like his Delle navigationi e viaggi (Mancall 2007), which published the first
edition of Africanus’s work. According to Zhiri (2001a:260), “Leo’s work was used to map
new explorations, was reassessed in light of new information, and was unanimously consid-
ered the most important text on Africa published in Europe before the nineteenth century.”
The old Italian, French, and English versions saw a steady flow of republication during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Zhiri 2001a).
In the case of van Linschoten’s work on India, intra-European imperial rivalries and reli-
gious tensions as well as power relations between Christian Europe and others were impor-
tant elements in the emergence and circulation of the Itinerario. Coming when the Portuguese
were still largely unchallenged in the East, van Linschoten depicted them as a corrupt, undis-
ciplined, and declining power and provided highly guarded Portuguese “secrets” on sea
routes and safe travel to the East. The Dutch Estates General immediately understood the
value of this work; in 1596, they rewarded him a license to publish his work. The Itinerario
is credited with the establishment and success of the Dutch East India Company and indeed
“had a direct effect upon the discoveries and conquests made by the Dutch, English, and
French navigators in the Far East” (Kamps 2001:149). In England, Richard Hakluyt referred
to it in the recommendations he made to the founders of the English East India Company. At
this time, the text became perhaps the most widely circulated source on the East in Europe
(Nocentelli 2013), and it was critical for post-Portuguese colonial strategies in the Far East.
In the visual episteme of the Renaissance, the illustrations, which were eventually sold sepa-
rately from the text, “secured Linchosten’s place at the beginning of an orientalist visual
tradition” (Saldhana 2011:155). His illustration of a sati jumping into a funeral pyre fur-
nished perhaps the iconic image of this rite in Europe and was regularly copied for decades
to come (Schmidt 2015).
Intra-European religious tensions and imperial rivalries were also critical for the emer-
gence and circulation of René de Goulaine de Laudonnière’s work on Florida. Engaged in
protracted religious war against the Catholic crown, the French Huguenots eventually sought
religious freedom for French Protestants overseas (Sauer 1975). France, seeking to chal-
lenge the papal bulls that granted exclusive rights to colonization to the Iberian powers,
permitted Huguenots such as Laudonnière to participate in colonial ventures that might dis-
place the Spanish. The Spanish eventually destroyed Fort Caroline, and Laudonnière
returned to Paris and published his memoir in French in 1586.
The colonial interests of other figures, such as Hakluyt and de Bry, who sought to pub-
lish travel accounts to contest the Spanish and serve the interests of commercial compa-
nies, increased the significance of Laudonnière’s work. Hakluyt, for example, who
translated Laudonnière’s original text into English in 1587, was centrally concerned with
promoting English colonization and commerce and Protestantism in the Americas. In
England, colonization was increasingly seen as necessary to counter a Catholic Spain growing
too powerful through its colonial ventures and for “saving” childlike natives from barbaric
10 Sociological Theory 36(1)

Spanish violence and cruelty. In this context, Hakluyt translated and published a number
of Spanish travel accounts on the Americas in English to promote the “black legend” of
Spanish cruelty, as well as accounts designed to reveal other nations’ secrets for English
use. Hakluyt demanded that colonization be backed up by government funding, pushing
for the establishment of the Virginia Company in 1606 and the Jamestown settlement in
1607 (Hadfield 1998).
The publisher de Bry, a Protestant and native of Liege who fled to Strasbourg around
1570 to escape religious persecution at the hands of Spanish Catholics, published works
marked by anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic bias. de Bry’s multivolume series on colonization
to the Americas, Great Voyages (or Grand Voyages), was the first large-scale attempt to
introduce pictorial images of the New World within Europe. Each travel narrative he included
had been previously published, but de Bry’s use of copperplate engravings to illustrate the
voyages was distinct (Bucher 1981). The second volume of this series, the Brevis Narratio,
advanced Laudonnière’s association of hermaphrodites with the Americas and provided
striking visual images. de Bry’s emphasis on pictures served as a guiding influence on book-
makers working a century later (Schmidt 2015). These visual images were copied by and
influenced other publishers, writers, scholars, physicians, and artists across Europe.

Enlightenment Placings of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Through these webbed connectivities, travel texts moved across political, academic, linguis-
tic, cultural, and other borders, eventually becoming the primary or secondary material
drawn on by Enlightenment writers in their considerations of bodies, desires, nature, history,
and civilization. John Millar (1771:xii), for example, in his historical work comparing dif-
ferent societies around the world, wrote, “Our information . . . with regard to the state of
mankind in the rude parts of the world, is chiefly derived from the relations of travelers.”
Some of the most direct influence was already evident at the end of the sixteenth century.
For example, renowned French surgeon Ambroise Paré’s 1575 edition of On Monsters and
Prodigies brought together Africanus’s discussion of African female same-sex behavior with
passages on female circumcision to make a claim about “the secret parts of women which
‘grow erect like the male rod’ making it possible for them to ‘disport themselves with them,
with other women’ and hence necessary ‘with such women’ that ‘one must tie them and cut
what is superfluous because they can abuse them’” (Parker 1994:84–85). Swiss botanist
Kaspar Bauhin’s (1614) discussion of hermaphrodites in On the Nature of Births of
Hermaphrodites and Monsters included a plate from the Brevis Narratio to illustrate the
“androgynous” inhabitants of Florida (van Groesen 2007) and discussed their bad treatment
as beasts of burden. The next year, in Mikrokosmographia, a Description of the Body of
Man, English physician Helkiah Crooke (1615:237) drew on Africanus and Bauhin to
describe women’s “nymphaea,” which could grow so long that they needed to be cut, “espe-
cially among the Egyptians.”
Some decades later, English midwife Jane Sharp (1671) published The Midwives Book;
or, The Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered, in which she sought to challenge male-domi-
nated medical knowledge and legitimate English midwives (Loomba and Burton 2007). Yet,
her thinking on race and bodies was very much influenced by this emerging racialization.
Sharp wrote that

hermaphrodites are only women that have their clitorises greater and hanging out more
than others have, and so shew like a Man’s Yard . . . some lewd women have endeavored
to use it as men do theirs. In the Indies, and Egypt, they are frequent, but I have never
heard of one in this country. (Pp. 44–45)
Patil 11

In the 1700s, early-modern travel writing was at the very least the implicit reference for
emerging understandings of the body. In 1741, English doctor James Parsons, Fellow of the
Royal Society, published A Mechanical and Critical Inquiry into the Nature of
Hermaphrodites. Writing in the immediate context of the display of an “Angolan hermaph-
rodite” in London in 1740, Parsons begins by acknowledging the bad treatment of hermaph-
rodites in places such as the “Gulf of Florida,” using Laudonnière’s travel text as evidence.
His basic goal, however, is to demonstrate that hermaphrodites do not actually exist but are
simply women with enlarged clitorises, as commonly found in Africa and Asia:

Now it is impossible that so many Hermaphrodites would be found at once, since we

have so very few In-stances among the European Nations of those so reputed; though,
as is before observed, they are common enough in Africa and Asia, in all those Places
especially that are nearest the Equinoctial Line. (Parsons 1741:147)

Parsons makes the same connections as Paré, Crooke, and Sharp. He implores his readers to
pay attention to the

Practice of the People of some of the Asiatick, as well as the African Nations,
concerning these large Clitorides; for as in both these Parts of the World, the Women
have them most commonly very long, and the People knowing that the Length of them
produces two Evils, viz. the hindering the Coitus, and Womens abuse of them with
each other, wisely cut or burn them off while Girls are young, and at the same time
never entertain the least Notion of the Existence of any other Nature besides the Female
in those Subjects who are thus depriv’d of that useless Part. (Parsons 1741:10–11)

In her analysis of how early-modern English writing on anatomy drew on travel writing,
Traub (2002) notes that travelogues made no reference to any particular body part when
discussing women’s transgressive sexuality. Anatomical writing introduced the idea that this
sexuality was located in transgressive genitalia generally and in a hypertrophied clitoris
particularly. Traub writes that the processes of both genres “fashion two sides of the same
coin: whereas the dissection of the corpse and its textual reconstitution create a normative,
abstracted body whose singularity encompasses and signifies all others, travel accounts
compose an exoticized body which often . . . reveals the antithesis of (western) normativity”
(p. 198). I argue that this spatialization of normative and deviant bodies is a constitutive
dimension in the biologization and binarization of male and female bodily difference, which
would become the basis of the (western) heterosexual matrix. Only by locating transgressive
bodies elsewhere are normative bodies securely placed here. In other words, the biologized
male-female dichotomy is imperial from its inception and is always already imperial, placed
within the heart of the metropole in the context of colonial and transnational relations.
This spatialization of normative bodies was echoed and elaborated further in the realm of
natural history, “one of the premiere sciences of the eighteenth century” (Schiebinger
1993:3–4), no doubt esteemed for its role in Europe’s commercial and colonial expansion.
Perhaps the most significant work in this vein was French naturalist Comte de Buffon’s
multivolume, Histoire naturelle, genreale et particuliere (1749–1788), which sold out in six
weeks, was reprinted numerous times, and was translated into multiple European languages.
Translated by the conservative British naturalist William Smellie into English in 1780,
Volume 2, in a section titled “The Natural History of Man,” discusses gender and sexuality.
Drawing on travel writing to discuss the civilized versus savage relations between women
and men, and premised on the biological assumption of men’s greater physical strength rela-
tive to women, Buffon (1785:466–67) writes:
12 Sociological Theory 36(1)

Men are much stronger than women; and they have too often employed this superiority
in exercising a cruel and tyrannical dominion over the weaker sex, who were entitled
to share with them both the pleasures and the pains of life. Savage nations condemn the
women to perpetual labour. They cultivate the ground, and perform every office of
drudgery, while the men indolently recline in their hammocks, from which they never
think of stirring, unless when they go a hunting or fishing. . . . All men are naturally
indolent; but the savages of warm countries are not only the most lazy of human beings,
but the most tyrannical to their women, whom they treat with a cruel barbarity. In
nations more civilized, men dictate laws to the women. These laws are always more
severe in proportion to the grossness of the national manners; and it is only among
people highly polished that women have obtained that equality of condition which is
due to them, and which contributes so powerfully to the happiness of society.

Historian Mary Ryan (2005) notes that the oft-repeated characterization of American
“savages” as being lazy and treating their women as “workhorses” was most likely due to
travelers witnessing seasonal gendered patterns of labor. Nevertheless, this characterization
of “savages” became significant in Buffon’s writing and the work of many others. For
Buffon, such civilizational differences among peoples were evident in customs concerning
sexuality and marriage. He writes of “gross superstition” and “abominable outrages” that
fail to respect women’s virginity before marriage in Cochin, Calicut, Goa, the Canary Isles,
Congo, and numerous other places in Asia and Africa. Rather, Buffon (1785:422) argues,

After puberty, marriage is the natural state of man. A man ought to have but one wife,
and a woman but one husband. This is the law of nature; for the number of females is
nearly equal to that of males. Such laws [as those recounted previously] as have been
enacted in opposition to this natural principle, have originated solely from tyranny and
ignorance.

Women have a unique responsibility here as “the beauty of women commenced the moment
they learned to make themselves respectable, by refusing all approaches to their hearts which
proceeded not from delicacy of sentiment; and, whenever the influence of sentiment was
felt, polished manners was a necessary consequence” (Buffon 1785:468).
Buffon’s natural history of man is a history of “civilized” or “polished” gender relations
and sexuality, legitimated with appeals to biology and nature. In such nations, men dictate
laws to women that contribute to their “equality of condition,” and women’s sexuality is
restricted to monogamous, heterosexual marriage. Buffon’s history augments Parsons’s spa-
tialization of normative bodies with a spatialization of civilized gender relations and
sexuality.
A third site of Enlightenment writing, Scottish conjectural history, elaborates the social-
historical dimension of this spatialization. In Observations Concerning the Distinction of
Ranks in Society (Millar 1771), for example, John Millar offers a stadial theory of different
societies. A student of Adam Smith, Millar adapts Smith’s theory that societies move pro-
gressively from hunting and gathering, through pastoral, to agriculture, and then the com-
mercial stage of development. In Chapter 1, “Of the Rank and Condition of Women in
Different Ages,” Millar (1771:2) begins,

A savage who earns his food by hunting and fishing . . . finds so much difficulty and is
exposed to so many hardships . . . his desires being neither cherished by affluence, nor
inflamed by indulgence, are allowed to remain in that moderate state which renders
Patil 13

them barely sufficient to answer the purposes of nature, in the continuation of the
species. . . . It cannot be supposed therefore that the passions of sex will ever arise to
any considerable height in the breast of a savage. He must have little regard for
pleasures which he can purchase at so easy a rate . . . it is no wonder they should
entertain the grossest ideas concerning those female virtues which in a polished nation
are supposed to constitute the honour and dignity of the sex.

For Millar, at the most “savage” stage, people are so consumed with survival that they do
not have the ability to develop sustained emotional connections with potential mates. Sex is
unregulated, and women’s chastity has no value, rendering women of no value. Women are
thus subjected to innumerable harms, from being abused as laborers to being treated as prop-
erty. From this first stage, Millar (1771:65–66) crafts a narrative of gender and sexual devel-
opment in which as societies develop, women’s sexuality becomes regulated, the value of
women’s chastity increases, and ultimately, their value and treatment improve such that

the wife is regarded neither as the slave nor the idol of her husband, but as the friend
and companion. . . . Loaded by nature with the first and most immediate concern in
rearing and maintaining the children, she is endowed with such dispositions as sit her
for the discharge of this important duty; and is at the same time particularly qualified
for the exercise of all those minute occupations which require skill and dexterity more
than strength, which are so necessary in interior management of the family.

The object of this process of development is the proper valuing and placing of women,
but the subject is men’s dispositions, which also develop from insufficient passions and cru-
elties of the savage to a civilized, genteel masculinity that sees a wife not as a slave but as a
“friend and companion.” Drawing on travel literature, Millar’s cases of “savages” come
from Africa, Asia, and the Americas, whereas instances of proper gender and sexuality come
from Europe. Millar (1771:77) also opposes civilized European mores to “the voluptuous-
ness of the eastern nations” (read: the Ottoman Empire) where wealth and opulence have led
to an excessive love of pleasure and the practice of polygamy. Yet framed within a concern
about the treatment of women in savage and barbaric societies, his text is riddled with con-
tradictions. For example, in his survey of the savage world, he includes clear examples of
women’s power and status, such as their participation in public governance institutions, their
active participation in the military, and matriarchal forms of kinship in which women have
access to and power over multiple men. However, similar to Buffon, and working from a
first premise of women’s “nature” and “dispositions” regarding family and domesticity as
well as patriarchal views of the regulation of women’s sexuality, he explains such practices
away as uncivilized or irregular.
Explicit discussions of hermaphrodites and sodomites—so ubiquitous in the travel and
medical literature—are absent in Millar’s account. Nevertheless, companionate, monoga-
mous, heterosexual marriage enfolding a private, domestic femininity and a public mascu-
linity—the grid of intelligibility Butler names “the heterosexual matrix”—emerges as the
highest stage of civilization, in opposition to unregulated sexuality and the resultant deviant
masculinity and femininity (see also Moloney 2005; Sebastiani 2013). In conjunction with
the spatialization of normative and deviant bodies as well as gender relations and sexuality
emerging in sites such as medicine, anatomy, and natural history, Millar’s sociohistorical
narration of (hetero)sexual and gender development is also spatialized. O’Brien (2009:1)
points out that conjectural history contributed to the “great discovery of the British
Enlightenment”—that there is such a thing called society and the idea of the progress of
14 Sociological Theory 36(1)

society—which helped inaugurate the field of sociology (Palmeri 2016). Millar’s writing
had a significant impact on his contemporaries. Early sociological writers, from Comte and
Spencer to Weber and Durkheim, would all reproduce such spatialized civilizational distinc-
tions regarding gender and sexuality (Patil 2017).
I would like to end this section with some discussion of a figure many contemporary
feminist sociologists point to as an example of an early woman and feminist in sociology
who has been neglected in histories of the discipline, Harriet Martineau. Indeed, Martineau’s
(1838) How to Observe Morals and Manners is considered the first sociological work on
method (Arni and Müller 2004; Lipset 1968), a detail one rarely learns in a classical sociol-
ogy course. What interests me here, however, is situating her writing within the broader
contours outlined previously. Martineau was concerned with rejecting patriarchal visions of
women’s natures and roles, such as those exhibited by Millar, and her feminist vision is a
point of contrast to the masculinist theorizations elaborated previously. Yet her critical writ-
ing too betrays not only an allegiance to dominant ideas of progress and development but
also the attendant spatialization of civilized gender and sexuality. Some scholars argue that
Millar’s work is an important precursor to the “sociology of woman” (O’Brien 2009; see
also Olson 1998), and parallels to Millar are evident in Martineau’s work. First, Millar’s nar-
rative of the progressive development of passion from unregulated sex devoid of sentimental
attachment to sex restricted to one’s spouse is echoed in Martineau’s (1838:103, 150) discus-
sion of the progressive development of passion as one moves up stages of civilization and
marriage turns from “merely an arrangement of convenience, in accordance with low mor-
als” to a “sacred institution, commanding the reverence and affection of a virtuous people.”
For Martineau (1838:145):

The Marriage Compact is the most important feature of the domestic state. . . . Almost
every variety of method is still in use, in one part of the world or another. . . . Polygamy
is very common there, as everyone knows. In countries which are too far advanced for
this, every restraint of law, all sanction of opinion has been tried to render the natural
method—the restriction of one husband to one wife—successful, and, therefore,
universal and permanent.

Furthermore, although Martineau’s (1838:151) feminist writing was deeply critical of “civi-
lized” societies, her understanding and critique of such societies emerged through a spatial-
ization of gender and sexuality:

The degree of the degradation of woman is as good a test as the moralist can adopt for
ascertaining the state of domestic morals in any country. The Indian squaw carries the
household burdens, trudging in the dust, while her husband on horseback paces before
her. . . . In other countries the wife may be found drawing the plough, hewing wood,
and carrying water. . . . From a condition of slavery like this, women are found rising
to the highest condition in which they are at present seen, in France, England, and the
United States, where they are less than half-educated, precluded from earning a
subsistence.

Martineau differs from the other writers discussed here primarily in her critique of the gen-
der inequality civilized societies perpetuate despite their progress over the inequalities of
more savage societies. Parallel to the significance of the masculinist writing discussed here
for emerging sociological work, it is also important to consider the import of her work for
emerging feminist logics.
Patil 15

Beyond merely reproducing stereotypes on distant lands, the authors discussed here
helped inaugurate new ideas of bodies, genders, and sexualities that were deeply spatialized.
Working with what was often considered data about the outside world produced and circu-
lated via early-modern webbed connectivities, their myriad theorizations on the humoral
understanding of the unstable body and its attendant ideas about gender and sexuality inau-
gurated a shift, or partial displacement, that would grow increasingly powerful. These
authors helped produce a new grid of intelligibility centered on a “stable sex expressed
through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses female) that is oppo-
sitionally and hierarchically defined through compulsory practice of heterosexuality” (Butler
1990:208).
Beyond the heterosexual matrix as a universal form across time and space on the one
hand, and as associated with the putative west on the other, this discussion demonstrates it is
a historically and spatially specific effect of imperial networks. Beginning in the early mod-
ern period, the fuzzy and overlapping territories of bodily sex, gender practices and identi-
ties, and sexual desire in European Christendom echoed similarly blurry geopolitical and
cultural borders. As webbed connectivities circulated images of alternative possibilities
within an early colonial and racialized context, Enlightenment and sociological texts negoti-
ated new, hardened configurations and binaries, spatializing and temporalizing them in the
process.2 Such a remapping aligned heterosexual public men and domestic women with
progress, placing other possibilities in other spaces and in other times. In this way, the align-
ment of dichotomous sexed bodies with binary gender roles and a certain kind of racialized,
classed (hetero)sexuality was very much located within civilizational space and time.
Anthropologist Ann Stoler (2002) has famously written on the British, French, and Dutch
colonies as key spaces in which new definitions of civilized sexuality were worked out in the
nineteenth century. Stoler (2002) argues that these definitions helped secure the civiliza-
tional superiority of European colonials and justified the colonial project. I argue that such
processes began much earlier and involved many more modalities and agencies. Beyond the
colonial state, which is Stoler’s focus, this construction was produced by religious, capital-
ist, academic, and other agencies within webbed connectivities. Furthermore, the “grid of
intelligibility” eventually named by Butler emerged in the eighteenth century; the instances
discussed by Stoler became key moments for the grid’s solidification over time. Paying
attention to the grid’s emergence in the early modern moment highlights links between
metropoles and colonies, as is Stoler’s dominant focus, but it also, critically, highlights the
thick web of connections among racialized spaces.

Some Lessons on Transnationalism, Race, and Empire for

the Sociologies of Gender and Sexuality
Examining the significance of these travel texts in the development of Enlightenment and
sociological thought can help us think differently about cross-border processes as they relate
to sex, gender, and sexuality. What new cartographies are revealed, and what new objects
come into focus?

Expanding the Imagination of the Transnational

First, the male-female binary of sex and associated notions of gender and heterosexuality—
the grid of intelligibility named “the heterosexual matrix”—are all already transnational and
are in fact imperial. They emerge from and are possible because of early-modern, cross-
border webbed connectivities. Their placing in various spaces (in Europe or the so-called
16 Sociological Theory 36(1)

west) is dependent on these larger border-crossing processes and is an effect of the networks
themselves. In other words, the western heterosexual matrix is a deeply spatial, relational,
and imperial concept.
The sociologies of gender and sexuality, much like the discipline as a whole, are over-
whelmingly presentist, and the cross-border tends to be invoked in certain overdetermined
ways. For example, a glance at current work shows transnationalism in feminist and queer
sociological work in terms of surveys/comparative work across multiple states or ethnogra-
phies of sites typically outside the United States or so-called west. Whether imagined as
multiple sites that can be surveyed or compared to each other—or as sites outside the United
States/west, imbricated by transnational processes of global capitalism, neoliberalism,
northern organizing, and so forth—current mappings of geopolitical and geocultural space
are the ground on which these transnationalisms take shape and become legible. In re-
embedding the heterosexual matrix in space and time in the manner argued for here, I seek
to expand the spatial imagination of the transnational. From this perspective, investigations
of sex, gender, and sexuality do not require survey/comparative work across states, nor eth-
nographies outside the United States, to be transnational.
This kind of work is of course important in examining contemporary transnational pro-
cesses. But limiting our understanding of transnational sex, gender, and sexuality along such
lines only perpetuates received geopolitical borders. It also does little to disrupt the fiction
that contemporary geopolitical and cultural spaces have had their own sex, gender, and sexu-
ality regimes prior to the complications introduced by contemporary transnational processes.
We must recognize that the so-called modern heterosexual matrix comes into being due to
webbed connectivities of proto, early, and subsequent colonial processes. To re-embed it
within these histories, feminist and queer explorations—whether outside the U.S./western
world or within—need to center its politics of place (and time).
In response to the call to transnationalize analysis in this way, some argue that such a
focus may be too generic or homogenizing and thus we should continue to focus on the
national and other more local scales. Yet the three travel texts examined earlier, for example,
all emerged and circulated in the precise manner in which they did due to a series of local,
national, and transnational processes at play within cross-border webbed connectivities in
the early modern period. Take Laudonnière, whose initial French text on the Timucua of
Florida was popularized by the geographer and publisher Hakluyt in English and the engraver
and publisher de Bry in Latin and German. Laudonnière was part of Protestant expeditions
to the Americas to establish Huguenot colonies—encouraged by a French state with colonial
designs—which shaped the emergence of his original French text. Hakluyt then translated
the text into English as part of his broader efforts to encourage English colonization and
counter Spanish power in the Americas. de Bry’s own experiences at the hands of Spanish
Catholics in Leige and his flight to Strasbourg shaped his deep anti-Spanish and pro-Protes-
tant sentiments, which were powerful elements in the framing of his illustrated Latin and
German volumes.3 Laudonnière’s text emerged and circulated in the way it did due to the
multiple ways in which the individual, national, and transnational came together.
Some current treatments of Harriet Martineau in feminist sociology provide another
example. Arni and Müller (2004), in their discussion of the marginalization of Martineau
and her work in early sociology, rightly point to how contemporaries neglected her work
while building on its insights. They discuss this treatment as an example of the gendering of
sociological modernity. Yet by focusing on Martineau’s feminist insights and her gendered
exclusion, they overlook the constitutive dimension of Britain’s role in broader colonial rela-
tions within her own writing. Beyond just Britain, they ignore the broader webbed connec-
tivities within which Martineau encountered ideas of savage gender ideologies and marital
Patil 17

forms. By eschewing the transnational scale, they are not able to consider the role of the
transnational in the construction of the domestic (civilized) gender dichotomies they are
concerned with and that affect Martineau’s scholarly reception. As the earlier discussion of
Millar’s text demonstrates, these domestic (civilized) gender dichotomies emerged in rela-
tion to the marital and sexual customs of a series of savage and barbaric others. The argu-
ment here is not to replace a focus on the local or national with the transnational but to
examine these multiple scales of analysis—in their connections with each other—together.

The Transnational Is Historical, the Transnational Is Imperial

Second, although I emphasized the spatial dimension here, transnational sex, gender, and
sexuality are also deeply historical. In this sense, the pervasive presentism in sociology is
problematic because it can elide imperial histories. But beyond presentist sociology, this
point is typically neglected even in explicitly historical work. In his highly influential
Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, for example, historian Thomas
Laqueur (1990) considers Millar’s argument in his larger discussion of western Europe’s
shift in the eighteenth century from a one-sex Galenic model of the body to a two-sex model
that biologizes sex difference. Laqueur relates Millar’s discussion of women’s progressive
differentiation with civilization, but he does not consider what this invocation of civilization
means for the emerging biologization of sex differences or its relation to proto and early
colonial processes. Rather, Laqueur provides an oddly Eurocentric reading of Millar’s text
that neglects the global consciousness actually exhibited by Millar. The eighteenth century
is in fact a key moment when understandings of the body were being rethought in a transna-
tional, early colonial context, but Laqueur’s model of diachronic change neglects space and
thus contains and makes invisible the coloniality of sexual diphormism.
Likewise, in his well-known work on the emergence of sexual identity among men who
have sex with men and women who have sex with women in the 1700s, historian Randolph
Trumbach (1994:119–21) discusses Parsons’s work on hermaphrodites:

He [Parsons] was interested in the women he called Macroclitorideae—the women

with large clitorises . . . they were not capable of “exercising the functions of either sex
with regard to generation” . . . such “poor women” could not “exercise the part of any
other sex but their own.” And their sexual desire must be presumably for men, not
women. Parsons’ position marked the beginning of the argument that biologically
there were only two sexes, that on these anatomical differences were founded two
gender roles but that both genders sexually desire only the opposite gender. No
individual was able to perform the role of gender that was not a reflection of that
individual’s sexual anatomy. It is apparent that for Parsons hermaphrodites were not a
third biological category (as had been traditionally held) but bodily defective males or
females. . . . Parsons’ view was becoming the dominant one in the middle of the
century.

Trumbach (1994) wishes to examine Parsons’s argument as an example of “the great transi-
tion” in, as he says, a shift from the “old regime” of sex, gender, and sexuality to a new one.
He argues that the transition occurred because male and female had “begun to grow more
nearly equal . . . confirmed by the development at the time of companionate marriage and the
domesticated family” (Trumbach 1998:171). Yet the placing dynamic of Parsons’s text,
which I discussed earlier, wherein the “women with the large clitorises” are “very few”
among “the European nations” and especially common in “Africa and Asia” is invisible. If,
18 Sociological Theory 36(1)

as I argue, this placing dynamic is crucial for the emerging dichotomization of women’s and
men’s bodies in the metropole, then the “new regime” Trumbach speaks of is necessarily
transnational. The new normativity is placed here while the deviant body is abjected there.
By neglecting this placing dynamic, Trumbach elides the coloniality of dichotomous sex and
related notions of gender and (hetero)sexuality.
Laqueur and Trumbach have been critiqued for too neat narrations of shifts that neglect
variation “before and after,” teleological thinking, and collapsing women’s distinct experi-
ences into the experiences of men (see e.g., King 2013; McFarlane 1997; Park and Nye
1991; Traub 2002). The spatial dimensions of their arguments, however, have received less
attention. That is, Enlightenment writers such as Millar, Parsons, Buffon, and Martineau
drew on colonial knowledges of the world that emerged and circulated due to early-modern
webbed connectivities of political, economic, cultural, religious, and academic institutions
and structures, and they made explicitly universal, global arguments. Not only is the hetero-
sexual matrix transnational from its inception, but this transnationalism is deeply historical.
These histories of the transnational and the cross-border must be acknowledged if we are to
adequately recognize the role of empire in emerging sex, gender, and sexuality regimes.

Thinking Sideways along Webbed Connectivities Brings New Ontological and

Political Objects into View
Finally, thinking sideways and following historic webbed connectivities across spaces and
groups points to a third lesson for the sociologies of gender and sexuality—in short, it makes
new objects legible or brings new objects into view. The circulations discussed here point to
a long history of cross-group and cross-space processes. We see these connectivities in three
ways. First, we see them in terms of ties that connect a single post/colony and a single metro-
pole. Most critical transnational feminist and queer work, including work in other disci-
plines, focuses on this axis (Overmyer-Velazquez 2005; Traub 2002), and hence I will spend
less time on this point. Second, we see cross-group and space connectivities in terms of ties
that connect different metropolitan or imperial centers. Examining the cross-language,
cross-denominational, and cross-border intra-European processes of the construction of the
non-European other within the three travel texts of interest here highlights the trans-imperial
as a key site for construction of a broader European/western identity. These processes are
deeply implicated in intra-European negotiations of more and less civilized national identi-
ties. Work that examines these sorts of cross-imperial processes (historical or otherwise)
vis-à-vis sex, gender, and sexuality is quite rare. Third, we see cross-group connectivities in
terms of ties that connect different post/colonies. Local, religious, national, and other cleav-
ages clearly matter, but the othering of peoples as far flung as North and West Africans,
peoples on the Indian subcontinent, and native Floridians emerges out of a broader frame-
work of sex-gender-sexuality ideology common throughout Christian Europe in the early
modern period. From within this framework, a series of bodily, gender, and sexual transgres-
sions has long shaped processes of othering within Europe.
Other practices also throw the meaningfulness of clear-cut colonial or racialized distinc-
tions between different groups and spaces into question. For example, as one of the most
important publishers of travel accounts in the early modern period (and perhaps the most
significant producer of visual images), Theodor de Bry published on the whole of the non-
European world in his two central illustrated series, Great Voyages (on the Americas) and
India Orientalis (on Africa and the Orient). de Bry, like other writers and publishers of his
time, borrowed stories and illustrations from one region or writer to frame others as he saw
fit (Bucher 1981). Likewise, English travel writers often took narratives written to describe
America and simply republished them for Africa (Morgan 2004). Such processes throw the
Patil 19

distinctness of “Africa,” “Asia,” and “America” within cross-cultural constructions into

question, and they demonstrate the interconnections among these racializations.
Contemporary scholarship that focuses on particular groups/spaces/states and examines
how transnational forces affect them or compares or surveys different sites in relation to
each other often presumes the distinctness of these sites. In doing so, this work neglects the
constitutive role of historic webbed connectivities for the production of these sites and their
distinctness. Yet even when distinctness between or among sites is not a theoretical assump-
tion, methodological choices to focus on “England” or “Mexico” or “Asian Americans” can
produce a similar effect. Historical interrelationships between spaces and groups are
neglected or relegated to the background; contemporary identity and conceptual categories
that became important due to current academic and political conversations are presumed,
foregrounded, and ultimately reified. Considering the transnational movements of just three
sites of cross-border construction in the travelogues of Africanus, van Linschoten, and
Laudonnière demonstrates what is lost when the scale shifts from circulations across groups/
spaces to particular groups/spaces.
I have written elsewhere about this problem and its consequences for ethnic studies (Patil
2014). The a priori bounding of the subject in otherwise critical work may perpetuate the
interpellation of modernist categories of identity and eschew alternative geographies, with
deep consequences for constructions of political community and solidarity. There are impor-
tant movements today toward solidarity across different racialized groups and spaces.
Groups fighting anti-black racism in the United States, for example, are creating relation-
ships with Palestinian rights groups.4 The argument here seeks to contribute to such political
projects of solidarity with the logically prior ontological case. That is, taking seriously
webbed connectivities across seemingly discreet sites and seemingly discreet sex/gender/
sexuality regimes constitutes an anti-racist, feminist, and queer challenge to modernist clo-
sures of space, identity, and community.

Moving Beyond the Heterosexual Matrix: Sex-Gender-

Sexuality Regimes as Relational Effects
Moving beyond the heterosexual matrix, how can we think about the complexities and rela-
tionalities of desires, embodiments, and identities in a more expansive way? This is a large
question to which I can only give some preliminary remarks. One valuable theoretical payoff
of this discussion is a temporalization and spatialization of not just the heterosexual matrix
but of the theoretical and cultural lines relating terms such as sex, gender, and sexuality in
the first place.
Valentine (2007) makes an important move in this direction when he argues that the dis-
tinctions between biological sex, social gender, and sexual desire were first elaborated by
early-twentieth century European sexologists. He argues that this move

enable[d] them to distinguish between the experiences of people who visibly

transgressed conventional expectations of masculinity and femininity in clothing,
occupation, or manner (gender) and those who, despite being content to be social men
and women in concordance with their birth ascription, were erotically drawn to people
of the same general embodiment (sexuality). (P. 27)

This distinction was further elaborated by mid–twentieth century psychiatrists and medical
practitioners in the United States (Valentine 2007). Somerville (2000) points out that ideas
about race were also central to these discourses in the United States.
20 Sociological Theory 36(1)

The argument here expands the scope of this discussion both temporally and spatially.
Centering shifting meanings and relations of embodiments, identities, and desires squarely
within proto-colonial and early colonial webbed connectivities, it insists on cross-border
racial histories. It is also a window onto how on the one hand, while regimes of sex-gender-
sexuality are in a state of becoming, on the other, some complexes of desires, embodiments,
and identities can become more or less realized or stabilized in particular ways within par-
ticular institutional and structural conditions. In this sense, we can conceptualize sex-gen-
der-sexuality regimes as events (Clemens 2007) with differing levels of stabilization
depending on the institutional and structural circumstances of their production and repro-
duction. As such, particular sex-gender-sexuality regimes exist within time, space, and cer-
tain institutional and structural circumstances. The heterosexual matrix is thus a specific
imperial event that emerged within proto-colonial and colonial webbed connectivities and
was stabilized and entrenched within the discourses and practices of colonial states, the
Catholic Church, capital, medicine, and so on.
A more complex and expansive understanding of sex-gender-sexuality regimes must con-
tend with the hegemony of the western heterosexual matrix and the regimes that exist along-
side it, in relation to it, and outside it. In contrast to transnational work that assumes the
fixity of its categories across time and space, ethnographic work that explores the experi-
ences of individuals living outside the western heterosexual matrix is useful in this regard.
For instance, the significance of institutional and structural processes, shaped by colonial,
postcolonial, and in this case apartheid histories, is underscored in Swarr’s (2012) ethnogra-
phy of the experiences of “gender liminals” during and after apartheid in South Africa.
Swarr uses the term gender liminal to discuss experiences of a range of queer subjects,
including transsexual, intersex, and other gender and sexual minorities. She argues that the
racial state was heavily influenced by medical theories from the United States, Europe, and
Australia. In the context of apartheid, the state encouraged gender liminality for black and
colored groups as this helped buttress apartheid claims about black and nonwhite abnormal-
ity. At the same time, the state policed and stamped out gender liminality for whites, who
were expected to conform to dominant ideas about gender, sex, and sexuality. In this context,
whites, but not other groups, were forced to undergo surgeries to “fix” their sex or electro-
shock therapy to “cure” their gayness (Swarr 2012). Here we see the structural production of
multiple sex-gender-sexuality regimes positioned hierarchically in relation to (a local-
national instantiation of) the western, imperial heterosexual matrix.
An example from the heart of the metropole comes from Manalansan’s (2003) study of
immigrant bakla experiences in New York. Although he “provisionally and strategically” (p.
viii) terms his informants “Filipino gay men,” Manalansan (2003:16) is careful to distin-
guish between the U.S. or western-based meaning of gay and the bakla:

Bakla conflates the categories of effeminacy, transvestism, and homosexuality. . . .

Bakla is concerned with the manipulation of surface appearances in such a way that a
singular, consistent self is not suggested. Rather, bakla self-formation involves a range
of possible scripts and the scripting of divergent selves, each of which is embedded in
a specific social location and network of social relationships. Filipino gay men
construct their sense of self and citizenship through negotiations between bakla and
gay traditions.

Manalansan (2003) discusses how these men are complexly situated in relation to hege-
monic white gay politics in New York, with the latter’s focus on the closet, coming out, vis-
ibility, and pride. He argues that as immigrant Filipino men of color, bakla are very differently
Patil 21

situated in relation to such politics in the United States. For example, coming from a cultural
framework where “quiet dignity” is prized over verbalization and identity is “worn rather
than declared,” admonishments to be out and visible sit uncomfortably. Additionally, in rela-
tion to the state, these immigrant men, particularly undocumented ones, have no wish to be
visible in this way. Manalansan argues that in opposition to the dominant juxtaposition of the
modern gay over the traditional bakla, these men redeploy the meaning of bakla in the dia-
sporic space of New York to negotiate a distinct modernity.
Manalansan’s rendering of these individuals as “gay men” accommodates them within
the categories of the heterosexual matrix, but their experiences point to what the matrix
leaves out: its colorblindness or whitewashing. Even in the heart of the metropole, multiple
instantiations of sex-gender-sexuality regimes are positioned in varying ways to the norma-
tive, western heterosexual matrix: We do not have to go outside the United States or the so-
called west to see them.
In the context of migrant Filipina hostesses in Japan, Parreñas’s (2011) ethnography looks
at a subcategory of bakla hostesses: those who were assigned a male classification at birth in
the Philippines but present as feminine and want a normatively male sexual partner. Parreñas
argues that these migrants come to Japan because they feel safer there and believe they have
a greater chance of having a Japanese man fall in love with them. At the same time, Japan
has a “compulsory heterosexuality” (Parreñas 2011:180) regime wherein same-sex marriage
is not available and long-term residency is only available for individuals married to citizens
or giving birth to citizens. Parreñas argues that these hostesses mimic the heteronormativity
of this regime in a variety of ways. For example, they engage in “fake” or “paper” marriages,
or they marry masculine subjects, including tomboys (i.e., individuals assigned female clas-
sification at birth but who present as masculine). Again, this discussion demonstrates the
navigation of multiple regimes of identities, embodiments, and desires produced by multiple
cultural and institutional demands. It again shows the provincialism of the western hetero-
sexual matrix.
One question that does need further exploration is the apparent prevalence of seemingly
western-style binaries, as in the case of the Japanese state regime. Rather than making ahis-
torical assumptions about universality, such an exploration would need to pay attention to
imperial histories. It would attend not just to the sexuality and gender politics of colonial
states (and other agencies) but also of postcolonial states bidding for the symbolic capital of
sexual and gender respectability in colonialism’s aftermath (Alexander 1994; Epprecht
2009). Beyond postcolonial states, it would need to examine autocolonial states like Japan
and Thailand, which experienced parallel concerns (Frühstück 2003; Käng 2014; Tierney
2010). Puri (2016) writes that sexuality is useful for producing the state’s legitimacy, for
producing the effect of the state itself. Within the colonial aftermath, to which the politics of
sexuality and gender were so central, sexuality as well as gender are again being used to
produce state legitimacy. Such an investigation would have to tease apart postcolonial and
autocolonial state regimes of sex-gender-sexuality (where we see widespread adaptations of
a western-style heterosexual regime) and alternative regimes that exist alongside, outside,
and against these state regimes. For example, in a broader postcolonial heteronormative
Indian context, Osella’s (2012) study of same-sex practices among Muslim South Indian
men shows how they deploy a rhetoric of secrecy to engage in male-to-male intimacy while
publicly reinforcing heteronormativity.
Finally, while these studies demonstrate why the heterosexual matrix cannot be universal-
ized, important work also shows why the answer to a problematic universalism is not recov-
ery of “authentic indigenous traditions.” For example, arguing against this sort of culturalist
approach, which typically builds on a binary between western categories of sexual and gender
22 Sociological Theory 36(1)

identity versus nonwestern practices, Osella’s aforementioned study of same-sex practices

among Muslim South Indian men offers an alternative explanation. Specifically, rather than
“indigenous cultures” not captured by western categories, Osella (2012:532) argues that

the globalisation of capital and labour markets—specifically long-term migration to

the Gulf countries of West Asia, a predominantly male affair—together with the
increased influence of Islamic reformism, has produced novel forms and spaces of
homosociality in which expressions of same-sex desire are hidden from the public
gaze, while intense male friendship is reinscribed as an (Islamic) moral value. A
rhetoric of discretion and secrecy allows men to continue to enjoy male-to-male
intimacy while participating in public critiques of openly homoerotic forms of sociality
and in calls for greater control of women’s lives—their sexualities in particular—
which, together, further reinforce local heteronormative discourse.

Likewise, Cohen (2005) writes about the supposedly indigenous sexual category of the kothi
in South Asia, recovered and reclaimed in relation to problematic western categories. Within
the context of what he terms “AIDS Cosmopolitanism,” he identifies multiple networks of
identification, capital, and surveillance in which those who seek to provide AIDS prevention
interventions produce competing categories of gender and sexual authenticity (of which
kothi is one). Such works identify institutional and structural processes having to do with
development, neoliberal capital, HIV/AIDS service provision, and so on that point to more
recent cross-border relations that developed within and exceeded older webbed connectivi-
ties. These newer webbed connectivities must be examined even as older connectivities
cannot be dispensed with.
The heterosexual matrix, as articulated by Butler and taken up by others, is a historically
and spatially specific event and effect of imperial networks or webbed connectivities.
Beyond this particular matrix, we can think of sex-gender-sexuality regimes more generally
as historically and spatially specific relational events. To the extent that the colonial politics
of race, space, civility, and respectability that have been in operation since the early modern
period are significant in their production—whether through identity, difference, or some-
thing else—we can say that these regimes are situated in relation to the hegemonic hetero-
sexual matrix. Thus, it is not enough to universalize the heterosexual matrix or to associate
it with the “culture” of the putative west or elaborate “authentic” nonwestern regimes. The
broader network of imperial relations, or webbed connectivities, from which the western
heterosexual matrix emerges—and within which other regimes are multiply situated—must
be acknowledged.

Concluding Remarks
This article has argued for the significance of histories of empire for sociological approaches
to gender, sexuality, and sex. I made the argument by centering the canonical heterosexual
matrix squarely within imperial histories. As such, I made the case that this matrix is neither
universally applicable across time and space nor merely associated with a putative west.
Rather, it must be understood as a relational effect, emerging from cross-border networks of
imperial relations. Early-modern and subsequent webbed connectivities are relevant not
only to those of us who study the global south. They are relevant to those of us who study
the global north as well. Likewise, they are not only relevant for those of us who study the
past—they shape the questions we investigate and the problems we care about in the here
and now.
Patil 23

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jyoti Puri, Evren Savci, Patrick Grzanka, Sinikka Elliott, Emily Mann, and the anony-
mous reviewers for their feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes
1. The “author” in the early modern period did not have the authority later ascribed. Rather, the author
was merely one among a number of individuals who contributed significantly to the materialization of
a text. Editors and publishers, for instance, often significantly changed content and tone to suit their
interests (Russell 2001).
2. Beyond Europeans, other groups, such as the Chinese, also had sexualized maps of otherness. Although
outside the scope of this article, bringing these multiple maps into the same frame of analysis would be
generative.
3. The first volume of Great Voyages was published in French, English, German, and Latin. The remain-
ing volumes, however, were only published in German and Latin.
4. See, for example, http://mondoweiss.net/2015/01/between-blacklivesmatter-palestine/.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Vrushali Patil is Associate Professor of Sociology at Florida International University in Miami, FL. She works
at the intersection of historical sociology and postcolonial/decolonial/transnational feminist and sexuality stud-
ies. She is currently working on her book, Empire and the Social Construction of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality:
From Societies to Webbed Connectivities. She has published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Signs, Theory &
Society, and Annals of Tourism Research, among others. She is the author of Negotiating Decolonization in the
United Nations: Politics of Space, Identity, and International Community (Routledge, 2008).