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Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers French Indochina and the Lover

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Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers French Indochina and the Lover
Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers, European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia. Ann Laura Stoler
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Race and the Education of Desire, Fauoult’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Ann Laura Stoler

Introduction
We will be presenting two essays by Ann Laura Stoler. The first essay, “Race and the Education of Desire”, Foucault’s history of sexuality discusses class, race and desire in terms of family and state regulations which are identified as the moral [bourgeois] code in the colonial context of Indochina. The second essay, Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers, European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia is focused on the construction of colonial categories in relation to people belonging to various geographical and cultural roots.

Background of French Colonial Expansion:
During the nineteenth century, France embarked on a series of conquests, annexations, and campaigns of pacification. From 1900 to 1914 the pacification of various colonies continued, agreements were signed with local authorities, and administrative organizations were put in place that imposed French models for schools, hospitals, and the army. Colonists began developing infrastructures which facilitated the exportation of raw material to metropolitan France.

French Indochina
It was a colony of commerce which was under the French rule in the 1860s and in the 1870s the Europeans began to settle here, in 1900 approximately 91 thousand settlers were classified European in the Indies. The metis population is also included in this estimate.

Race and the Education of Desire, Foucault’s history of sexuality
Stoler represents bourgeois classism in its linkage to racism. The Bourgeois code is discussed as a desire to defend its members from the pollution of the primitive others. The former are considered as threat and enemy of the White culture. Bourgeois fear of assimilation



Cited: Nagel, 2000. Ethnicity and Sexuality. Annual Review of Sociology. 26 Pratt, 1992 – Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routhledge Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT. Yale University Press.

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