Orientalist sociology and the creation of colonial sexualities

In what Arjun Appadurai has dubbed the 'colonial imaginary' issues of femin inity, and who possessed it, were of prime importance. An orientalizing soc iology sought to distinguish, and indeed to fix, differences between metrop olitan and indigenous women as a rhetoric of hierarchy which secured proper and western femininity to white women. One critical route which colonial c ommentators and authorities took to produce that knowledge was to measure w omen's proximity to the practice of prostitution, a means which permitted d iscussion and judgement of racialized sexualities as well as of proper mode ls of feminine behaviour. This article will explore the ways in which the n ew sociology of the Victorian period, wielded in a colonial context, served to separate women through race-based ideas of sexual behaviour and sexual order. It will deal with British India in the nineteenth and early twentiet h centuries.