Material ambitions: self-help and Victorian literature

Abstract

sexological thinking. And she too is keen to resist the elision of empire, in part to illustrate that heteronormality is the effect of imperial formations, in part to re-orient the direction of current academic practices. Here she is unequivocal: “I argue that the ongoing dominance of the category of sexuality in mainstream queer approaches, to the neglect of race and empire, is an inheritance of this deliberate separation of sexuality from the racial-imperial conditions of its production” (92). If Patil’s (anti)imperial sociology of sex and gender is aimed at challenging the presumptive whiteness of contemporary critical methodologies, it is also intended as a thoroughgoing critique of the northern hemispheric presumptions of those practices. From the start of the book, she takes up the centrality of global south perspectives to any truly disruptive approach – which raises interesting questions about the role of a vertical-axis view in the context of a horizontal, “webbed connectivities” study. The two are not mutually exclusive, of course, but the book doesn’t address the interesting collisions and convergences that result from acknowledging both the significance of cross-hatched spaces and the enduring machinery of north-south grids and metropole-colony configurations. That said, she saves her real firepower for the last chapter, “The Reordering of Empire and the American Invention of Gender,” which brings us effectively back to Lugones’ coloniality-of-gender paradigm. Here Patil offers a bracing account of how crucial US settler colonial contexts are for understanding how sociological thinkers and the discipline as a whole took up gender, and how gender, with its implicit bias toward anglophone usages and meanings, became enshrined in – and as – a global, universal category. The implication is that gender, as a category of analysis, is itself a carrier of the coloniality of power. This is also not a new claim, though some of the most celebrated gender theorists in the west (Joan Scott, Judith Butler) have recognized it belatedly in terms of their own scholarly production. That is to say, they proceeded for decades to deploy their conceptual frameworks without taking the imperial sociology Patil has materialized into consideration. Given the global impact of their work, Patil is right to call out this hemispheric bias and to make visible the continuous influence of such thinking from the pre-Enlightenment period down to the present, and to remind us what the dangers are of disappearing empire and its highly racial and racializing histories in our practices. While it is sobering to acknowledge such reminders are needed, this book makes clear what the stakes are if we do not continue to foreground the ideological and material work of imperialism, past and present.