A Political Reading of the Gender ing/Sexualizing of Colonial and Racial Condition

For the politicized literary and cultural studies, there has been a tendency, since the 1990s, to
bring together two (or more) previously segregated but evidently related problematics for
critical exploration. This latest development would not be possible had critical discourse not
reached an advanced stage, but it is already a belated response to the factual connections of
the concerned issues (specifically colonialism/race and gender/sexuality in this project) in the
modern cultural imaginary. Before, “analogy” was the commonest and actually the only
conceptual scheme available for understanding such connections, which themselves, however,
have gradually begun to show complexities that demanded a much more sophisticated
approach. That is why I am proposing “intersection” or even “convergence” to replace
“analogy” as the real adequate conceptualization to be deployed here. After all, recent studies have demonstrated colonialism/race and gender/sexuality as sharing some common origins in
the grand cultural configuration known as modernity. In other words, these two groups of
issues are much more closely related, or, to put it more accuratedly, entwined, than the
conceptual scheme of “analogy” suggests. Yet the entwinement in question is not just
historical, and therefore can be traced in the Foucauldian manner, it also has its psychical
dimensions within that grand narrative, which calls for local analysis with the help of
psychoanalysis. And the present research project comprises these two main aspects of critical
exploration.