This course explores episodes in which categories of gender, race and sexuality interacted and shifted through colonial encounters. We will consider episodes in various parts of the globe (Africa, India, Australia and Vietnam) and at different time periods, in which encounters between expanding imperial cultures and indigenous cultures combined to produce societies with racial and gender hierarchies, and in which gender and sexuality were sites of colonial anxiety, regulation and exploitation. Recent scholarship has shown how gender and race were crucial markers of colonial social order upon which governing regimes in all four sites depended. 

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Analyze the ways in which hierarchies of gender, class and race have intersected historically under colonialism.
2. Use specific historical examples to discuss connections among gender, sexuality and race in Africa, India, Australia and Vietnam.
3. Identify, reflect on and discuss specific instances of colonial societies in which imperial rule depended on categories of gender and race.
4. Locate and use primary sources as historical evidence of how colonialism worked.
5. Think, write and argue about how ideas of gender and race have changed over time.

Primary source essay 1,500 words (30%) [assesses LO 1, 2, 4 and 5]

Tutorial participation (10%) [assesses LO 2, 3 and 5]

Quiz (10%) [assesses LO 2and 3]

Rresearch essay 3,500 words (50%) [assesses LO 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5]

26 hours of lectures, 13 hours of tutorials. Students should expect to undertake 7 hours per week of independent study.

The course will be delivered via (streamed) lectures and face-to-face tutorials. 

Completion of first year requirements for the HIST major (including EURO 1004), or by permission of the course convenor.

None

Recommended texts:

• Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (eds.), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (1992);
• Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities  (1994);
• Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (eds.), Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism  (1998);
• Tanya Dalziell, Settler Romances and the Australian Girl (2004);
• Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds.), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (2005).