Colonized Women

The hypersexualization of native women extended to young girls – Ghosh cites two separate cases in which girls as young as ten were forcibly raped, but due to “expert” testimony that Indian girls were sexually mature at young ages, the rapists were acquitted (Ghosh 614-618). In sum, the characterization of colonized women as libidinous was largely a projection of European male fantasy onto their objectified, hypersexualized bodies, constructed to justify sexual access to these women and reinforced by the imperial hierarchy.

Native women were not just objectified sexually, however. One major idea in post-colonial thought is that women are often the “grounds” over which a conflict is fought; i.e. while they might, in rhetoric, be the subject

Upon examining the voices of the native woman, a much more nuanced picture of imperial dominance – especially in the form of the relationship between the colonizing man and the colonized woman – appears. On the one hand, Stoler is correct when she questions the notion that colonized women could advance themselves through their relationships with colonized men: “Are we to believe that sexual intimacy with European men yielded social mobility and political rights for colonized women? … Colonized women could sometimes parlay their positions into personal profit and small rewards, but these were individual negotiations with no social, legal, or cumulative claims. European male sexual access to native women was not a levelling mechanism for asymmetries in race, class, or gender” (227). However, while she may be correct in stating that it did not collapse the colonial hierarchy, it is worth examining how colonized women were able use their unique positions to subvert the both gender and racial hierarchies, especially since sources discussing this are some of the few places that native women’s voices can be found. In her work “A Black Girl Should Not be With a White Man,” Rachel Jean-Baptiste discusses the case of Flavie N’Guia, an African Mpongwé woman married to a Frenchman, M. Moutarlier. N’Guia first attempted to use her position as “Madame Moutarlier” to convince a police commissioner to ignore a traffic infraction of her driver, but then successfully uses it combined with her métisse status to rebuff a Mpongwé man who had told her not to speak of politics, as it was men’s business (Jean-Baptiste 56-58). This case is particularly interesting because of the intersection of different class, racial, and gender hierarchies, all of which N’Guia seems to navigate with skill: