Fig. 1. City of Liverpool heritage plaque, 96–98 Upper Parliament Street.

Fig. 2. Butler in stained glass, Ladies Chapel, Anglican Cathedral.

 Histories of Sexuality and
Imperialism: What’s the Use?
by Richard Phillips

Postcolonial criticism is structured and sometimes strained by a dual interest

in histories of imperialism and interventions in and against the colonial
present. Setting up a dialogue between these spheres, this paper asks how
histories of imperialism bear upon and can be useful within political
interventions today. It does so with reference to a growing sub-field of
postcolonial criticism, concerned with relationships between imperialism
and sexuality.
Following Kenneth Ballhatchet’s early work on India, reacting to Ronald
Hyam’s provocative review of the sex life of the British Empire and guided
by Michel Foucault’s histories of sexuality, a number of influential
postcolonial critics and historians across and between a number of
disciplines – history and geography, sociology and gender studies – have
investigated relationships between global power, sexuality and/or intimacy.
Following the publication of two landmark books on the subject –
Ann Laura Stoler’s Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the
Intimate in Colonial Rule (2003) and Philippa Levine’s Prostitution, Race and
Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (2004) – now is a
good time to take stock of where this broadly historical work has taken us
and can take us yet, intellectually and politically.1 Building upon other
attempts to develop a ‘useable past,’ including Peter Linebaugh and Marcus
Rediker’s work on radicalism in the Atlantic sphere and David Scott’s
analysis of the uses of colonial memories and histories,2 I will use this paper
to reflect on the uses of histories – and, closer to the subject of my own
work, historical geographies – of imperialism and sexuality: on how these
histories have been used; how they can and should be used; and how we
might anticipate this in the stories we tell, the knowledge we produce.
My point of departure for this has been the completion of a book about
sexuality politics in the British Empire. In the conclusion to Sex, Politics and
Empire: a Postcolonial Geography (2006), I speculated on the legacies of
Victorian sexuality politics and their lessons for the present day. I traced
echoes of Victorian debates and interventions, echoes for instance of British
women’s advocacy for female prostitutes in India in expressions of solidarity
by western gay and human rights activists for Jamaicans in same-sex
relationships. The preliminary nature of those comments led me both to
think more about relationships between past and present, and also to act: to
try to turn the histories I had written to the contemporary cross-cultural and
international sexuality politics. This paper describes where these thoughts

History Workshop Journal Issue 63 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbm004

ß The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.
138 History Workshop Journal

and acts led, and seeks to develop connections between past and present.
It bridges the writing and the mobilization of my own historical research and
reflection on imperial and postcolonial sexuality politics, while it also
addresses broader questions about the uses of histories of sexuality and
imperialism. Though it begins by asking how historical knowledge can be
politically useful, it quickly develops into a critique of instrumentalism,
moving towards the productive question posed by Doreen Massey,
‘not . . . of how to use the past in any utilitarian sense, but how to make
the past within political struggles’.3
Making the past within political struggles is sometimes a matter of
making ‘past places within such struggles’.4 Massey explains that, ‘In many
political struggles, writ large or small, and in many aspects of daily life,
the issue of identification and characterisation of places is a significant
component’.5 To unpack these broad claims, I begin by turning to the
memory of Josephine Butler – a key figure in imperial sexuality politics – in
a place once regarded by many as the second city of the British Empire:
Liverpool. Later in the paper, this discussion of the uses of histories of
sexuality and imperialism shifts from Josephine Butler’s work in Liverpool
to Peter Tatchell’s interventions in Jamaica, and thus from historical to
contemporary activists, and from metropolitan to non-metropolitan sites of
sexuality politics.

REMEMBERING JOSEPHINE BUTLER IN LIVERPOOL

Butler is best remembered for her campaigns against the state regulation of
prostitutes in a number of British towns and cities, naval docks and army
garrisons under provisions known as the Contagious Diseases (CD) Acts
(1864, 1866, 1869). She lived and worked in Liverpool during the formative
stages of this national campaign, at a time when Liverpool was a centre of
imperial commerce and trade. With its great wealth and desperate poverty,
cross-cut with differences of race and ethnicity, Liverpool teemed both with
poor and destitute women, many of whom were forced into prostitution,
and with wealthy and/or single and transient merchants and ship-workers,
many of whom picked them up on the streets or visited them in brothels.
This was an imperial city with an underclass of prostitutes, but it was also in
some measure a humanitarian city, in which Butler and others hoped and
worked for something better.
Today, if you walk several hundred metres into the centre of Liverpool
from the once-fashionable inner-city neighbourhood of Toxteth, you pass a
number of references to Butler. On a stretch of Upper Parliament Street,
remembered by many as the site of street disturbances that took place in the
summer of 1981, a heritage plaque marks a house where she once lived
(Fig. 1). It identifies ‘Josephine Butler (1828–1906)’ as a ‘moral crusader’
who ‘brought outcast women to a house on this site’. In the Anglican
Cathedral nearby an image of Butler appears in stained glass (Fig. 2).
 Histories of Sexuality and Imperialism 139

She was chosen to represent feminine purity in the Edwardian window

conceived shortly after she died in 1906. Continuing a little further towards
the city centre, you pass Josephine Butler House, currently the law school
for Liverpool John Moores University. There is no outward reference to
Butler here, though the university’s web site does explain that the building
was named after ‘a social reformer who tackled hardship amongst women in
Victorian Liverpool’.6 Like many other references to Butler dotted around
the city – a resource centre, charity, nursing home and city square are all
named after her, for instance – the plaque, window and website present their
own versions of history and biography.7 The heritage plaque makes the most
direct reference to Butler’s work among prostitutes. The Cathedral, on the
other hand, uses Butler to represent an abstract moral virtue, while the
university website locates her within a secular, sanitized social history.
These are only official memories of Butler, of course. Histories are not
simply ‘set in stone’; they wither away if not animated by the people who
inherit and inhabit them. As Massey puts it, ‘The identity of places is very
much bound up with the histories which are told of them; how those histories
are told, and which history turns out to be dominant’.8 Visiting the places in
which Butler is commemorated I have sometimes asked local people what if
anything the references to Butler mean to them. Taking photographs of
Josephine Butler House one evening, I was stopped by the porter, who had
been watching me on CCTV and was curious.9 When I asked him about
Butler, he said that there was no portrait or plaque inside or outside the
building, but he happened to know a few things from a book he had read.
He told me how Butler had helped poor people in the city, and how she
knew ‘it wasn’t their fault’. This man seemed to be making a past of his own,
a history of class struggle, in which the memory of Butler and the memorial
of the Josephine Butler building played a part. The official memories of
Butler, inscribed in the presences and absences of plaques and names,
neither acknowledged nor erased this man’s history of Butler nor his
political interest in her.
Memories of Butler, contested and mobilized in Liverpool today,
are equally potent in other times and places. Immediately following her
death (as in her life), Butler was re-presented, claimed as a source of
inspiration, reinterpreted in changing times. Women students training in
social purity work, living in the Josephine Butler House that had opened in
Liverpool’s Abercromby Square in 1924, spoke of the inspiration given to
them by Butler. As one put it,

Beneath all the practical and theoretical work of our day-to-day training,
we were slowly absorbing the principles upon which the lifework of
Josephine Butler was based; her passion for justice as the right of
everyone, including the socially outcast; her insistence on the need at
every stage in good works of continually waiting upon God.10
140 History Workshop Journal

Working more widely among young prostitutes, the Josephine Butler

Society has also claimed to keep her project alive, though this has inevitably
involved reinterpretation and adaptation.11 As a Society pamphlet put it in
1985, the ‘safeguards’ for which Butler successfully lobbied ‘are no less
necessary today than they were a century ago’.12 Other individuals and
groups, working among prostitutes, also claim to follow in Butler’s
footsteps. Joseph Williamson, who worked in the 1960s and 70s ‘to make
a way of escape for prostitutes in Stepney,’ claimed Butler as his inspiration
– and wrote a biography to keep her memory alive.13 More recently,
a British Home Secretary presented a strategy on prostitution in England
and Wales as a kind of homage to the Victorian activist. David Blunkett
declared in 2003 that ‘We in this century must do what Josephine Butler
attempted over 100 years ago, in a very different era and in a very different
way’.14 Specifically, he proposed to overhaul laws on prostitution through:
a clampdown on pimps and kerb crawlers; a series of measures to help girls
and women avoid or escape the sex industry; and the establishment of
toleration zones, in which soliciting would be decriminalized but monitored
by police and welfare services.15 Blunkett was careful to distance himself
from his own proposals, by stating that he was reacting to initiatives taken
at the more local level, particularly in Liverpool, where the city council had
designated a tolerance zone which was to go ahead when the necessary
legislation was passed centrally.16 Deferring to councillors and appealing to
Butler, Blunkett sought a safe way into some thorny political ground.
Through Butler, he raised the subject of prostitution almost euphemistically,
aligning himself with a symbol of compassion and feminine respectability,
and distancing himself from the legislation presented – anxiously – in her
name.17 Doing so, he brought a version of the past to a contemporary
political question.
Quoted by many different people for many different reasons, cited as the
inspiration for a great variety of projects and policies, Butler has proved
adaptable, malleable and eminently useful. She has been named in
arguments against the introduction and for the repeal of CD Acts – not
surprisingly, since Butler led the campaign against regulation in Britain and
supported similar campaigns in India.18 But she has also been cited in quite
different arguments, such as Blunkett’s proposals for toleration zones. Since
she opposed prostitution and believed it could be prevented, it is difficult to
imagine Butler approving of toleration zones, even though these were geared
towards the health and safety of prostitutes, who generally supported them,
as did their advocates in health and social services.19 But it would go against
the grain of this paper to try to recover an essential Butler or to decide what
she would have thought about some of the things that have been done in her
name. Rather, through Butler, I seek to explore the ways in which histories
of sexuality and imperialism are constructed, sometimes through places,
and how they are then deployed within political projects.
 Histories of Sexuality and Imperialism 141

With their different interpretations of Butler, and more generally of the

contested regulation of prostitution, academics have come up with equally
varied conclusions about the lessons of her history. If, as Cynthia Enloe has
argued, regulation is closely allied with militarism, then resistance to
regulation can be seen as a form of anti-militarism.20 Or if, as Philippa
Levine would have it, regulation is broader than this, in some measure an
ideological and practical plank of imperialism, then resistance to regulation
can be seen as a form of anti-imperialism.21 But if, as Levine and Lenore
Manderson both show, struggles over regulation were messier than this,
the system finding friends as well as enemies among never-in-any-case
homogeneous colonial subjects, then there are no such clear-cut historical
lessons about regulation, in the form of CD Acts and their successors.22
Some historians of sexuality claim that their work has direct and wide-
ranging political implications. Judith Walkowitz and Frank Mort used
prologues and epilogues to assert that their histories of sexuality in Victorian
Britain, first published in the 1980s, spoke directly to contemporary
sexuality politics. Walkowitz found parallels between ‘Jack the Ripper’ and
the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, locating both within a cultural history of sexual
violence.23 Mort argued that ‘AIDS is the contemporary moment in a much
longer history’, strands of which he proceeded to describe and interpret in a
study of what he called medico-moral politics, in which moral and sanitary
campaigners such as Butler played prominent parts.24
So the figure of Butler, and the histories of sexuality and prostitution in
which she is positioned, have all been deployed within a variety of political
struggles, and in a variety of ways. A Home Office spokesman, elaborating
on Blunkett’s policy initiative on sex workers, seemed to spell this out.
If, as he put it, ‘nearly every model for dealing with prostitution has been
tried in Britain over the last 700 years’, the lessons of history were certainly
diffuse.25 But if this history is really so all encompassing and ultimately so
malleable, what is the point in writing it?
Of course there is nothing new or original about this question, in its most
general form. As Francois Hartog and Jacques Revel write, ‘the political
uses of the past have been a classic, even a common, theme in the reflections
of historians’.26 Indeed, all but the most rarefied historical writers ask it
from time to time, and some look systematically and theoretically for
answers. As have I: on other occasions I have explored the uses of history by
following stories into circulation, asking about the contexts and power
relations under which they are read – or ignored – and in which readings are
deployed.27 In this research on the politics of reading, I have reflected on the
limited ability of authors – including those who write histories – to
determine the ways in which their work can and should be read and used.
Limited, but not negligible, for as Stanley Fish once argued, an author is not
completely dead or powerless, and a text is not completely carte blanche:
a limited number of readings are possible.28
142 History Workshop Journal

But I do not want to attempt a theoretical or too general answer to the

question of how histories of sexuality and imperialism can be open-ended
and yet pointed, either in their uses or in their conception. For as Jean
Howard argues there can be no definitive answer to the ‘why do it’ question,
which ‘has to be asked and re-asked, with the recognition that the answers
will shift and change as the horizons of (ideological) understanding and
historical possibility shift’.29 And once the ‘why do it’ question has been
answered and the history has been written, other questions follow, not least
that of ‘what can be done with it’ or, as Linebaugh and Rediker put it, ‘what
does [any given history] have to offer us today?’30 In this spirit, I will reflect
on one of my own attempts to make connections between the conception,
writing and use of history. The next section develops a contextual answer to
the question of how the past – and past places – may be made and remade
within contemporary political struggles.
The contemporary sexuality politics I will describe do not simply replay
their Victorian antecedents in a modern context. Without diminishing
Butler’s achievements, or presenting a naively progressivist political history,
I turn in the next section to modern activists and interventions that attempt
to go further than Butler was prepared to do, to forge a more fundamentally
postcolonial sexuality politics. Fighting the immorality she saw in the
imperial city of Liverpool and in British India, speaking for women of other
classes and nationalities, Butler was a compassionate figure and a tireless
activist. She was, nevertheless, a reformer rather than a revolutionary,
an imperial reformist rather than an anti-imperialist.31 Working from within
the heart of the English establishment (for she was a wealthy, well-
connected, married, white woman), seeking to rearrange the gender and
sexual order of empire, she left some of the biggest political stones of her day
unturned: ultimately, questions about the legitimacy of imperialism and the
nature and origins of sexual desire. This no doubt strengthened her specific
causes, while limiting their ultimate scope. The next section turns to
a figure who has also broached the thorny ground of transnational sexuality
politics, but has done so from a less comfortable but arguably less
constraining position vis à vis the English establishment: that of a gay-
identified socialist immigrant who is prepared to ask fundamental and
unsettling questions about sexuality and power.

MOBILIZING HISTORIES OF SEXUALITY

One way in which the past is made and deployed in political struggles is
through overtly applied or ‘public’ history. This, as Hartog and Revel
explain, ‘involves professionals making their specialized knowledge and
skills available to specific interests for what may be highly disparate ends:
the history of a company commissioned by itself, or the search for a
precedent, or the drawing up of an argument, the establishing of a case for
the defence’.32 The following paragraphs illustrate how histories of sexuality
 Histories of Sexuality and Imperialism 143

and imperialism may be applied, through a case study of my attempts to

mobilize my own historical research.
I wrote to Peter Tatchell, the London-based independent human-rights
activist, to ask whether there was any use for the research I had done on
historical geographies of sexuality in the British Empire. He called and said
there was. For some years, Tatchell had been campaigning against what he
saw as homophobia in African and Afro-Caribbean societies, particularly in
Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and in the Caribbean music industry.
He wanted to challenge the alleged Zimbabwean and Jamaican persecution
of gays and lesbians by contesting assertions that homosexuality was alien to
those societies, an import of decadent colonialism and neo-colonialism.
Historical research would help him to make the case, he suggested, because
it would show that same-sex practices were common in these parts of the
world before contact with Europeans, and also that colonialism was
responsible not for homosexuality but homophobia, in the form of colonial
laws and punishments for sex between men.
I was able to give Tatchell pretty much what he asked for, both from my
own work and from a wider reading of research on the subject. I could not
find much on pre-contact sexualities among Caribbean islanders, whose
descendents form a small remnant population, but there was plenty of
evidence about same-sex behaviour on the male-dominated slave plantations
and male-to-male and female-to-female behaviour among many of the West
and Central African societies from which slaves had been brought.
There was also plenty of evidence about colonial policies and practices,
including laws that have been transcribed and preserved in remaining
colonies and in the statutes of former colonies.33 For example, derivatives of
the colonial statute book and of English law are regularly used to prosecute
men who have sex with men, these including ostensibly gender-neutral
prohibitions of anal intercourse and ‘gross indecency’.34
A synopsis of this material, and information Tatchell gleaned from other
sources, appeared in an article he wrote for the Guardian newspaper. The
article, ‘It isn’t racist to target Beanie Man’, described an international
solidarity campaign against Jamaican reggae singers, defending the
campaign against charges of racism.

Why are some people making excuses for homophobic black music?
They say it is ‘cultural imperialism’ to challenge gay rights abuses in
Jamaica. I don’t remember anyone accusing me of cultural imperialism
when I supported the ANC’s freedom struggle against apartheid. In those
days we called it international solidarity.
Homophobia . . . was foisted on the people of Jamaica in the 19th century
by British colonisers and their Christian missionary allies. There is no
evidence that the Africans brought to Jamaica as slaves were
homophobic. On the contrary, homosexuality was common in many of
the West African societies from which they were stolen. It became more
144 History Workshop Journal

or less accepted among many slaves in their Caribbean exile, especially

given the dislocation of traditional family life by the slave system. The
prejudices and laws against homosexuality were imposed by the British.
Yet most Jamaicans now claim homophobia is part of their own African-
derived culture. They are in massive denial. . . . Jamaica won its
independence in 1962, but the mind of Prime Minister P J Patterson
remains colonised by the homophobic values of 19th century British
imperialism.35

I admire the clarity and force of Tatchell’s argument, which no doubt

benefited from leaving out a few of the qualifications I put in my report.
I pointed out that sexualities were and are understood differently in the
societies, places and times he referred to. It would be ahistorical to speak,
for instance, of homosexuality in slave plantations. I also pointed out that
the historical evidence is incomplete, that attitudes towards and practices of
same-sex contact were variable, and that colonial authorities took equally
diverse approaches to this subject. These qualifications would cloud an
argument and might lessen its force. Still, their absence seems to reiterate the
point that histories of sexuality can be shaped and used to order. Even with
these details, this would be a selective and constructed history, still
somewhat arbitrary and malleable.
There is something naively purist about this complaint. Of course,
histories are constructed and used, and if they can be used for what we think
is good, all the better. Seeing that histories are contested, always-already
politicized, we can unsettle unitary, hegemonic notions of the past that
may once have held sway, serving those with the power to construct
and propagate them. Actively contesting hegemonic histories, Tatchell’s
Caribbean music campaign has been a success. Record companies and
artists have been forced into talks and have dropped some of their offending
material. Following a five-year campaign, said to have cost the reggae
industry £5m, music bosses negotiated in London with the Stop Murder
Music coalition and promised not to release any more music that could be
seen as inciting violence against gays and lesbians – such as the previous
songs calling for gays to be burned or chased into the sea to drown.36 With
the participation of record companies, promoters and publishing firms
representing up to ninety per cent of the reggae industry, the deal committed
the music companies to ensuring there are no provocative references in
recordings or at live concerts.37 This made a greater impact in Europe and
North America than in Jamaica, where the music industry had less control
over grassroots music, and many musicians refused to apologize or change
their ways. One day, for example, Beenie Man’s UK label issued a statement
offering the singer’s ‘sincerest apologies’; the next a spokesman for his
management company told Radio Jamaica that the apology had been
initiated by Virgin Records and asserted Beenie Man’s right to continue
criticizing the ‘homosexual lifestyle’.38 But at least there was ambiguity
 Histories of Sexuality and Imperialism 145

where before there had been categorical homophobia, and this represented a
qualified victory for the campaigners.
It might have been best to stop with a happy and apparently
uncomplicated ending to this story of how histories can be used within
political struggles. I want to go on, however, because I think I pulled my
punches in what I gave to Tatchell. Rather than just filling the blanks in his
already scripted political project, I might be able to comment on the way in
which it was conceived. So I want to ask, more boldly than before,
how histories of sexuality might inform political action. More specifically,
how histories of imperial sexualities might help to inform and frame western
interventions against alleged homophobia within non-western societies.
These political subjects are directly addressed in a number of
contemporary works, notably Dennis Altman’s and Jon Binnie’s studies
of global sexuality politics. I am interested, however, in the bearings and
resonance of specifically historical and colonial research on present events
and politics.39 To pursue the question of how I might have mobilised my
own historical research, to consider how I might have contributed more
forcefully to Tatchell’s project, I will draw out some of the arguments and
findings in the book about imperial sexuality politics that I have just
finished, and then ask what I might have done with them.40 At the risk of
crude summary, I argued that: (1) Imperial sexualities – sexuality politics,
politicized sexual identities, systems for regulating sex – are embedded in
contested imperial power; (2) Continuities between metropolitan and non-
metropolitan sexuality politics are sometimes due to western exports and
impositions; (3) The transplantation of sexuality politics however was not
simply determined by the centre; identities and politics were appropriated
and reinterpreted by people in places cast as margins; (4) Metropolitan
initiatives were also resisted in those places; (5) More than this, colonies
could be productive sites, whether through the power they concentrated or
the contact they engendered, generating new sexuality politics.
Where does this history take us? Where might it take Tatchell? Perhaps
nowhere, if we decide that the urgency of incitements to homophobic
violence in the Caribbean or state-persecution in Zimbabwe justify that
trump card that allows us to disregard elements of history: strategic
essentialism. It would be artificial, however, to suspend a whole way of
thinking, which Michel Foucault’s historicization of sexuality and Ann
Laura Stoler’s postcolonial critique of Foucault have engendered. Ideally,
this way of thinking should be combined with the urgency and clarity of a
political campaign.
This leads in two directions. On the one hand, it suggests caution
over western interventions in sexuality politics in other parts of the world.
This means being sensitive to the dangers of Eurocentrism, which in this case
means imposing western assumptions about identity and liberty upon other
peoples and places. Tatchell’s argument with Mugabe began when the latter
decided to exclude a gay and lesbian organisation from the international
146 History Workshop Journal

book fair in Harare in 1995.41 Opening the fair, Mugabe condemned

homosexuals as perverts and ejected Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe
(GALZ), the offending organization. In response to a letter of protest sent in
by seventy American Congressmen, he warmed to his theme, inviting
‘Americans [to] keep their sodomy, bestiality, stupid and foolish ways to
themselves, out of Zimbabwe’.42 For Mugabe, homosexuality was a western
vice, associated variously with the neo-colonial superpower (the USA) and
the former colonial power (Britain). When Tatchell attempted a citizen’s
arrest on him in London, Mugabe claimed that the British government had
organized the attack as a way of punishing him for seizing land from white
farmers.43 And when he made a second attempt, this time in Brussels,
Mugabe’s bodyguards beat him unconscious, leaving him with brain
damage, broken teeth and impaired vision.
Mugabe’s interventions on sexuality are unhinged and bigoted. And yet,
he does have a point about the embroilments of transnational sexuality
politics with respect to deeply-rooted international power relations.
For reasons Foucault made clear, western gay and lesbian organizations
might genuinely be seen as alien in parts of southern Africa, even in those
places where space can be found for sexual love between members of the
same gender. The argument between Tatchell and Mugabe also reflected a
broader racial pattern in which the Zimbabwean was generally condemned
by white and supported by black-majority countries. Before and during the
2003 Commonwealth Conference in Nigeria, at which Zimbabwe averted
possible expulsion from the organization by announcing its decision to quit,
attitudes towards the country corresponded almost perfectly to the division
between Old Commonwealth and New. South African President Thabo
Mbeki has remained stubbornly loyal to his northern neighbour, despite
criticism from some of his own people.44 This racialized international
division over attitudes towards Mugabe and related issues such as sexuality
rights is echoed in other spheres, notably the General Synod of the Anglican
Church. Ongoing Anglican divisions over homosexuality correspond – albeit
imperfectly – to a division between global North (led by the United States)
and South.
It is also potentially disturbing to know that Tatchell’s interventions
against Mugabe also empower him and his movement, winning respect-
ability in the mainstream British press, where before he had been vilified.
Tatchell has been praised for the bravery he showed in the face of Mugabe’s
bodyguards, and applauded for apparently speaking for Africans who could
not represent themselves – not least, the Zimbabweans excluded from the
book-fair and other areas of public life. In a parallel argument, Antoinette
Burton has shown how nineteenth-century English feminists made political
capital by campaigning on behalf of Indian prostitutes, whom they spoke of
as ‘sisters’.45 Campaigning for Indians, they strengthened and galvanized the
feminist movement at home. The repeal of British CD laws in 1886 might
have left Butler triumphant but irrelevant, had she not found new political
 Histories of Sexuality and Imperialism 147

ground in which to renew the movement, fighting the longstanding military

practice and more recent civil system of regulation in India. Interviewing
Tatchell for a British newspaper, Lynn Barber articulates a more general
anxiety about activist empire building. ‘To me’, she writes, ‘there seems
something promiscuous about his geographical range: it looks as though he
is looking for battles to fight. . . . He’s never even been to Jamaica or
Zimbabwe.’46 Neither had Butler been to India; poor health led her to
appoint representatives to investigate and spearhead the battle against
regulation in India.47 But this is not to suggest that their interventions were
simply self-interested, or that activists such as these should have refrained
from using the power and influence that they found and made for
themselves in England. Nor that political activism should be paralysed
with doubt. On the contrary, there are some areas of sexuality politics in
which western interventions in non-western countries are not only possible
or desirable, but urgently necessary. The concentration of the global AIDS
crisis in the world’s poorest regions – in South Africa alone, 4.5 million
people are HIV-positive and upwards of 1000 die from AIDS every day
(2005 figures) – means that, whether they like it or not, those based in
western countries must act in and for their poorer counterparts, in some
cases in former colonies.48 They must do so selectively, sensitively and self-
reflexively: supporting rather than driving; facilitating rather than forcing;
through negotiation and by invitation. This means learning from the
imperial past: lessons from what were in many cases ill-judged interventions
in clitoridectomy, polygyny, child marriage and other sexual and more
generally moral practices of colonial subjects. These are the lessons
that interventions have in some cases been wrong – banning the potlatch
(native Canadian ceremonies that they misunderstood as gluttony),
for example – or at least wrongly conceived – such as the campaign against
sati (in which certain Hindu widows climbed on to their husbands’ funeral
pyres) that sensationalized the practice and failed to properly consult the
women who practised it.49 This is not to say that intervention in sexual and
other moral customs is always wrong. Failure to intervene can be just as
bad. Those with the power to intervene in cross-cultural and transnational
sexuality politics must be prepared to do so, engaging and where necessary
working to change sexual attitudes and behaviour.
I began this paper by asking about the uses to which histories of sexuality
and imperialism could be put, but I will end it by arguing that these histories
should not simply serve existing purposes. Reaching beyond any simple
instrumentalism, they should invent new purposes, critiquing and disrupting
this political agenda. To develop this case, the final paragraphs of this paper
expand briefly on western engagements with sexuality politics in Jamaica.
To change the agenda for western interventions in non-western sexuality
politics, it is first necessary to recognize the latter as more than copies of
the former. There is nothing particularly new about this as a general point,
which has been well taken in postcolonial studies and critical history,
148 History Workshop Journal

but it remains to be digested in specific and practical ways. To move

sexuality politics practically beyond the binary logic of western centres and
non-western margins would be to recognize and explore how political ideas
can come from what might once have been considered ‘unlikely places’ and
be generated and transformed in connections and movements between them.
This would displace the metropolitan figures and organizations that
dominate Eurocentric narratives of international sexuality politics.
Tatchell, the central figure in British media coverage of the Stop Murder
Music campaign, would then share some of the limelight with Jamaican
individuals and organizations. That campaign originated, in part, in the
work of organizations such as J-FLAG (the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians,
All-Sexuals and Gays) and the efforts of Jamaican activists such as Steve
Harvey and Brian Williamson, who worked to stop the spread of HIV and
to promote sexual freedoms. Until they were each murdered in separate
apparently homophobic incidents,50 neither Harvey nor Williamson simply
imported western sexuality politics; they developed a specifically Jamaican
agenda, organized around the avoidance of and resistance to violence.51
This contrasts with gay and lesbian politics in western countries, which have
the relative luxury of concentrating on more subtle concerns: legal and
cultural issues of equality and identity. It illustrates how Jamaican activism,
rather than simply borrowing from its counterparts in England and
elsewhere, has emerged both through collaboration with movements in
other parts of the world and also out of local concerns and contexts.52
As we learn to see sexuality politics within geographies of connection
rather than binary systems of centres and margins, we must also learn to
recognize non-western sexuality politics in many forms, not just those that
superficially resemble their western counterparts. Though I have argued that
it is not derivative, J-FLAG is closely allied and similar to western
counterparts such as Outrage! At a vigil for Williamson, demonstrators held
up photos of the murdered activist, underlined by the words: ‘Born in
Jamaica, Lived in Jamaica, Murdered in Jamaica. Gay hero! Jamaican
hero!’53 As these defensive assertions implicitly recognized, many other
Jamaicans regarded Williamson’s style as un-Jamaican. Or, just as bad, they
felt able to argue as much.54 It is worth considering other ways of
approaching same-sex politics, which for better or worse might be either
more acceptable to these Jamaicans or more difficult for them to contest.
It is increasingly recognized that overt gay and lesbian politics do not
provide the only path to liberation even in western countries such as the
United States and Britain, where such formal and cultural politics tend to be
concentrated in a few large cities. In smaller towns and rural areas, same-sex
desires and relationships tend to be expressed and organized differently,
and not necessarily any less happily for those involved.55 Whereas openly
gay movements and activists are relatively easy to recognize and trace,
the same cannot be said of the more discrete and elliptical paths to
liberation. This presents a considerable conceptual and empirical challenge,
 Histories of Sexuality and Imperialism 149

and defies standardized research questions and answers. The many paths to
liberation in Jamaica include everyday coping strategies and accommoda-
tions, as well as a range of recent moves, not explicitly concerned with gay or
lesbian rights, which variously: provide antiretroviral drugs to people living
with HIV/AIDS;56 establish a Charter of Rights to remove discrimination
on the basis of sex; and amend legislation about various sexual-offences
(including harassment, rape and incest) so as to remove discrimination
according to gender or sexual orientation. Arguing that these would have
profound if implicit effects on Jamaican gay and lesbian rights, an editorial
in the Jamaica Gleaner – a news website – concluded that ‘Jamaica has been
far more advanced in gender neutrality laws than many other nations and
we are to be commended for the stance that is being taken’.57 These
assertions can of course be contested, but they do suggest some of the ways
in which sexuality politics may be advanced in contextually specific ways,
away from the sphere of western gay and lesbian politics and identity,
and through a different kind of political agenda.
If western historians of sexuality and imperialism are to do more than
serve transnational sexuality politics in their present form, however laudable
the aims of such politics might be, we must turn towards non-western
organizations such as J-FLAG, and then widen our horizons still wider,
to include sexuality politics in a broader sense. As we begin to recognize
these paths to liberation, in their many different forms, we can try to
support those who have embarked upon them. But, more than this, we can
open and contribute to dialogue aimed at carving out such paths.

DISRUPTION
Charges of Eurocentrism in transnational sexuality politics, and evidence
concerning the legacies of imperial sexuality politics in former colonies,
have led to questions about whether this politics needs to be ‘decolonized’ in
some way. On one level, the answer to this appears straightforward: as
Tatchell made clear – it does, he argued, because colonialism brought
homophobia. And yet, the liberation anticipated in calls to eradicate
offending remnants of colonial legislation is complicated by Foucault’s
convincing argument that sexuality forms ‘an especially dense transfer point
for relations of power’.58 Rather than trying to extricate sexuality from
power, sex should become a vehicle for the transformation of power,
power for the transformation of sex and sexuality. The decolonization of
sexuality politics must go hand in hand with something broader: the
transformation of relationships between richer and poorer, western and
non-western, formerly imperial and colonial countries, and, most funda-
mentally, the transformation of sexualities and sexual subjectivities.
Susan Bucks-Morss argues that ‘radically open communication’ is a ‘slow
and painful task’ that ‘does not presume that we already know where we
stand’.59 In sexuality politics, ‘radically open communication’ puts ‘where
150 History Workshop Journal

we stand’ on the table, and also who we are, in terms of how we understand
sexualities, and how we embody and perform them in our lives. As Alan
Sinfield argues, we should not attempt to sidestep power differentials by
excluding them from our relationships, for instance. On the contrary,
‘We should be exploring ways to assess and recombine power, sexiness,
responsibility and love’.60 These are polemical and ambiguous words,
but useful, I think, as a warning against tidy and parochial sexuality politics.
Rather than asserting the rights of narrowly defined sexual subjects
(usually western gay men), Sinfield seems to be saying, we must broach
more challenging questions about the relationships between sexualities and
power. If this means unsettling western assumptions about sexualities and
sexual freedoms, so be it.
Addressing some specific and concrete histories, this paper has taken
some sharp and perhaps unlikely turns: from Josephine Butler
(a historical figure who is regularity invoked in sexuality politics) to Peter
Tatchell (a contemporary activist who has invoked figures such as Butler
and more general histories of sexuality and sexuality politics); from female
prostitution to male homosexuality; and from nineteenth-century Liverpool
to contemporary Jamaica. It has done so in the pursuit of a less eclectic
concern: with how histories of sexuality and imperialism have been and can
be used. The discussions of Butler and Tatchell identified some of the
different forms this history can take – including local memories and
memorials, archives and historical narratives. They also identified some of
the ways in which histories have been deployed: by academics and others
who research and write them, of course, but also by individuals (such as the
porter at Josephine Butler House, mentioned above), institutions and
organizations (such as the Anglican Cathedral and the City of Liverpool),
each making and using histories in their own way. Furthermore,
these contrasting examples highlight the geographical span of histories of
sexuality and imperialism, both in relation to the places (such as Liverpool
and Jamaica) depicted in them and also to the sites in which they are written
and read. The final pages of this paper, concerned with Jamaica, identified
tensions that arise when histories of one place are produced and/or used in
another. The issue of where histories are written, read and deployed is
particularly significant when these histories are intended not simply as
chronicles of imperialism but rather as historically informed postcolonial
interventions.
To restate the question at the heart of this paper: what use are histories
of sexuality and imperialism? My conclusion is that these histories have been
and can be instrumentally useful in justifying, inspiring and excusing a range
of actions and interventions – some of which we may see as good, others
bad. More challengingly, however, they may force us to rethink and open up
what Tatchell has called the ‘international solidarity’ underpinning
transnational sexuality politics.61 It follows that these histories should
not simply be imported into or written for predefined political projects;
 Histories of Sexuality and Imperialism 151

reaching beyond instrumentalism, they should be allowed to disrupt and

reshape those projects.

Richard Phillips teaches Postcolonial Geography and Development Studies

at Liverpool University. His publications include Mapping Men and Empire:
a Geography of Adventure, Routledge, 1997; the co-edited (with Diane Watt
and David Shuttleton) De-centring Sexualities: Politics and Representations
Beyond the Metropolis, Routledge, 2000; and Sex, Politics and Empire:
a Postcolonial Geography, Manchester University Press, 2006. His current
research examines memories of empire and the language of imperialism in
contemporary social movements, particularly the anti-war movements
including Stop the War.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

I would like to thank Dave Featherstone, Gordon Pirie, Amanda Sives and two anonymous
referees for comments on this paper; thanks also to Steve Legg and Philip Howell for inviting
me to present an early version of it at the Association of American Geographers annual meeting
in Denver, in 2005. It was fun to walk around Liverpool with Charlotte Cory, two of whose
photographs are reproduced here. And it was a privilege to work with Peter Tatchell.
1 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality
and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham NC, 1996; Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race
and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, London, 2003.
2 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves,
Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Boston, 2000; David Scott,
Conscripts of Modernity: the Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, Durham NC, 2004.
3 Doreen Massey, ‘Places and their Pasts’, History Workshop Journal 39, spring 1995,
pp. 182–92, p. 190.
4 Massey, ‘Places and their Pasts’, p. 190.
5 Massey, ‘Places and their pasts’, p. 189.
6 www.cwis.livjm.ac.uk/est/Jo-but.htm, accessed 4 March 2005.
7 For a more general discussion of the memorialization of women in the British Empire,
see: Katie Pickles, ‘Landscape, Memory and Female Imperialism: the Australian
Memoralisation of Edith Cavell’, in Exploring the British World, ed. Kate Darian-Smith,
Patricia Grimshaw, Kiera Lindsay and Stuart McIntyre, Melbourne, 2004, pp. 271–94.
8 Massey, ‘Places and their Pasts’, p. 186.
9 Charlotte Cory, who was with me, took some of the photographs.
10 Kathleen Heasman, Josephine Butler House: a History, Unpublished MS, British
Library b.6661.YA.1988, undated, p. 24.
11 Josephine Butler Society, ‘Underage prostitution: new approaches’, 1999, British
Library YC.2000.a.1806.
12 Joyce Ansell, A Century’s Safeguards, Hatfield, Herts, Josephine Butler Society, 1985,
unpaginated.
13 Joseph Williamson, Josephine Butler: the Forgotten Saint, Leighton Buzzard, Beds,
1977, p. 8.
14 Mark Oliver and Alan Travis, ‘Victorian reformer inspired Blunkett’, Guardian, 30 Dec.
2003, p. 2
15 Alan Travis, ‘Sex laws to get major overhaul: review of prostitution will be the first
for 50 years’, Guardian, 30 Dec. 2003, p. 1.
16 Alan Travis, ‘Wary Blunkett backs prostitution zones’, Guardian, 16 July 2004,
from http://society.guardian.co.uk/crimeandpunishment, consulted 13 March 2006.
17 Travis, ‘Wary Blunkett backs prostitution zones’.
18 Richard Phillips, Sex, Politics and Empire: a Postcolonial Geography, Manchester,
2006.
152 History Workshop Journal

19 Alan Travis, ‘Tread warily on vice reform, say police’, Guardian, 17 July 2004,
from http://society.guardian.co.uk, consulted 13 March 2006. David Ward, ‘Liverpool
likely to lead way in turning on official red lights’, Guardian, 16 July 2004, from
http://www.guardian.co.uk, consulted 13 March 2006. For example Rosie Campbell, a
voluntary outreach worker in Liverpool, told the Guardian: ‘For years, the women have
asked why they could not have a managed area where they would be left to their own devices’.
And a survey conducted in Liverpool showed support for the prostitutes’ position. Of more
than 1,000 replies from residents, businesses and sex workers, 83% were in favour of a
managed zone. Jo Revill, ‘Nurses demand legal vice zones’, Observer, 17 April 2005,
from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/, consulted 13 March 2006. In 2005 a member of the
Liverpool branch of the Royal College of Nursing put forward a resolution in favour of
managed zones. And when Central Government abandoned these proposals in December 2005,
it was prostitutes who expressed most disappointment, both in Liverpool and across the
country. In Liverpool, this disappointment was articulated in a drama based on conversations
with prostitutes; Unprotected was staged at the city’s Everyman theatre in March 2006. At the
national level, a spokeswoman for the English Prostitutes’ Collective said the plans to replace
proposed toleration zones with ‘effective policing’ and legalized small brothels would force
women into more dangerous conditions, and would have ‘an absolutely devastating impact’
on prostitutes. Alan Travis and Ben Farmer, ‘New crackdown on prostitution’, Guardian,
28 Dec. 2005, from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/, consulted 13 March 2006;
Matt Weaver, ‘Government cracks down on kerb crawlers’, Guardian, 17 Jan. 2006, from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/, consulted 13 March 2006.
20 Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International
Politics, London, 1989.
21 Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics.
22 Lenore Manderson, ‘Colonial Desires: Sexuality, Race and Gender in British Malaya’,
Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, 1997, pp. 372–88.
23 Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in
Late-Victorian London, London, 1994.
24 Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830.
2nd edn, London, 2000, p. 2.
25 Travis, ‘Sex laws to get major overhaul’, p. 1.
26 François Hartog and Jacques Revel, ‘Historians and the Present Conjuncture’, in
Political Uses of the Past: the Recent Mediterranean Experiences, ed. Jacques Revel and
Giovanni Levi, London, 2002, pp. 1–12, p. 1.
27 Richard Phillips, ‘Politics of Reading; Decolonising Children’s Geographies’, Cultural
Geographies 8, 2001, pp. 125–50.
28 Stanley Fish, Is there a Text in this Class?, Cambridge MA, 1980.
29 Jean E. Howard, ‘Towards a postmodern, politically committed, historical practice’, in
Uses of History: Marxism, Postmodernism and the Renaissance, ed. Francis Barker,
Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen Manchester, 1991, pp. 101–22, p. 112.
30 Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, p. 333.
31 Richard Phillips, ‘Imperialism and the Regulation of Sexuality: Colonial Legislation on
Contagious Diseases and Ages of Consent’, Journal of Historical Geography 28: 3, 2002,
pp. 339–62.
32 Hartog and Revel, ‘Historians and the present conjuncture’, p. 5.
33 Sources include: Federico Garzal Carvajal, Butterflies Will Burn: Prosecuting
Sodomy in Early Modern Spain and Mexico, Austin TX, 2003; Gordon Isaacs and
Brian McKendrick, Male Homosexuality in South Africa: Identity Formation, Culture and
Crisis, Oxford, 1992; Culture of Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean, ed. Linden Lewis,
Florida, 2003; Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities, ed.
Steven Murray and Will Roscoe, New York, 1988.
34 Elton John 2005, ‘Make prejudice history’, Observer, 3 July 2005, from http://
arts.guardian.co.uk/features/, consulted 13 March 2006: Article 76 of the Jamaican Offences
Against the Person Act punishes the ‘abominable crime of buggery’ with up to ten years’
imprisonment with hard labour.
35 Peter Tatchell, ‘It isn’t racist to target Beenie Man’, Guardian, 31 Aug. 2004.
36 The Pink Paper reported that while artists such as Beenie Man, Elephant Man, Buju
Banton and Bounty Killer have not signed up to the deal, their labels and promoters have:
T. Reid-Smith, ‘War on murder music is over’, Pink Paper, 17 Feb. 2005: 1, 13.
 Histories of Sexuality and Imperialism 153

37 Hugh Muir, ‘Ceasefire brokered in reggae lyrics war’, Guardian, 5 Feb. 2005, from:
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/, consulted 13 March 2006.
38 Alexis Petridis, ‘Pride and prejudice’, Guardian, 10 Dec. 2004.
39 Dennis Altman, Global Sex, Chicago, 2001; Jon Binnie, Globalization of Sexuality,
London, 2004.
40 Phillips, Sex, Politics and Empire.
41 The following year Mugabe added to the constitution of Zimbabwe a clause against gay
marriage and a provision allowing individual rights to be overruled on the grounds of ‘public
morality’. Steve Chan, Robert Mugabe: a Life of Power and Violence, London, 2003.
42 Martin Meredith, Mugabe: Power and Plunder in Zimbabwe, Oxford, 2002, p. 130.
43 David Blair, Degrees in Violence: Robert Mugabe and the Struggle for Power in
Zimbabwe, London, 2003, p. 135.
44 Andres Meldrum, ‘Get tough’, Guardian, 2 June 2004.
45 Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial
Culture, 1865–1915, Chapel Hill NC, 1994.
46 Lynn Barber, ‘Pride and prejudice’, Observer, 19 Dec. 2004, from: http://www.guar-
dian.co.uk/gayrights, consulted 13 March 2006.
47 Josephine E. Butler, Present Aspect of the Abolitionist Cause in Relation to British India,
London, 1893.
48 Figures from Treatment Action Campaign electronic newsletter, 21 Feb. 2005,
www.tac.org.za.
49 Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British
Columbia, Vancouver, 2002; Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on
Widow Sacrifice’, Wedge 7/8, winter/spring 1985, pp. 120–30; Pompa Banerjee, Burning
Women: Widows, Witches, and Early Modern European Travellers in India, London, 2003.
50 ‘Gay rights leader murdered and mutilated’, OutRage! News Service, from http://
www.ilga.org, posted 14 June 2004, consulted 13 March 2006. Gary Younge, ‘Jamaican gay
activist shot dead after being abducted’, Guardian, 6 Dec. 2005, from http://www.guardian.co.
uk/gayrights/story/0,,1659296,00.html, consulted 13 March 2006.
51 Alexis Petridis, ‘Pride and prejudice’, Guardian, 10 Dec. 2004.
52 Similarly, Butler responded to local concerns but also corresponded widely, not only in
the British Empire but also in the United States and Continental Europe. On her
correspondences in Europe, see: Anne Summers, ‘Which Women? What Europe? Josephine
Butler and the International Abolitionist Federation,’ History Workshop Journal 62, 2006,
pp. 214–31.
53 http://www.ilga.org, posted 23 June 2004, consulted 13 March 2006.
54 Rob Berkeley, ‘We won’t desert them’, Guardian, 11 Jan. 2005, from: http://
arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story, consulted 13 March 2006.
55 De-centring Sexualities, ed. Richard Phillips, Diane Watt and David Shuttleton,
London, 2000.
56 Rebecca Schleifer ‘All Jamaicans are threatened by a culture of homophobia’, Guardian,
21 Nov. 2004, from: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story, consulted 13 March 2006.
57 Raymond Forrest, ‘Commentary’, Guardian, 3 Dec. 2004, http://www.jamaica-
gleaner.com/gleaner/, consulted 13 March 2006.
58 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1, London, 1978, p. 103.
59 Susan Bucks-Morss, Thinking Past Terror, Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left,
London, 2003, p. 6.
60 Alan Sinfield, ‘The Production of Gay and the Return to Power’, in De-centring
Sexualities, ed. Philips Watt and Shuttleton, pp. 21–36, p. 35.
61 Tatchell, ‘It isn’t racist to target Beenie Man’, Guardian, 31 Aug. 2004.