This is something I wrote a few years back: In my interest in interactions between sexuality and colonization, between race and gender, and between opression and binary divisions, I came upon the work of Kent Monkman as an interesting case in point. As a queer first nations filmmaker, Monkman draws on his personal experience and on issues that are very relevant to him, personally. Needless to say, however, his work is not of interest simply because it exposes his particular reality, that of someone who has likely faced multiple forms of oppression. If someone lived totally isolated from human reality and could relate only to ideas, I believe they would still find interest in Monkman’s work as he is using his personal reality and artistic medium to express some very profound concepts that, oddly, could be said to stand apart from anything that occurs in the real world. As an afterthought, I realized that I attributed the relation of sex, power, and production entirely to Foucault. While I think Foucault would certainly say that this is one way that sexuality is "an especially dense transfer point for relations of power...” but the connection to production comes a little earlier from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels:

 “Sex love in the relation of husband and wife is and can become the rule only among the oppressed classes, that is, at the present day, among the proletariat, no matter whether this relationship is officially sanctioned or not. But here all the foundations of classical monogamy are removed. Here, there is a complete absence of all property, for the safeguarding and inheritance with which monogamy and male domination were established.” (Engels, 1993:91)

 I also think it is interesting to look at both Ward Churchill and Franklin W. Knight’s comments on gold mining and early colonial Latin America. Here the issues of sexuality, ownership, wealth, and power all interact and involve men as well as women as the subordinate parties. What is also interesting in Knight’s piece is how he talks about how Spain was at a heyday and also a time of intense Catholicisation, with all of its sexual repression, during the prime time of Spanish colonization of the Western Hemisphere. England’s counterpart was, perhaps, the industrial revolution. There was not, of course, a period of intense Catholicisation, but Barry Adam talks about the significance of the industrial revolution to England’s sexual practises, touching on a lot of the same issues as Engels. Niko Besnier brings this into a colonial context in her discussion of views of the people of the South Pacific by the British. There seems to be a connection between power, (apparent) sexual repression, and colonization... Well, here’s the rest of the quotes...

 "Columbus' image feminizes the earth as a tiny, cosmic breast, in relation to which the epic, male hero is a tiny, lost infant, yearning for the Edenic nipple…(Columbus' breast fantasy) draws on a long tradition of male travel as an erotics of ravishment…Africa and the Americas had become what can be called a porno-tropics for the European imagination- a fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected forbidden sexual desires and fears." (McClintock, 1995:22)

 "Polynesia, one of the last frontiers of colonial expansionism, was the embodiment of a paradise that Westerners had left behind in their quest for civilization…On the other side of the world, explorers found what they thought was humankind in its primeval state, unencumbered by the proscriptions of civilized mores. And, of course, one of the most prominent features of the harmonious marriage of humankind and nature was the apparent straightforwardness with which islanders approached sexual matters…The Tahitians' 'predilection' for 'sodomy' had already been amply described in seafarers journals…British seamen and missionaries of the Georgian era evaluated the practices of which they caught glimpses in Tahiti through a specific framework of moral reference, In the late eighteenth century, 'sodomy' had become the focus of particularly virulent revilement in England…fragments of historical representations like missionaries and seafarers journals, which remained highly peripheral to the events they purported to describe, should be read as texts of perhaps greater relevance to European social history than to early-contact Polynesian societies" (Besnier 288-295)

 “The intrusion of the capitalist state into the private familial and sexual realms proved functional to a system that needed a high birthrate (though eugenicists at the time feared the proliferation of the ‘wrong kinds’ of people). The prohibition of ‘irregular,’ nonreproductive sexuality and the promotion of reproduction came about at a time when the rapidly expanding capitalist economy required an immense labor supply. Indeed, an oversupply of workers would ensure the lowest possible wage rates. To sustain the socioeconomic configuration most favorable to the capitalist class, the least desirable outcome would have been a scarcity of labour, which would force employers to compete against each other by raising wages. Through the nineteenth century the demand for reproduction was reflected in increasing state regulation of family life. The Factory Acts of the 1840s moved women out of wage labour; common-law marriages were forced into legal straightjackets and medical and “helping” professionals developed to supervised family stability. Women increasingly were defined as mothers and wives incapable of performing wage labour...Humanitarian legislation to protect women and children from the degradations of factory work helped revalue women’s reproduction of laborers over their production as laborers. As employment was withdrawn from women, they necessarily became more dependent on men and thus possessed fewer options in determining their own lives. Lesbianism as an alternative to the nuclear family (and as opposed to ‘romantic friendship’) became an even more remote possibility, and male homosexuality fell under the baleful eye of the state.” (Adams, 1995:36-37)

 “By means of careful investigations (only made possible indeed by disinterested self-discipline) we have come to know groups of individuals whose sexual life deviates in the most striking way from the usual picture of the average. Some of these ‘perverse’ people have, we might say, struck the distinction between the sexes off their programme. Only members of their own sex can rouse their sexual wishes;” (Freud, 1962:345) “Until Freud, at least, the discourse on sex-the discourse of scholars and theoreticians- never ceased to hide the thing it was speaking about...Historically there have been two great procedures for producing the truth of sex. On the one hand, the societies- and they are numerous: China, Japan, India, Rome, the Arabo-Moslem societies- which endowed themselves with an ars erotica. In the erotic art, truth is drawn from pleasure itself...On the face of it at least, our (Western European) society produces no ars erotica. In return, it is the only civilization to practise a scientia sexualis, or rather, the only civilization to have developed over centuries procedures for telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret...” (Foucault, 1990 vol 1:53-75)

 “Much mainstream colonial history has proceeded not from a Foucauldian premise that desire is a social construct, but from an implicitly Freudian one. While Freudian language has certainly permeated other branches of history and other disciplines, the specific and varied invocations of Freudian models in colonial studies -and the effects of their silent presences- have neither been fully acknowledged nor explored. The relationship between Freudian models and Foucauldian critiques in the writing of colonial history has been a more complicated relationship than one might expect. Some analytic debts have been more quickly acknowledged than others. But saying ‘yes’ to Foucault has not always meant saying ‘no’ to Freud...For Freud, sexual desire is a cause, for Foucault, an effect. Freud accounts for the psychological aetiology of perversions, Foucault looks to the historical specificity of the notions of sexual pathology and perversions themselves...As Julie Kristeva writes, ‘Freud does not speak of foreigners; he teaches us how to detect foreignness within ourselves.’ For Foucault, the cultural conventions of racism emerge out of social bodies at war with themselves. We might look to Edward Said’s supremely Foucaultian analysis of Orientalist discourse and western domination where Freud’s notion of projection of the Orient as the West’s ‘surrogate self’ is a crucial but buried part of the argument.” (Stoler, 1995:169)

 “The sexual politics of empire has never been reduced to the opportunistic possibilities prompted by repressions in Europe alone. What gets clouded in such accounts is precisely where Foucault’s analysis would lead us to turn. Colonial discourses of sexuality were productive of class and racial power, not merely reflections of them...These discourses circulated in a racially charged magnetic field in which debates about sexual contamination, sexual abstinence, or spermatic depletion produced moral clusters of judgement and distinction that defined the boundaries of middle-class virtue, lower-class immorality, and the depravations of those of colonial birth or of mixed-race.” (Stoler, 1995:174-177)

 “He (Bartolome de las Casas) was born in an extraordinarily fascinating and dynamic period, not only of Spanish but also of world history. In Spain, the Catholic Christians, finally united under the uneasy crowns of Castile and Aragon, after a struggle; lasting more that 700 years at last expelled the Muslim Moors from southern Spain, especially the Moors’ splendid fortress city of Grenada. At the same time Christopher Columbus and, later, Ferdinand Magellan (ca. 1480-1521), sailing under the auspices of Castile, opened up vast opportunities for continuing conquest, exploration, and spiritual service in the hemisphere of the Americas... An impressionable youth -he would have been between eight and eighteen- Bartolome de las Casas witnessed the enthusiastic parades in Seville to commemorate the return of Christopher Columbus from his first voyage of discovery in 1493. On that occasion, Columbus displayed the seven brightly decorated Indians he brought back with him from the New World, along with some gorgeously coloured parrots, painted native masks, several curiosities, and a small sample of gold. A rubber ball that could bounce far higher than any ball he had known especially impressed Las Casas...the second voyage of Columbus attracted some 1,500 eager participants...When Pedro de las Casas returned to Spain in 1498 or 1499, he presented his son (Bartolome) with a young Taino Indian...In 1502, when he was between eighteen and twenty-eight- a mature age for his time, Bartolome de las Casas accompanied his father in the large initial colonizing expedition...Pedro de las Casas received an encomienda, or an official allotment of Indians, and proceeded to mine for gold....The encomienda represented the lucrative tribute system worked out by Queen Isabella of Castile whereby the Crown retained possession of the newly discovered lands while the arriving colonists enjoyed usufruct along with a designated number of Indians to work the lands for the Spanish. In return, the Spanish colonists obliged to instruct the Indians in the Catholic faith as well as to pay them a modest wage as repeatedly stipulated in the Laws of Burgos in 1512...While the officially ‘encomended’ Indians were not legally slaves- that is, they could not be sold or transferred freely- they remained nevertheless ruthlessly exploited, as Las Casas repeated often in his writings. (Knight, 2003:xiv-xix)

 “Then there was the matter of sex. For all their supposedly devout Catholicism, the Iberians, Spanish, and Portuguese alike excelled at rape, forced concubinage, and forced prostitution. In part, this seems to have been a grotesque psychological stratagem to effect the final degradation and disempowerment of men as well as women; as a group of Dominican friars reported rather early on, when an enslaved native man emerged from the mines of Mexica at the end of the day, ‘not only was he beaten or whipped because he had not brought up enough gold, but further, most often, he was bound hand and foot and flung over the bed like a dog, before (a Spanish overseer) lay down, directly over him, with his wife.’ (quoted in Todorov, Conquest of America, op.cit., p.139)” (Churchill, 1998: p. 105)

 “Unlike European/American systems, the Mexican/Latin American system is based on a configuration of gender/sex/power that is articulated along the active/passive axis and organized through the scripted sexual role one plays. It highlights sexual aim-the act one wants to perform with the person toward whom the sexual activity is directed- and gives only secondary importance to the person’s gender or biological sex...Although stigma accompanies homosexual behaviour in Latin culture, it does not equally adhere to both partners. It is primarily the anal-passive individual (the chochon or pasivo) who is stigmatized for playing the subservient role...This equation makes homosexuals such as the pasivo and cochon into feminized men; biological males, not truly men...Psychoanalyst Marvin Goldwert argues that this patriarchal cultural equation has special resonance for Mexicans and remains deeply embedded in the Mexican psyche. He claims that it has symbolic roots in cultural myths surrounding the Spanish conquest of Mexican in the sixteenth century. This colonial drama unfolded with the Spanish conquistadors playing the role of active, masculine intruders who raped the passive, feminine Indian civilization.” (Almaguer, 1998:538-540) 

“When the Europeans first came in contact with the Indians of Canada, it was always as a group of European sailors meeting a mixed male and female population" (Sealey and Lussier, 1)

 "European manhood in the colonies, whether measured by 'character' and civility or by position and class, was largely independent of the presence of European women…heterosexual unions based on concubinage and prostitution across the colonial divide were defended as a 'necessary evil' to counterthose deemed more dangerous still- carnal relations between men and men." (Stoler, 2002: 1-2)

 "A feminist informed cultural studies places questions of homo-and heterosexual arrangements and identities not as the seedy underside of imperial history, as Britain or France's dirty secret exported to the colonies, but as charged sites of its tensions." (Stoler, 2002:10)

 “-As Aristotle says, “the female as female is passive, and the male, as male, is active.” (Aristotle, Generation of Animals, I, 21, 729b.)

"...From this viewpoint, and in this ethics, (always bearing in mind that it was a male ethics, made by and for men), it can be said that the dividing line fell mainly between men and women, for the simple reason that there was a strong differentiation between the world of men and women in many ancient societies. But more generally, it fell between what might be called the “active actors” and the “passive actors”...the first were men, naturally, but more specifically they were adult free men. The second included women of course, but women made up only one element of a much larger group that was sometimes referred to as a way of designating objects of possible pleasure: ‘women, boys, slaves.’” (Foucault, 1990 vol 2:46-47)

 “In ancient Athens it was both accepted and expected that older men would fall in love with and seek sexual gratification from younger (that is, adolescent) boys. Such relationships generally existed side by side with conventional marriage on the part of the older man, the ‘lover’ (erastes), and with the expectation of it on the part of the boy, the ‘beloved’ (eromenos). The affairs were asymmetrical in a number of ways. For one thing, the boy was supposed to be won only with difficulty and to resist the passionate and often extravagances of the lover. Second, once won, the beloved was expected not to enjoy the sexual act; on the contrary, enjoyment was a sign of a depraved nature...Finally, the relationship, at least ideally, involved the lover in the role of ethical and intellectual teacher and the boy in the role of his student.” (Nehamas and Woodruff, 1989:xiv-xv)

 “There is no ‘proper gender,’ a gender proper to one’s sex rather than another, which is in some sense that sex’s cultural property. Where that notion of the ‘proper’ originates, it is always and only improperly installed as the effect of a compulsory system.” (Butler, 1991, 21.)

 “...I am exploring the significance of power in relation to touch and sexuality. Foucault described sexuality as "an especially dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, young people and old people, parents and offspring, teachers and students, priests and laity, an administration and a population". I am interested in how the discourse about, and practise of, sexuality and touch relate to hierarchy, dominion and subordination. I am currently exploring the correlation of Eros and conquest to European and Native American contact...Since the first arrival of the Spanish in the Americas, the church has played a vital role in the sexual conquest of the aboriginal nations. The Spanish conquistadors sought papal permission to punish the natives for practicing sodomy, and having accused their enemies of committing this ‘abominable sin’, the Spanish felt justified in their brutalities and thereby claimed their right to conquest of the Native American. According to various European missionary reports, from that time forward, there was much sexual diversity in aboriginal America including polygamy, transvestism, and homosexuality. The extent of these practices, however, varied according to the data collected by the different religious orders, who required information on native sexual institutions if they were to conquer the devil and convert the sinners. We cannot, however, simplify anything as complex as sexuality or define European sexuality as exclusively ‘repressive’ and native American sexuality as ‘permissive’. From antiquity to the present, all over the globe, homosexuality has been varyingly encouraged, tolerated, or outlawed. However, through the widespread evangelisation and indoctrination by missionaries, many native American people adopted Judaeo-Christian attitudes toward their sexual expression. The adoption of these values, both through struggle and acquiescence, is one of the areas that I am exploring in this new series of work; and while these new paintings are highly personal on one level, they are intended to transcend pat explorations of sexual identity and cultural heritage.” (Monkman, 2001)

 Bibliography:

 Adam, Barry. The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement. 1995

Almaguer, Tomas. “Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behaviour,” In Social Perspectives in Lesbian and Gay Studies, Peter M. Nardi and Beth E. Schneider, eds. London and New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 537-551.

 Besnier, Niko. “Polynesian Gender Liminality Through Time and Space,” in Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. ed. Gilbert Herdt. New York: Zone Books, 1996, pp. 285-328.

 Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. London and New York, Routledge: 1991, pp. 13-31.

 Churchill, Ward. A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 1998.

 Engels, Friedrich. “The Overthrow of the Mother-Right, and Monogamous Marriages,” In Sociology, An Introduction: From the Classics to the Contemporary Feminists. Gordon Bailey and Noga Gayle, eds. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1993.

 Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis. Penguin, 1962.

 Foucault, Michel. The History Of Sexuality, Vols. 1, 2. New York: 1990, Vintage Books.

 Knight, Franklin W. “Introduction”, in An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies, Franklin W. King ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003, pp. xi-xlix. 

McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

 Monkman, Kent. Artist Statement for The Prayer Language, 2001. See http://urbannation.com/kentwritings.htm

 Nehamas, Alexander, and Paul Woodruff. “Introduction,” in Plato’s Symposium, Alexander Nehamus and Paul Woodruff, eds. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989, pp.xi-xxvi. 

Sealey, D. Bruce, and Antoine S. Lussier. The Metis, Canada’s Forgotten People. Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications, Inc, 1975.

 Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire. Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkely and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002.