Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T14:45:36.030Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Crossing borders in transnational gender history*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2011

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, PO Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53201, USA E-mail: merrywh@uwm.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality have both been concerned with the issue of borders and their crossing, but the two fields themselves have not intersected much in the past. This is beginning to change, and this article surveys recent scholarship that draws on both fields, highlighting work in six areas: movements for women’s and gay rights; diverse understandings of sexuality and gender; colonialism and imperialism; intermarriage; national identity and citizenship; and migration. This new research suggests ways in which the subject matter, theory, and methodology in transnational history and the history of gender and sexuality can interconnect: in the two fields’ mutual emphasis on intertwinings, relationships, movement, and hybridity; their interdisciplinarity and stress on multiple perspectives; and their calls for destabilization of binaries.

Keywords

colonialismgenderintermarriagesexualitytransnational
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , November 2011 , pp. 357 - 379
Copyright
Copyright © London School of Economics and Political Science 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Iriye, Akira and Saunier, Pierre-Yves, eds., The Palgrave dictionary of transnational history: from the mid–19th century to the present day, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar, jacket.

2 Vertovec, Steven, Transnationalism, London: Routledge, 2009, p. 2Google Scholar.

3 ‘Reflections on the transnational turn in United States history: theory and practice’, Ian Tyrrell, Journal of Global History, 4, 3, 2009, p. 454.

4 ‘American Historical Review conversation: on transnational history’, with Chris Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, American Historical Review, 111, 5, 2006, pp. 1441–64.

5 Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, ‘Beyond comparison: histoire croisée and the challenge of reflexivity’, History and Theory, 45, 2006, p. 30.

6 See the essays in Lieberman, Victor, ed. Beyond binary histories: re-imagining Eurasia to c. 1830, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997Google Scholar, especially that by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected histories: notes towards a reconfiguration of early modern Eurasia’, pp. 289–315; Conrad, Sebastian and Randeria, Shalini, Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaft, Frankfurt-am-Main: Campus, 2002Google Scholar; Stoler, Ann and Cooper, Frederic, Tensions of empire: colonial cultures in a bourgeois world, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997Google Scholar; Ann L. Stoler, ‘Tense and tender ties: the politics of comparison in North American history and (post) colonial studies’, Journal of American History, 88, 3, 2001, pp. 829–65.

7 For other recent work that considers theoretical issues involved in comparison, see Cohen, Deborah and O’Connor, Maura, eds. Comparison and history: Europe in cross-national perspective, New York: Routledge, 2004CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Budde, Gunilla, Conrad, Sebastian, and Janz, Oliver, eds. Transnational Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006Google Scholar; Micol Seigel, ‘Beyond compare: comparative method after the transnational turn’, Radical History Review, 91, 2009, pp. 62–90; Kedar, Benjamin Z., Explorations in comparative history, Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnus Press, 2009.Google Scholar

8 Burke, Peter, Cultural hybridity, London: Polity, 2009Google Scholar.

9 Werner and Zimmermann, ‘Beyond comparison’, p. 32.

10 Herdt, Gilbert, ed. Third sex, third gender: beyond sexual dimorphism in culture and history, New York: Zone Books, 1994Google Scholar; Ramet, Sabrina Petra, ed. Gender reversals and gender cultures: anthropological and historical perspectives, London: Routledge, 1996CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meyerowitz, Joanne, How sex changed: a history of transsexuality in the United States, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004Google Scholar; Stryker, Susan, Transgender history, Berkeley, CA: Sea Press, 2008Google Scholar.

11 Fausto-Sterling, Anne, Sexing the body: gender politics and the construction of sexuality, New York: Basic Books, 2000Google Scholar; Butler, Judith, Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity, 2nd edition, New York: Routledge, 2000Google Scholar; eadem, Undoing gender, London: Routledge, 2004. These issues have been highlighted recently in the ongoing controversy about the South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya: see Ariel Levy, ‘Either/or: sports, sex, and the case of Caster Semenya’, New Yorker, 30 November 2009.

12 Doubts about the value of ‘women’ as an analytical category were conveyed most forcefully in Riley, Denise, ‘Am I that name?’ Feminism and the category of ‘women’ in history, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988CrossRefGoogle Scholar, though they have primarily been associated with the work of Joan Scott, such as Gender and the politics of history, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. For a recent discussion of the impact of Scott’s work, see ‘American Historical Review forum: revisiting “Gender: a useful category of historical analysis”’, with articles by Joanne Meyerowitz, Heidi Tinsman, Maria Bucur, Dyan Elliott, Gail Hershatter, and Wang Zheng, and a response by Joan Scott, American Historical Review, 113, 5, 2008, pp. 1344–1430.

13 Nye, Robert, ed. Sexuality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999Google Scholar.

14 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the closet, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993, p. 44Google Scholar. Recent works on European sexuality that affirm the idea of a major shift include Trumbach, Randolph, Sex and the gender revolution, volume I: heterosexuality and the third gender in Enlightenment London, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999Google Scholar; Tobin, Robert, Warm brothers: queer theory and the age of Goethe, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001Google Scholar. Those that critique it include Traub, Valerie, The renaissance of lesbianism in early modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002Google Scholar.

15 Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, ‘Global identities: theorizing transnational studies of sexuality’, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, 7, 4, 2001, p. 669. Several of the authors in the ‘American Historical Review forum: transnational sexualities’, American Historical Review, 114, 5, 2009, pp. 1250–1353 (which includes articles by Margot Canaday, Marc Epprecht, Joanne Meyerowitz, Dagmar Herzog, Tamara Loos, Leslie Peirce, and Pete Sigal), also highlight the use of a Foucaultian paradigm of modernity and the problems that this has created, as does Najmabadi, Afsaneh, Women with mustaches and men without beards: gender and sexual anxieties of Iranian modernity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005Google Scholar.

16 Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon, ‘Queering history’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 120, 5, 2005, pp. 1608–17; Piontek, Thomas, Queering gay and lesbian studies, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006Google Scholar; special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, ‘Thinking sex/thinking gender’, 10, 2, 2004, pp. 211–313; David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Munoz, eds., ‘What’s queer about queer studies now?’, special issue, Social Text, 84–5, 2005.

17 For a history of the way in which this understanding emerged, see Valentine, David, Imagining transgender: an ethnography of a category, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For key texts and debates, see Stryker, Susan, and Whittle, Stephen, eds. The transgender studies reader, London: Routledge, 2006Google Scholar.

18 Susan Stryker, ‘Transgender studies: queer theory’s evil twin’, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, 10, 2, 2004, pp. 212, 214.

19 For gender historians who have commented on this, see Judith P. Zinsser, ‘Women’s history, world history, and the construction of new narratives’, Journal of Women’s History, 12, 3, 2000, pp. 196–206; Bonnie Smith, ‘Introduction’, and Margaret Strobel and Marjorie Bingham, ‘The theory and practice of women’s history and gender history in global perspective’, in Smith, Bonnie, ed. Women’s history in global perspective, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004, vol. 1, pp. 1–8, 9–47Google Scholar; Merry Wiesner-Hanks, ‘World history and the history of women, gender, and sexuality’, Journal of World History, 18, 2007, pp. 53–68. For comments by historians of sexuality, see Grewal and Kaplan, ‘Global identities’, pp. 663–79, and Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey, eds., ‘Thinking sexuality transnationally’, special issue, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, 5, 4, 1999; Leila J. Rupp, ‘Toward a global history of same-sex sexuality’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 10, 2, 2001, pp. 287–302. For remarks on this from a world historian, see Manning, Patrick, Navigating world history: historians create a global past, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 208, 210CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 In 2004–2006, I was on the Kelly prize committee; my thanks to Katherine French for providing me with the statistics for 2010 and 2011.

21 This includes a forum, edited by Karen Hagemann and María Teresa Fernández-Aceves, ‘Gendering trans/national historiographies: similarities and differences in comparison’, Journal of Women’s History, 19, 1, 2007, pp. 151–213.

22 Ulrike Strasser’s ‘A case of empire envy? German Jesuits meet an Asian mystic in Spanish America‘, Journal of Global History, 2, 1, 2007, pp. 23–40, does use gender as a category of analysis.

23 Mary Louise Roberts also notes this parallel in ‘The transnationalization of gender history’, History and Theory, 44, 3, 2005, p. 462.

24 Margot Canaday, ‘Thinking sex in the transnational turn: an introduction’, American Historical Review, 114, 5, 2009, p. 1251.

25 Dagmar Herzog, ‘Syncopated sex: transforming European sexual cultures’, American Historical Review, 114, 5, 2009, p. 1291. Ida Blom agrees with this assessment, in ‘Gender as an analytical tool in global history’, in Sogner, Sølvi, ed. Making sense of global history: the 19th International Congress of the Historical Sciences, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2001Google Scholar, pp. 71–86.

26 One example is Darwin, John, The empire project: the rise and fall of the British world-system, 1830–1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 David Northrup, ‘Globalization and the great convergence: rethinking world history in the long term’, Journal of World History, 16, 3, 2005, pp. 249–68.

28 On multiple masculinities, see (among many) Stefan Dudnik, Hagemann, Karen, and Tosh, Josh, eds. Masculinities in politics and war: gendering modern history, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004Google Scholar; Ouzgane, Lahoucine, and Morell, Robert, eds. African masculinities: men in Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tosh, John, Manliness and masculinities in nineteenth-century Britain: essays on gender, family, and empire, Harlow, Essex: Pearson Longman, 2005Google Scholar; Ulrike Strasser and Heidi Tinsman, ‘It’s a man’s world? World history meets the history of masculinity, in Latin American studies, for instance’, Journal of World History, 21, 2010, pp. 75–96. On sexualities, see Hayes, Jarrod, Queer nations: marginal sexualities in the Maghreb, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000Google Scholar; McLelland, Mark and Dasgupta, Romit, Genders, transgenders and sexualities in Japan, Malden, MA: Routledge, 2005CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Sexualities in southern Africa’, special issue, Sexualities, 10, 2, 2007; Wieringa, Saskia, Blackwood, Evelyn, and Bhaiya, Abha, Women’s sexualities and masculinities in a globalizing Asia, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009Google Scholar.

29 Conference program for the 15th Annual Berkshire Women’s History Conference, p. 3.

30 Daly, Caroline, and Nolan, Melanie, eds. Suffrage and beyond: international feminist perspectives, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1994Google Scholar; Rupp, Leila, Worlds of women: the making of an international women’s movement, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997Google Scholar.

31 Edwards, Louise, and Roces, Mina, eds. Women’s suffrage in Asia: gender, nationalism and democracy, New York: Routledge, 2004CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Edwards, Louise P., Gender, politics, and democracy: women’s suffrage in China, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008Google Scholar.

32 Urdang, Stephanie, Fighting two colonialisms: women in Guinea-Bissau, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979Google Scholar. See also Schmidt, Elizabeth, Mobilizing the masses: gender, ethnicity, and class in the nationalist movement in Guinea, 1939–1958, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2005Google Scholar.

33 For books that set developments in particular regions or countries in a global context, see Joannou, Maroula, and Purvis, June, eds. The women’s suffrage movement: new feminist perspectives, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998Google Scholar; Ray, Raka, Fields of protest: women’s movements in India, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999Google Scholar; Dore, Elizabeth, and Molyneux, Maxine, eds. Hidden histories of gender and the state in Latin America, Durham, NC: Duke University, 2000CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Al-Ali, Nadje, Secularism, gender and the state in the Middle East: the Egyptian women’s movement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hodgson, Dorothy L., and McCurdy, Sheryl, eds. ‘Wicked’ women and the reconfiguration of gender in Africa, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001Google Scholar; Wesoky, Sharon R., Chinese feminism faces globalization, New York: Routledge, 2002Google Scholar; Fleischmann, Ellen L., The nation and its ‘new’ women: the Palestinian women’s movement, 1920–1948, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Al-Atiyat, Ibtesam, The women’s movement in Jordan: activism, discourses and strategies, Berlin: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2003Google Scholar; Kobayashi, Yoshie, A path toward gender equality: state feminism in Japan, New York: Routledge, 2004Google Scholar; Paletschek, Sylvia and Pietrow-Ennker, Bianka, eds. Women’s emancipation movements in the nineteenth century: a European perspective, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004Google Scholar; Ehrick, Christine, The shield of the weak: feminism and the state in Uruguay, 1903–1933, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005Google Scholar.

34 Louise Michele Newman, White women’s rights: the racial origins of feminism in the United States, New York, Oxford University Press, 1999; Fletcher, Ian Christopher and Mayhall, Laura E. Nym, and Levine, Philippa, eds. Women’s suffrage in the British Empire: citizenship, nation, and race, New York: Routledge, 2000Google Scholar; Paisley, Fiona, Loving protection? Australian feminism and aboriginal women’s rights 1919–1939, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000Google Scholar. Racist voting restrictions often lasted long after women’s rights groups and others argued for their removal. Native Americans, female and male, were granted voting rights in Canada only in 1960, and Aboriginal peoples in Australia only in 1962.

35 Dixson, Miriam, The real Matilda: women and identity in Australia, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1999Google Scholar; Lake, Marilyn, Getting equal: the history of Australian feminism, St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1999Google Scholar.

36 Lake, Marilyn and Reynolds, Henry, Drawing the global colour line: white men’s countries and the international challenge of racial equality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Molyneux, Maxine, Women’s movements in international perspective: Latin America and beyond, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Craske, Nikki, and Molyneux, Maxine, eds. Gender and the politics of rights and democracy in Latin America, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a comparative study that looks at women in revolutionary movements in Latin America, see Shayne, Julie D., The revolution question: feminisms in El Salvador, Chile, and Cuba, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 2004Google Scholar.

38 Basu, Amrita, ed. The challenge of local feminisms: women’s movements in global perspective, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995Google Scholar; Scott, Joan W., Kaplan, Cora, and Keates, Debra, eds. Transitions, environments, translations: feminisms in international politics, London: Routledge, 1997Google Scholar; Smith, Bonnie G., ed. Global feminisms since 1945: a survey of issues and controversies, New York: Routledge, 2000Google Scholar; Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Feminism without borders: decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity, Durham: Duke University Press, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moghadam, Valentine M., Globalizing women: transnational feminist networks, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2005Google Scholar; Stephanie A. Limoncelli, The politics of trafficking: the first international movement to combat the sexual exploitation of women, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2010; Amanda Lock Swarr and Riacha Nagar, eds., Critical transnational feminist praxis, New York: State University of New York Press, 2010.

39 Kozol, in ‘American Historical Review conversation’, p. 1445. Kozol’s own work does just what she calls for: Hesford, Wendy, and Kozol, Wendy, eds. Just advocacy? Women’s human rights, transnational feminisms, and the politics of representation, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005Google Scholar.

40 Jacobs, Sue-Ellen, Thomas, Wesley, and Lang, Sabine, eds. Two-spirit people: Native American gender identity, sexuality, and spirituality, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997Google Scholar; Roscoe, Will, Changing ones: third and fourth genders in Native North America, London: Macmillan Press, 1998Google Scholar; Lang, Sabina, Men as women, women as men: changing gender in Native American cultures, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998Google Scholar; Horswell, Michael J., Decolonizing the sodomite: queer tropes of sexuality in colonial Andean culture, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005Google Scholar.

41 Rifkin, Mark, When did Indians become straight? Kinship, the history of sexuality, and Native sovereignty, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Sima Qian included more about sexuality than have most political historians since; after becoming involved in a succession dispute, he chose castration over death, and commented on his degraded position as a eunuch in his history.

43 Nanda, Serena, Neither man nor woman: the hijras of India, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1990Google Scholar; Murray, Stephen O., ed. Oceanic homosexualities, New York: Garland Publishing, 1992Google Scholar; Herdt, Gilbert, ed. Third sex, third gender: beyond sexual dimorphism in culture and history, New York: Zone Books, 1994Google Scholar; Reddy, Gayatri, With respect to sex: negotiating hijra identity in South India, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davies, Sharyn Graham, Challenging gender norms: five genders among the Bugis in Indonesia, London: Wadsworth, 2006Google Scholar; Peletz, Michael, Gender pluralism: Southeast Asia since early modern times, London: Routledge, 2009Google Scholar; William G. Clarence-Smith and Raquel Reyes, eds., Sexual diversity in Asia, c. 600–1950, London: Routledge, forthcoming.

44 Driskill, Qwo-Li, et al. eds. Queer indigenous studies: critical interventions in theory, politics, and literature, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2011Google Scholar.

45 Roscoe, Changing ones; Williams, Walter L., The spirit and the flesh: sexual diversity in American Indian culture, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1986Google Scholar; Richard C. Trexler, ‘Making the American berdache: choice or constraint?’, Journal of Social History, 35, 3, 2002, pp. 613–36; Ramón Gutiérrez, ‘Warfare, homosexuality, and gender status among American Indian men in the southwest’, in Foster, Thomas A., ed. Long before Stonewall: histories of same-sex sexuality in early America, New York: New York University Press, 2007, pp. 19–31Google Scholar.

46 Martin Nesvig, ‘The complicated terrain of Latin American homosexuality’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 81, 3–4, 2001, pp. 689–729, presents a good overview of this debate, as well as other issues. For other studies of sexuality and colonization in Latin America, see Carvajal, Federico Garza, Butterflies will burn: prosecuting sodomites in early modern Spain and Mexico, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003Google Scholar; ‘Sexual encounters/sexual collisions: alternative sexualities in colonial Mesoamerica’, special issue, Ethnohistory, 54, 1, 2007, pp. 3–194; and the many works of Pete Sigal, including From moon goddesses to virgins: the colonization of Yucatecan Maya sexual desire, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000; idem, Infamous desire: male homosexuality in colonial Latin America, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003; idem, ‘Latin America and the challenge of globalizing the history of sexuality’, American Historical Review, 114, 5, 2009, pp. 1340–53.

47 General studies include Lenore Masterson and Margaret Jolly, eds., Sites of desire, economies of pleasure: sexualities in Asia and the Pacific, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997; Nancy Rose Hunt, Tessie P. Liu, and Jean Quataert, eds., Gendered colonialisms in African history, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997; Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri, eds., Nation, empire, colony: historicizing gender and race, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998; Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and homosexuality, London: Routledge, 2002; Tamara L. Hunt and Micheline R. Lessard, eds., Women and the colonial gaze, New York: Palgrave, 2002; Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi, eds., Women in African colonial histories, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002; Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal knowledge and imperial power: race and the intimate in colonial rule, 2nd edition, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011; eadem, Haunted by empire: geographies of intimacy in North American history, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006; Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds., Bodies in contact: rethinking colonial encounters in world history, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005; Patty O’Brien, The Pacific muse: exotic femininity and the colonial Pacific, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006; Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

On Spanish colonialism, see Martha Few, Women who live evil lives: gender, religion, and the politics of power in colonial Guatemala, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002; Miroslava Chávez-García, Negotiating conquest: gender and power in California, 1770s to 1880s, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2004; Karen Vieira Powers, Women in the crucible of conquest: the gendered genesis of Spanish American society, 1500–1600, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.

On French imperialism, see Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, eds., Domesticating the empire: race, gender and family life in French and Dutch colonialism, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1997; Alice Conklin, A mission to civilize: the republican idea of empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997; Alice Bullard, Exile to paradise: savagery and civilization in Paris and the South Pacific, 1790–1900, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000; ‘Intersections of race and gender in French history’, special issue, French Historical Studies, 33, 3, 2010.

On British imperialism, see (among many) Anne McClintock, Imperial leather: race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest, London: Routledge, 1995; Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid zones: maternity, sexuality, and empire in eighteenth-century English narratives, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995; Richard Phillips, Sex, politics, and empire: a postcolonial geography, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006; Angela Woollacott, Gender and empire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

48 Giulia Calvi, ‘Global trends: gender studies in Europe and the US’, European History Quarterly, 40, 4, 2010, p. 645.

49 Claire C. Robertson and Nupur Chaudhuri, eds., ‘Revising the experiences of colonized women: beyond binaries’, special issue, Journal of Women’s History, 14, 4, 2003.

50 Wilson, Kathleen, The island race: Englishness, empire and gender in the eighteenth century, New York: Routledge, 2003Google Scholar.

51 Zine Magubane, Bringing the empire home: race, class, and gender in Britain and colonial South Africa, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

52 Midgely, Clare, Feminism and empire: women activists in imperial Britain, 1790–1865, New York: Routledge, 2007Google Scholar; Carolyn Eichner, ‘La Citoyenne in the world’, French Historical Studies, 32, 1, 2009, pp. 63–84. For other studies that link metropole and colony, see Hall, Catherine, and Rose, Sonya, eds. At home with the empire: metropolitan culture and the imperial world, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Sarkar, Tanika, Hindu wife, Hindu nation: community, religion and cultural nationalism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002Google Scholar; Goswami, Manu, Producing India: from colonial economy to national space, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sinha, Mrinalini, Specters of Mother India: the global restructuring of an empire, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ghosh, Durba, Sex and the family in colonial India: the making of empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 The concept of ‘gender frontiers’ was first proposed by Kathleen Brown in Good wives, nasty wenches and anxious patriarchs: gender, race, and power in colonial Virginia, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Like so much else in gender history, the role of intermarriage in the creation of racial categories has been particularly well studied for North America: Kirsten Fischer, Suspect relations: sex, race, and resistance in colonial North Carolina, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001; Adele Perry, On the edge of empire: gender, race, and the making of British Columbia, 1849–1871, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001; Elise Lemire, ‘Miscegenation’: making race in America, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002; Nancy Shoemaker, A strange likeness: becoming red and white in eighteenth-century North America, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; Thomas N. Ingersoll, To intermix with our white brothers: Indian mixed bloods in the United States from earliest times to the Indian removal, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005; Peggy Pascoe, What comes naturally: miscegenation law and the making of race in America, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

On gender, racial mixing, and national identity in Latin America, see Maria Elena Martinez, ‘The black blood of New Spain: limpieza de sangre, racial violence, and gendered power in early colonial Mexico’, William and Mary Quarterly, 61, 3, 2004, pp. 479–520; Susan Kellogg, ‘Depicting mestizaje: gendered images of ethnorace in colonial Mexican texts’, Journal of Women’s History, 12, 3, 2000, pp. 69–92; Magal M. Carrera, Imagining identity in New Spain: race, lineage, and the colonial body in portraiture and casta paintings, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003.

55 Letter from Colbert to Intendant Jean Talon, 5 January 1666, quoted and translated in Saliha Belmessous, ‘Assimilation and racialism in seventeenth and eighteenth-century French colonial policy’, American Historical Review, 110, 2, April 2005, pp. 325, 326..

56 Quoted in Guillame Aubert, ‘“The blood of New France”: race and purity of the blood in the French Atlantic world’, William and Mary Quarterly, 61, 3, 2004, p. 449.

57 Ibid., p. 459.

58 Quoted in Jennifer M. Spear, ‘“They need wives”: métissage and the regulation of sexuality in French Louisiana, 1699–1730’, in Hodes, Martha, ed. Sex, love, race: crossing boundaries in North American history, New York: New York University Press, 1999, pp. 47, 48, 50Google Scholar. See also Spear’s book, Race, sex, and social order in early New Orleans, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

59 See my Christianity and sexuality in the early modern world: regulating desire, reforming practice, 2nd edition, London: Routledge, 2010.

60 See Blussé, Leonard, Bitter bonds: a colonial divorce drama of the seventeenth century, trans. Diane Webb, Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2002Google Scholar; Pickles, Katie, and Rutherdale, Myra, eds. Contact zones: aboriginal and settler women in Canada’s colonial past, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005Google Scholar; Sleeper-Smith, Susan, Indian women and French men: rethinking cultural encounter in the western Great Lakes, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001Google Scholar; Barr, Juliana, Peace came in the form of a woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas borderlands, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007Google Scholar; Fur, Gunlög, A nation of women: gender and colonial encounters among the Delaware Indians, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Jean Gelman, The social world of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia, 2nd edition, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009Google Scholar.

61 Quoted in Brooks, George E., Eurafricans in western Africa: commerce, social status, gender, and religious observance from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003, p. 214Google Scholar. Two other studies that examine gender in the Afro-Portuguese Atlantic are Sweet, James, Recreating Africa: culture, kinship and religion in the African–Portuguese world, 1441–1770, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003Google Scholar, and Matory, J. Lorand, Black Atlantic religion: tradition, transnationalism, and matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian candomblé, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005Google Scholar.

62 German church ordinances, quoted in Dagmar Freist, ‘One body, two confessions: mixed marriages in Germany’, in Rublack, Ulinka, ed. Gender in early modern German history, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 282, 287Google Scholar. See also Sabean, David Warren, Teuscher, Simon, and Mathieu, Jon, eds. Kinship in Europe: approaches to long-term development (1300–1900), New York: Berghahn, 2007Google Scholar.

63 Records of the Strasbourg XXI, translated and quoted in Wiesner, Merry E., Working women in Renaissance Germany, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986, p. 20Google Scholar.

64 Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the global colour line; Herzog, ‘Syncopated sex’, p. 1305.

65 Blom, Ida, Hagemann, Karen, and Hall, Catherine, eds. Gendered nations: nationalisms and gender order in the long nineteenth century, Oxford: Oxford International Publishers Ltd., 2000Google Scholar.

66 Social Text Collective (Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, Ella Shohat), eds., Dangerous liaisons: gender, nation, and postcolonial perspectives, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997; Yuval-Davis, Nira, Gender and nation, London: Sage Publications, 1997Google Scholar; Kaplan, Caren, Alarcon, Norma, and Moallem, Minoo, eds. Between woman and nation: nationalisms, transnational feminisms, and the state, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999Google Scholar; Ranchod-Nilsson, Sita and Tétreault, Mary Ann, eds. Women, states, and nationalism: at home in the nation?, New York: Routledge, 2000CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Joseph, Suad, ed. Gender and citizenship in the Middle East, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, 2000Google Scholar; Canning, Kathleen and Rose, Sonya O., eds. Gender, citizenships and subjectivities, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002Google Scholar; Kaufman, Joyce P. and Williams, Kristen P., Women, the state, and war: a comparative perspective on citizenship and nationalism, Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2007Google Scholar; Chong, Natividad Gutiérrez, ed. Women, ethnicity, and nationalisms in Latin America, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007Google Scholar.

67 Ray, Sangeeta, En-gendering India: woman and nation in colonial and postcolonial narratives, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Martyn, Elizabeth, The women’s movement in post-colonial Indonesia: gender and nation in a new democracy, New York: Routledge, 2005CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pollard, Lisa, Nurturing the nation: the family politics of modernizing, colonizing, and liberating Egypt, 1805–1923, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Oza, Rupal, The making of neoliberal India: nationalism, gender, and the paradoxes of globalization, New York: Routledge, 2006Google Scholar; Baron, Beth, Egypt as a woman: nationalism, gender, and politics, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007Google Scholar.

68 Layoun, Mary N., Wedded to the land? Gender, boundaries, and nationalism in crisis, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Thompson, Elizabeth, Colonial citizens: republican rights, paternal privilege, and gender in French Syria and Lebanon, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000Google Scholar.

70 Charrad, Mounira, States and women’s rights: the making of postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001Google Scholar.

71 Canaday, Margot, The straight state: sexuality and citizenship in twentieth-century America, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009Google Scholar; Lewis, Carolyn Herbst, Prescription for heterosexuality: sexual citizenship in the Cold War era, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Puar, Jasbir, Terrorist assemblages: homonationalism in queer times, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 See Gert Hekma, ‘Imams and homosexuality: a post-gay debate in the Netherlands’, Sexualities, 5, 2, 2002, pp. 269–80; Scott, Joan, The politics of the veil, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007Google Scholar; Eric Fassin, ‘A double-edged sword: sexual democracy, gender norms, and racialized rhetoric’, in Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed, eds., The question of gender: Joan W. Scott’s critical feminism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, forthcoming.

74 Sharpe, Pamela, ed. Women, gender, and labour migrations: historical and global perspectives, New York: Routledge, 2001Google Scholar; Stasiulis, Daiva K. and Bakan, Abigail B., Negotiating citizenship: migrant women in Canada and the global system, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005Google Scholar; Grewal, Inderpal, Transnational America: feminisms, diasporas, neoliberalisms, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Palmary, Ingrid, et al., eds. Gender and migration: feminist interventions, London: Zed Books, 2010Google Scholar; Zontini, Elisabetta, Transnational families, migration and gender: Moroccan and Filipino women in Bologna and Barcelona, New York: Berghahn, 2011Google Scholar; Beutsch, Sandra McGee, Crossing borders, claiming a nation: a history of Argentine Jewish women, 1880–1955, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011Google Scholar; Coll, Kathleen M., Remaking citizenship: Latina immigrants and the new American politics, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011Google Scholar.

75 Ballantyne, Tony, and Burton, Antoinette, eds. Moving subjects: gender, mobility, and intimacy in an age of global empire, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009, p. 12Google Scholar. See also Bao, Jiemin, Marital acts: gender, sexuality, and identity among the Chinese Thai diaspora, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005Google Scholar; Camiscioli, Elisa, Reproducing the French race: immigration, intimacy, and embodiment in the early twentieth century, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011Google Scholar.

76 Sarker, Sonita and De, Esha Niyogi, eds. Trans-status subjects: gender in the globalization of South and Southeast Asia, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Luibhéid, Eithne, Entry denied: controlling sexuality at the border, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005Google Scholar; Luibhéid, Eithne and Cantu, Lionel Jr, eds. Queer migrations: sexuality, U.S. citizenship, and border crossings, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005Google Scholar.

78 Patton, Cindy, and Sánchez-Eppler, Benigno eds. Queer diasporas, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000Google Scholar; Manalansan, Martin and Cruz-Malave, Arnaldo, eds. Queer globalizations: citizenship and the afterlife of colonialism, New York: New York University Press, 2002Google Scholar; Manalansan, Martin F. IV, Global divas: Filipino gay men in the diaspora, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gopinath, Gayatri, Impossible desires: queer diasporas and South Asian public cultures, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bhaskaran, Suparna, Made in India: decolonizations, queer sexualities, trans/national projects, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005Google Scholar.

79 La Fountain-Stokes, Lawrence, Queer Ricans: cultures and sexualities in the diaspora, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009Google Scholar.

80 Both Margot Canaday and Joanne Meyerowitz make this same point in the American Historical Review forum on transnational sexualities.

81 Gayatri Spivak, ‘Subaltern studies: deconstructing historiography’, in Landry, Donna, and MacLean, Gerald, eds. The Spivak reader: selected works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, London: Routledge, 1995Google Scholar, p. 214.