Sexing Empire

A common, obvious sexual metaphor for empire equates it with rape; yet empire, to some, has felt at once like rape and like seduction.Let us consult, for example, the New York Herald of October 8, 1847.At this late hour in the United States' war with Mexico, the Herald forecast that "like the Sabine virgins, she [Mexico] will soon learn to love her ravisher."As Amy Greenberg shows us, this was a vision of lusty imperial adventure, pregnant with the combined possibilities of territorial and bodily ravishings, seductive both to virginal Mexico and to "her" North American rapists.The central tension -seduction of both parties -subsumed imperialism into a gendered, sexual, and racial metaphor in which "the Spanish maid, with eye of fire" and "budding charms," "await[ed]," pantingly, the rape of "Yankee chivalry." 1 It would appear that today's imperial subjects -inhabitants of several subjectivities within imperial power relations -continue to pant with desire.Mimi Thi Nguyen pinpoints for us the ways in which femininity and sexuality can simultaneously, even bizarrely, serve the need to "forgive" atrocity and to shore up empire.As made famous by Phan Thi Kim Phuc's iconically photographed 1972 flight from Trang Bang, her "desires for beauty and romantic love" enable a redemptive narrative in which empire magnanimously remakes her, physically and sexually.Via consumption of beauty products, Kim Phuc becomes "a woman like any other," incorporated into an imperial plotline of "civilizational thinking."Kim Phuc's use of "rouge, lipstick, and eyeliner," her desirability to "boys," signal, in imperial eyes, the stitching up of the Vietnam War's multiple wounds. 2 From where we stand, then, empire has reasserted itself as "liberal" -and, moreover, as a "gift."This is a sexualized and gendered fantasy of gift giving, of

Ancient history · Art · Biology · Empire · Political science · Sexing · Zoology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History

• Where We Stand

  Open Access•Matthew Frye Jacobson•American Quarterly•2013

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