Webbed Connectivities: The Imperial Sociology of Sex,Gender,and Sexuality

Webbed Connectivities: The Imperial Sociology of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality makes a timely intervention in a number of different debates, crossing over multiple disciplines, including sociology, philosophy, history, cultural studies, international relations, psychology, and medicine. The book’s primary aim is to shed light on the embeddedness of current concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality within histories of empire, disrupting ideas about their universal applicability and opening avenues for “mak[ing] legible forgotten histories of connection and forg[ing] new possibilities for solidarity,” enacting a “decolonial relationality” (p. 55).

Over the length of almost 180 pages, Vrushali Patil presents a historical sociology of British and American imperiality that dislocates the centrality of society as a fundamental category, offering webbed connectivities instead as a framework that shifts the attention from particular sites to the relations, networks, and connections that cross sites. In doing so, the author aims to disclose the racial, colonial, and imperial underpinnings of current, northern-based concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality. Through a methodological tactic of thinking sideways, Patil claims that by looking at seemingly disconnected materials and sources crossing different sites and temporalities, new objects and connections can emerge, presenting us with different avenues for exploration.

In four historically rich and conceptually dense chapters, Webbed Connectivities walks us through the paradoxical centrality and invisibility of the transnational—forged by imperial histories, colonial encounters, and racialized power hierarchies—for the political economy of knowledge production in the West/North. The two correlated categories of space and time are offered as a means to disrupt the apparent universality of current concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality by showing how their spatialization and temporalization in different writings and archives have served both to produce and efface deeply embedded racial-imperial hierarchies.

Chapter One makes the bold move of denouncing the imperial and transnational roots of the “heterosexual matrix,” questioning the atemporality and aspatiality of Judith Butler’s concept that became central for feminist and queer studies since the 1990s. To do so, Patil looks for the profound intertextual nature of three travel writings that were fundamental for circulating ideas about bodies, sexualities, and gender in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Despite taking up different subject matters (Africa, America, and Asia), being published in different geographical spaces and in three distinct languages—Italian, Dutch and French—together they are shown to have supported imperial, capitalist, national, religious, and scholarly interests, helping to craft a profound Eurocentric vision of the colonies.

These travel writings would later provide the foundations on which many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers (namely, James Parsons, Comte de Buffon, John Millar, and Harriet Martineau) built universalist ideas about the normativity and deviancy of human bodies and desires in relation to nature, history, culture, and civilization. These ideas are at the heart of the imperial heterosexual matrix, as Patil renames it in an attempt to stop whitewashing multiple, complex, and expansive regimes of sex-gender-sexuality “that exist alongside it, in relation to it, and outside of it” (p. 48).

Chapters Two and Three build a very structured and compelling narrative of the spatialization and temporalization of sex, gender, and sexuality and how these processes were fundamental for sustaining the legitimacy of the British empire and its civilizational logics. The spatialized production of three figures—the disappearing hermaphrodite in the metropole, the hot constitution’d ladies ¹ in Africa, and the hijras ² in India—are shown to be intimately tied to the emergence of a temporal, evolutionary logic of civilization (as seen in Darwin). Reading across three distinct and yet interrelated literatures, Patil points to the ways in which the differential production of a natural/biological African difference during the transatlantic slave trade and a cultural Indian difference during colonial efforts in the East were intimately tied to the evolutionary framings of binary sex that sustained the civilizational logic of modernity.

In this context, Patil denounces the role canonical sexological texts play in separating the category of sexuality from those of race and empire. Many of these texts—namely by the German authors Karl Ulrichs and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the U.S. American James Kiernan, and the British Havelock Ellis—are shown to have been written at the height of imperial efforts by England, Germany, and the United States, amply resorting to civilizational logics in forging modern concepts of sexuality—particularly regarding the medical, psychological, cultural, geographical, or criminal roots of sexual desires, vices, and perversions. Patil, claims, however, that these imperial genealogies remain largely unaccounted for, even in contemporary queer approaches, and suggests that while we cannot entirely avoid the use of concepts and frameworks that fail to account for racial-colonial processes, we should urgently resort to a more adequate naming strategy, in which the sexual becomes the racial-sexual, and sexuality becomes racial-imperial sexuality.

Building on this rich historical sociology of sex, gender, and sexuality, the book’s fourth and last chapter claims to make an intervention in the polarized conversation about gender going on in academia. On the one side, there is a part of the feminist literature that treats gender as an analytically mobile and universalizable category that can assume different contents in multiple contexts; on the other side, a smaller but burgeoning part of the literature, mostly reliant on Latin American and African authors such as Maria Lugones and Oyèrónkẹ Oyěwùmí, has been denouncing gender as a colonial category in need of being decolonized. Patil argues that, while both conversations are reliant on these imperial histories, the first one remains oblivious to these webbed connectivities and to the ways in which the invention of gender in the 1950s has been serving an important role in the construction of American hegemony. As such, this conversation reifies the scale of society as the appropriate locus for probing and comparing the evolutionary and developmental stages of gender equality, reenacting a profoundly imperial civilizational logic. The second conversation, however, much more cognizant of its transnational and imperial roots, points to the limits of gender as a category able to account for the histories and experiences of colonized bodies, cultures, and peoples.

While Webbed Connectivities is very successful in building a dense historical argument for backing the need for thinking of sex, gender, and sexuality as spatially and temporally situated categories, profoundly tied to imperial histories, colonial encounters, and racial hierarchies—thus “making legible forgotten histories of connection”—it remains unclear how it contributes “to forging new possibilities for solidarity” (p. 55). To be fair, the book clearly states its commitment to a western, mostly U.S.-based audience, many of them feminists and queer theorists who remain largely oblivious to their own embeddedness within the imperial histories of the transnational. And it, in fact, delivers a masterful and didactic effort of educating this audience—within and outside the global North or the West—about their/our ongoing complicities with a racial-imperial modernity. I found it particularly important, in that regard, not only that the book points to these imperial legacies in the obvious concepts, texts, and authors, but that it connects them to some of the most prominent or critical names in historical sociology: Parsons, Weber, Durkheim, Foucault, and Butler, to name but a few.

And yet, for those who remain at the boundaries of these geographies of knowledge production, suffering the worst effects of this racial-imperial legacy, this didactic effort may still fall short of the massive work that is required to cope with the oppression and silencing operating inside and outside academia. In fact, in the few instances where the book engages a less Eurocentric literature or reflects on what to do in light of such an all-encompassing system of imperiality, its strategy basically resorts to renaming concepts and reclaiming the R- and E- words. Little is offered in the path of pointing to emerging new solidarities or avenues for exploration. Perhaps that is something we cannot expect from academia, after all; or perhaps, we need to completely rethink the role and commitments of academia in face of the challenges imposed by racial-imperial modernity. In any case, it still seems that a more systematic engagement with non-Eurocentric thinkers might be a necessary next step in crafting a truly decolonial relationality.