Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest by Anne McClintock (1995)

One of the books I had to read for postcolonial lit. course in grad school. We used it to put some of the literary works we read in class into context. ( )

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

McClintock argues that "race, gender and class are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other...[but] come into existence in and through relation to each other--in in contradictory and conflictual ways" (McClintock, 5)
Therefore, empire was a domestic as well as global experience, and it was essential in the definition of Western modernity. In a similar way, "the cult of domesticity was a crucial, if concealed, dimension of male as well as female identities" (McClintock, 5). McClintock asserts that "men and women did not experience imperialism in the same way" and that intra-gender relations were important, as well (McClintock, 6).
To explore the above statements, McClintock presents and analyses a variety of cases One is Arthur Munby, a gentleman with an obsession with working class women. He wandered London streets and traveled to different towns to observe the conditions and subjects in action, acquired an expansive collection of photographs and drawings, and secretly married his own maid, Hannah Cullwick. Together with Freud's oedipal complex, Munby explains "inversion of gender" through a displacement of class" (McClintock, 88). McClintock argues that nurses represented in the subconscious both the mother and the father figure, through their care for their charges and their authority over them (she takes from his letters Freud's own obsession with his childhood nanny, absent from his published theory). This "revealed how much the sexual identities of upper-class men and women were shaped and informed by the female working-class workers in their midst... [G]ender is an articulated category, constructed through and by class" (94). Furthermore, Munby's sketches of dirt and soot-covered women indicate that "the dangerous crossings of gender and class are negotiated by projecting onto them the rhetoric of race" (108).
For the most part, Imperial Leather is well-written, interesting, and adds insights to the historical debate on post-colonialism. McClintock is helpfully clear about crediting other academics for their work, on which she builds, but sometimes has the redundant (and annoying) habit of pointing out her own theories with the words "I argue" or "I suggest."
The most obvious shortcoming is a lack of discussion of how her theories not only reflected society and imperial feelings but affected and were affected by historical events. Although McClintock engages a wide variety of material, from advertisements to literature and art, discussion of how her theories developed from these materials effect or explain wider events are limited in nature and very specific.
As one of her cases McClintock discusses Olive Schreiner, a south-African feminist, activist, and writer during the turbulent era around the turn of the century. An analysis of her writing presents Schreiner's "subtle betrayals of both the empire and the cult of domesticity" (McClintock, 261). This represents one of McClintock's better arguments because she includes a discussion of the political events during Schreiner's lifetime and how they reflected and affected her views. It might have been valuable to include, for example, more specific instances of the "military subjugation, cultural coercion and economic thuggery" which was presented as "domestic processes as natural and healthy as washing" by imperial soap ads (McClintock, 223).
McClintock's Imperial Leather represents and ambitious project and new way of re-evaluating the common themes and ideas of post-colonialism (most notably exploring the relationship between history and psychoanalysis). In her introduction she asserts that "the book is a sustained quarrel with the project of imperialism, the cult of domesticity and the invention of industrial progress" (McClintock, 4). Does she succeed in arguing against these themes with the ideology she develops? Perhaps not completely, but for all the above faults McClintock presents an interesting and innovative contribution to the debate on post-colonialism. ( )