Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities considers the ways in which modernity was constructed, in all its incompleteness, through colonialism. Using a variety of archival resources and equally diverse methodologies, the authors trace modernity's unstable foundations in the slippages and ruptures of colonial gender and sexual politics. As a whole, the essays illustrate that modern colonial regimes are never self-evidently hegemonic, but are always in process - subject to disruption and contest - and never finally accomplished; and are therefore 'unfinished business'. The book is divided into four sections: mapping new terrains; representation and cultural production; domestic contingencies; and negotiating new identities. The essays cover a wide geographical range: from India to Indonesia: Canada to Calcutta; Paris to London; Australia to the Straits settlement; China to Niagara Falls. Equally broadly, they deal with travel writing, women's political and social reform activities, urban ethnography, immigration, the regulation of prostitution, military discourse, the picture postcard and theosophy.
What all these articles share is an interest in working through the ways in which gender and sexuality underwrote the projects of colonial modernity, and a commitment to understanding how apparently dominant regimes are unstable, porous and eminently contestable as well. Gender Sexuality and Colonial Modernities presents exciting new perspectives on modern colonial regimes to researchers and students in gender studies, history and cultural studies.