Intersectionality and Sexuality in the Comparative Study of Extreme Violence
By Dia Deepak
Edited by Maximilian Kabjian & Leila Van Glabeke , Peer Reviewed by Sophie Bright
What does it mean when the most intimate aspects of human experience become instruments of imperial control?
This paper argues that intersectionality transforms the anthropological study of sexuality by revealing how it is constituted through overlapping regimes of race, gender, religion and colonial power. Rather than treating sexuality as instinct or identity, it will be approached as a contested site of governance and struggle. The paper proceeds in three movements. It begins by establishing the theoretical stakes, arguing that whilst Foucault's account of sexual discourse offers a productive starting point, his universalising framework fails to account for the uneven ways in which power is experienced across race, gender and colonial history. Intersectionality is mobilised not as an additive lens but as a corrective to this abstraction. The analysis then turns to two case studies through which this corrective is applied: colonial concubinage in the Dutch East Indies and sexualised torture in U.S. military detention. The first, drawing on Ann Laura Stoler's work, examines how indigenous women's reproductive and domestic labour was strategically organised to serve imperial economic and demographic interests; and further how the arrival of European women intensified racial segregation rather than ameliorating it. Here, intersectionality reveals how race, gender and colonial capitalism were not parallel systems but mutually constitutive ones, forging the very conditions of European modernity. The second case turns to Bonnie Mann's work, focusing on the systematic deployment of female bodies and violated Islamic moral codes as instruments of humiliation against Muslim male detainees. This case exposes how sexuality operated not merely as a vector of gendered or heteronormative power, but as a culturally and spiritually loaded site of violation, one that cannot be adequately grasped without attending to the intersection of religion, race, gender and colonial power. In both cases, the paper examines how bodies are rendered legible and governable through biopolitical techniques, how social categories are exposed as unstable and historically produced, and how domination is simultaneously naturalised, internalised, and sometimes resisted. Taken together, these cases demonstrate that sexuality is not merely shaped by power but is generative of it, a condition of colonial modernity rather than its consequence.
To understand how sexuality becomes a site of governance rather than merely expression, it is necessary to engage with the theoretical apparatus through which power itself has been most influentially theorised; it is here that Foucault's analytics of power offers an indispensable, if ultimately insufficient, point of departure. Michel Foucault’s theorization of power marked a radical break from earlier models that saw power solely as coercive or repressive. Most notably the sovereign model advanced by Hobbes (1651), understood power as fundamentally repressive and top-down, emanating from a centralised authority and operating primarily through law, prohibition and the threat of punishment. Marxist (1840) frameworks conceived of power as rooted in economic domination, treating culture and sexuality as mere superstructural reflections of material class interests rather than as autonomous sites of governance in their own right.
Power, Foucault posits, operates through mechanisms of confession, surveillance, and scientific classification. This is perhaps best illustrated through his concept of the Panopticon (a circular prison with cells arranged around a central well), in which inmates, unable to determine when they are being watched, internalise the gaze of the guard and regulate their own behaviour. The Panopticon illustrates how modern power does not need to physically coerce; it operates most effectively when subjects police themselves. Subjects become simultaneously an ‘object and agent’ (94), produced through discourses of self-surveillance and truth-telling, embedding power within intimate life. His stance is compelling in that it invites a critical interrogation of the ostensibly neutral or autonomous dimensions of everyday life. It exposes how subjects are subtly governed through internalised norms. Yet Foucault overlooks how power operates differentially across race, gender, and colonialism. His universal subject, a white European male, is analytically limited by its universalising tendency; it cannot account for how power and sexuality operate and is layered systems of domination. Intersectionality, then, intervenes not merely as an additive framework but as a corrective to this abstraction, grounding power in historically situated, embodied experience. In my essay, this is crucial to understanding how colonial sexual economies and modern forms of sexualized violence operate through racialized and gendered logics that Foucault overlooks.
Intersectionality is a demand for power to be understood as it is actually lived, in bodies marked by race, gender, and colonial history. In Sojourner Truth’s oration of ‘Ain't I a Woman?’ (1851) she contends that race systematically overrode her gender, rendering her womanhood socially illegible. She describes how, in moments where femininity could be seen to denote privilege, Black women were structurally excluded from such treatment. In her speech, she articulates:
“Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman?
I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman?
I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?”
Being helped in and out of carriages, shielded from physical labour or treated with gentleness were markers of womanhood that Black women were disqualified from, expected instead to endure gruelling field work and physical violence without any social protection. Femininity here, is consanguineous with a as a set of protections and courtesies reserved exclusively for white women, a form of racialised social currency. Yet, within the lived experience of a Black woman, ‘race – and racism – trumped gender’ (Brahm 2019: 160). Mainstream feminism anchored its political project in the analytical category of ‘woman,’ presuming a universality of struggle and subjugation that collapsed the profound differences in how oppression is lived across race, class, and colonial histories. In doing so, it systematically failed to apprehend, nor sincerely represent, the experience of non-white women; rendering their particular forms of domination either invisible or subordinate to a politics that was, in practice, racially exclusive. Black feminism emerged as a rejection of mainstream feminisms’ false universalism, exposing gender as an insufficient analytical lens through which to apprehend the compounded nature of Black women's subjugation. Black feminism launched a rejection of the use of women and gender as a ‘unitary and homogenous category reflecting the common essence of all women’ (McCall 2005:1776). Intersectionality, thus, had its ‘roots in Black feminism’ (Brahm 2019: 1), emerging in response to the failings of universal feminism and the acute awareness of gender’s limitations as a ‘single analytical category’ (McCall 2005: 1771). It is a framework for understanding how various social and political identities overlap and intersect to create unique, compounded experiences of discrimination or privilege. Intersectionality is defined by a consanguineous logic to Black feminism that ‘nothing fits neatly except as a result of imposing a stable and homogenizing order on a more unstable and heterogeneous social reality’ (McCall 2005:1779). Kimberlé Crenshaw formalised this concept, showing how identity politics ‘frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences’ (1991:1242). She evidenced that a large range of different experiences, identities and social locations failed to fit neatly into any single master category. Crenshaw demonstrated that black women, as an empirical matter of documented fact, faced discrimination in hiring not only as black or as female, but specifically as persons whose lives were lived at the ‘intersection of race and gender’ (Brahm 2019: 162). Intersectionality stands as a critique of gender-based and race-based research for failing to account for lived experience at neglected points of intersection, ones that tended to reflect multiple ‘subordinated locations as opposed to dominant or mixed locations’ (McCall 2005:1779). Rather than treating gender, race, and class as static and separable, intersectionality insists they are co-constitutive.
This insistence on co-constitution makes intersectionality indispensable to the colonial archive. Within the viscerally legible entanglement of race, gender, and economic governance, the regulation of indigenous women's bodies under Dutch colonial rule is where this paper will take its exploration. In “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power” (2010), Ann Laura Stoler describes sexual governance, marriage and reproduction in European settlements across Indonesia. She argues that the regulation of sexual activity, reproduction and marriage were an essential ‘part of the apparatus of colonial control’ (Stoler 2010: 42). Sexual relations were ‘strategically employed’ (Pervez 2008: 115) to sustain the colonial economy, with indigenous women categorized as concubines, prostitutes, or coerced partners. Indigenous women made ‘fewer financial and affective demands’ than European women (Stoler 2010: 42) and so were central to imperial expansion. The colonial state enabled the ‘controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production’ (Foucault 1978: 141). Concubinage allows ‘power to be situated and exercised at the level of life’ (Foucault 1978: 143), turning indigenous wombs into tools for demographic control and imperial accumulation. Whilst the Foucauldian address of this situation has engaged with the analytical apparatuses of sexuality, Stoler would highlight that he has not paid enough attention to the historical content of his analysis (Stoler 2010: 145). I would argue that colonial rule did not simply impose capitalist logics onto sexuality but rather forged them through the management of racialised reproduction. Intersectional analysis reveals that sexuality may not be an extension of European modernity, but a condition of its possibility. Diffusionist accounts of power position Europe as the originary site of modernity, casting non-European societies as passive recipients of capitalist and governmental logics that flow outward from the metropolitan centre. In this framework, the colonies appear as derivative spaces, shaped by European power rather than generative of it. Yet as both Mitchell and Stoler will be shown to demonstrate, this genealogy is fundamentally inverted; the techniques of surveillance, spatial organisation, and bodily regulation that came to define European modernity were, in many instances, first conceived and rehearsed in the colonial periphery before being repatriated to the metropole. Timothy Mitchell’s analysis of colonial Egypt destabilises conventional genealogies of power by revealing that the panopticon, held as the quintessential metaphor of European modern governance, originated in Egypt and later repatriated to Europe. Similarly, urban planning innovations trialled in Paris were rehearsed first in Rabat and Haiphong, both African and Asian cities under French protectorates. These perspectives recast the colonies not merely as sites of exploitation but as laboratories of modernity, spaces in which forms of governance, spatial organisation, and bodily control were first invented and refined.
Applying this logic to sexuality, one might ask whether colonial economies did not simply reflect European capitalist values but were generative of them. The management of concubinage in the Dutch East Indies, for instance, exemplifies how reproductive labour was monetised and aligned with imperial interests. Economically, indigenous women represented a cheap consolidation of domestic, sexual and reproductive labour, requiring neither the financial maintenance nor the costly transatlantic passage of European wives, reducing the economic burden of sustaining a European male presence in the colonies. Demographically, the arrangement served to stabilise colonial settlements by providing men with domestic anchorage, improving military retention and securing a continued European foothold in the Indies. Rather than viewing this as a local application of European biopolitics, it becomes plausible to see colonial control over sex and reproduction as foundational to the very conceptual infrastructure of capitalist modernity. Intersectionality enables this shift in perspective by foregrounding the co-constitution of race, gender and economic governance; it traces not only how these vectors intersect in lived experience, but how they produce one another historically. In doing so, this reframing allows anthropologists to move beyond diffusionist accounts of power and instead examine the colonial world as a generative site, where sexuality is not only regulated but also conceived through the convergence of empire, economy, and bodily discipline.
Generative potential is not confined to those who resist; even actors who reproduce dominant structures do so in ways that are unstable and capable of inversion. The arrival of European women altered the lives of indigenous women by intensifying racial segregation. European women were not only the ‘the bearers of racist beliefs’ (Stoler,2010 :57) but were the ‘hard-line operatives who put them in place’ (Stoler,2010 :57). Their presence reinforced segregationist standards because they were central to maintaining ‘white male prestige’ (Stoler 2010: 55). Fears of ‘sexual contamination, physical danger, [and] climatic incompatibility’ (Stoler,2010, 46) fuelled the increased ‘policing of sex’ (Balhatchet, 2010, 45). Relations with native women were framed as physically dangerous as they were believed to house ‘contagions’ (Stoler, 2010,46). Central to the justification of racial policing was the fear of miscegenation; the prospective mixed-race child born from the sexual union between a European man and indigenous woman was constructed as an existential threat to white racial purity. The child represented a moral transgression, but more pertinently as a biological contamination of the European race, threatening to dissolve the very boundaries upon which colonial hierarchy depended. The mixed-race body thus became a site of profound imperial anxiety, prompting the colonial state to regulate interracial intimacy with increasing juridical rigour in order to preserve the fiction of white racial integrity. This case exhibits the main qualm of intersectionality: the violence that many women experience is ‘often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class’ (Crenshaw 1991:1242). The intersection of racism and sexism permeates the experience of indigenous women’s lives in ways that cannot be wholly captured by looking at ‘the race and gender dimensions of those experiences separately’ (Crenshaw 1991: 1244). Intersectionality provides a vocabulary for describing the tensions within and between marginalized groups. We must reject the idea that one can ‘simply add women and stir’ (McCall 2005:1776) into pre-existing theoretical frameworks. Indeed, the approach of ‘ignoring such difference[s] within groups contributes to tension among groups’ (Crenshaw 1991: 1242). Many scholars have reduced racial conflict and subordination to expressions or projections of repressed sexual desire, ignoring other power relations and inadvertently essentializing race. Freud posits that racial conflict is a manifestation of repressed sexual anxiety, locating the origins of colonial domination in the white male's simultaneous desire and dread of the racialised body. In doing so, such frameworks inadvertently essentialised race, displacing attention from the structural, economic, and juridical mechanisms through which racial hierarchy was materially constructed and sustained. Libidinal explanations implicitly ‘naturalise racial antagonisms as a primal aspect of human nature’ (Schmitt 1997:497). Understanding sexuality as ‘discursively constructed, thus historically mutable… reveals sexualised racism itself as a social and historical product’ (Schmitt 1997: 497). If instead of treating sexuality as a primal instinct, we understand it as discursively constructed, produced through language, institutions, laws and social norms; it becomes something that changes across time and place. And crucially, if sexuality is historically mutable, then sexualised racism is not a timeless feature of human nature but a specific historical product, shaped by particular political and economic conditions. It can therefore be analysed, critiqued and dismantled rather than accepted as inevitable. Intersectionality allows us to reconceive racism not as an ‘aberrant pathological development of state authority … but as a fundamental indispensable technology of rule’ (Stoler 2010: 156). Both racial and sexual classifications appear as ordering mechanisms that shared their emergence with the bourgeois order. Intersectionality draws attention to the fact that dominant discourses such as feminist, antiracist, or class-based often ‘silenced those at the margins of the margins’ (Crenshaw 1991: 32). Intersectionality is not only a way of understanding how oppression works, but how solidarity often fails. It demands attention to the silences, the contradictions, and the frictions that arise when lived realities defy neat categorization.
What follows from this is a more unsettling claim; the categories through which domination operates are not merely exclusionary but fundamentally fictitious, a tension the colonial archive renders with particular clarity. In colonial contexts, racism did not rely on the ‘visual and social clarity’ (Hazel 2019: 89) of difference amongst groups but operated through anxieties surrounding identities that were threatening because ‘such crafted differences were not clear at all’ (Stoler 2010: 92). Intersectionality reveals that social categories are not grounded in any inherent or objective reality but are instead the outcome of discursive practices. Racism gains its strategic force, not from the fixity of its essentialism, but from the ‘internal malleability assigned to the changing features of racial essence’ (Stoler 2010:94), allowing racialisation to remain flexible, unstable and deeply effective as a tool of governance (Stoler 2010: 102). This is illustrated in the colonial strategy of divide and conquer, whereby administrators did not simply recognise pre-existing racial or ethnic distinctions but actively fabricated and hardened them as instruments of governance. This fabrication of racial categories as instruments of governance is perhaps most catastrophically illustrated in colonial Rwanda, where Belgian-imposed ethnic classifications ultimately contributed to the conditions of the 1994 genocide[1].
[1] In 1930s Rwanda, Belgian colonisers introduced identity cards, institutionalising a distinction between Hutu and Tutsi people, previously fluid and socioeconomic categories in Rwanda. Ethnicity was cast as rigid and heritable. Belgian colonisers favoured Tutsis over Hutus, granting them preferential access to education and administrative positions whilst constructing their superiority in explicitly racial terms. Upon independence in 1962, this hierarchy was violently inverted as Hutu-led governments came to power and Tutsis faced decades of escalating political exclusion and violence. When President Habyarimana’s (Hutu President) plane was shot down on April 6th, 1994, Hutu extremist militias mobilised immediately utilising state-controlled radio broadcasting to make explicit calls for Tutsi extermination. The resulting genocide culminated in the slaughter of an c.800,000 people in one hundred days.
In Rwanda, categorisation itself became a form of control as ‘demarcation leads to exclusion, and exclusion to inequality’ (McCall 2005: 1777). This critique invites a radical reconsideration of how knowledge is produced and urges caution in the use of categories that may themselves be implicated in the reproduction of power. These ambiguities are sharply revealed in the position of European women in the colonies, whose role in ‘promoting white solidarity’ came ‘partly at their own expense,’ as they were ‘almost as closely policed as colonized men’ (Stoler 2010: 96). Bourgeois femininity was not the product of autonomous will but of practices not ‘contingent on the will to self-affirmation alone’ (Stoler 2010: 96). European femininity was dependent on others to provide the ‘leisure for such self-absorbed administering and self-bolstering acts’ (Stoler 2010: 153). Although whiteness sought to ‘cordon’ itself off from colonial entanglements, it was continually breached by ‘cultural proximities, intimacies and sympathies that transgressed them’ (Stoler 2010: 153). The irony of this attempt at separation was that it depended on the very closeness it feared. The colonial home, rather than shielding white respectability from native influence, became the primary site where racialised sexuality was produced and regulated. Indigenous women, employed as domestic servants, wet nurses and concubines within the European household, were simultaneously indispensable to its functioning and constructed as a threat to its racial integrity. The intimacy of this proximity meant that the colonial home was not a sanctuary from racialised sexuality but conversely, its most immediate and contradictory site of production. It was precisely here, in the ostensibly private space of domesticity, that the boundaries of race, gender and sexuality were most anxiously policed and most persistently undermined. Intersectionality enables us to grasp these contradictions in their ‘simultaneity, complexity and irreducibility’ (Carastathis 2014: 304), making visible the unstable and contingent processes through which sexuality is governed, and knowledge itself is formed.
The colonial archive does not exhaust the terrain on which intersectionality does its most unsettling work. What the Dutch East Indies makes visible in the register of reproduction and domestic labour, the U.S. detention complex makes visible in the register of pain. Damningly, in both cases, it is the body that bears the weight of intersecting imperial logics. We shall turn now our exploration to the sexualised torture of Muslim detainees in the U.S, which will reveal the theatrical brutality of contemporary imperial violence, enabling an understanding of the multifarious cruelties defining each act. In Bonnie Mann’s Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror (2014), the author draws on the testimony of Mohammed Al-Qahtani, an Iraqi detainee whose interrogation documents the systematic deployment of female bodies as instruments of sexualised torture and racial humiliation. The ‘Invasion of Space by Female’ torture method involved forcing the prisoner to ‘look at pictures of … scantily clad women’ (195), dress up in a ‘fake burka and take dance lessons’ (196) and female torturers ‘straddling him and shoving her breasts in his face’ (197). This sexualised torture was a deliberate technique to humiliate the prisoner; to ‘destroy [his] humanity and relational place in the community’ (190). Mann objects to the ‘characterizations of female interrogators as innocent,’ arguing they are ‘bearers of the power of the regime’ (195). Despite this assertion, I would contend that the women are primarily subjugated through their bodies. Beauvoir, in ‘The Second Sex’ (1949), argues that patriarchal culture establishes a foundational dualism in which man is associated with culture, reason and transcendence; equipping him with the capacity to shape and exceed his biological condition. In contrast, woman is anchored to nature, the body and immanence, condemned to no more than biological repetition via menstruation, pregnancy and reproduction. This association is hierarchical; culture is valorised over nature and reason over the body. Woman ‘ascribes a purely negative connotation to the ways in which women differ from men’ (Chanter 1995: 49). As woman identifies with ‘nature’, she is in turn, ‘identified with the disgust generated by her sexual organs’ (Beauvoir, 1949: 143). In one tragic moment, as the female soldier tries to enact the power of the regime, she is at once admitting to an inferiority of the female body through its ability to elicit shame from the prisoner. Shame is described as a ‘wrenchingly painful feeling that is focused on a negative evaluation of the self as a whole’ (Mann 2010:56). By pursuing the reaction of disgust from the prisoner, I would argue that, inadvertently, her body becomes aligned with the very ontology it has been tasked to undo. This is the ontology that reduces woman to her body; where her sexuality is constructed as inherently shameful and abject, where her nature is so damning that even when wielding institutional power, the female soldier cannot escape the patriarchal logic that renders her femininity a source of disgust rather than authority. And of course, sexualised torture would not be successful without ‘shared misogyny across cultural contexts’ (Mann 2010:56). Biology becomes prosocial and determinative of existential possibilities. The female soldier is then in constant indecision between inwardness and externality. This irresolvable tension between her agency and subjugation, between institutional power and bodily diminishment is not incidental to her position but constitutive of it. The paradox, of her enacting the regime’s power and being subjugated to macroprocesses herself, cannot be resolved; ‘it can only be endured and executed in various ways’ (Beauvoir 2003:11)..For Beauvoir, the human relation to nature is fundamentally ambiguous, nature is the inescapable condition of human existence, yet it cannot be fully brought under the control of human will or meaning. Patriarchal culture exploits this tension by collapsing woman into nature entirely, denying her the capacity for transcendence that man is presumed to possess, and condemning her instead to the repetition of biological life. Beauvoir is unsettling in insisting that our relation to nature is constitutively irresolvable; nature appears as the precondition of human experience yet remains at once indifferent to it and in perpetual excess of it. In this way sexual difference can be understood as a ‘metaphysical question that served to mask or mystify a political reality’ (Mann 2014: 35). It allows us to notice the ways in which the ‘forces of man-made injustice feed on nature’ (Mann 2014: 36). What we gain here, different to feminist denaturalising accounts where material and political interests act causally on material bodies to constrain or shape them as sexed, is an approach that accounts for women’s bodily differences as backgrounded causes for symbolic formations that are potentially generative of different meanings for sexual difference. Far from being merely passive actors, women ‘can [be] both subject to violence and agents of violence’ (Puar, 2007, 90), revealing how gendered roles within systems of power do not always align with simplistic binaries of oppressor and oppressed. This echoes the position of European women in the colonial context, who were simultaneously subjugated by the very racial and gendered order they were tasked to uphold. In both instances, women are conscripted into structures of domination as instruments rather than architects, their agency circumscribed by the same patriarchal and racialised logics they are made to enforce. The female body is wielded as a tool of power whilst remaining subordinate to it; its utility contingent on its continued subjugation within it. The very force and ‘directionality of causality is not eliminated but diffracted’ (Mann 2014: 38). These are not isolated operations of power but overlapping and mutually sustaining ‘justificatory entanglements' (Mann 2014: 38). Intersectionality reveals how bodies are instrumentalised through intersecting structures of power, but how those same bodies trouble fixed distinctions between domination and subjugation, agency and constraint.
Yet to read this torture solely through the lens of gendered humiliation is to miss its most devastating dimension; the effectiveness of these techniques derived not only from their assault on masculine dignity but from their deliberate violation of Islamic moral codes, targeting the detainee's religious self-conception as much as his body. The use of sexualized violence against Muslim men in U.S. military detentions was not only designed to break them psychologically but to dismantle their communal ties. As touched on previously, the female torturer through a ‘racially gendered theatre of subordination’ is a ‘tool of the regime’ (Mann 2014: 48). Through a process of ‘analogical substitution’, the ‘ephemeral’ power of the regime becomes tangible by borrowing the ‘incontestable reality’ of pain and ‘the sheer material factualness of the human body’ to shift its ‘sentience’ into reality. This substitution has the dual action of ‘undoing a man’ through various acts of torture and ‘[attacking] the groupness of the group’ (Mann 2014:190). In traditional Islamic teachings, moral behaviour focuses on ‘premarital and extramarital abstinence, piety and decency in dress’ (Beckmann 2010: 62). Any sexual relation outside of marriage is considered ‘zinaa or sin’ and is ‘socially and legally condemned’ (Beckmann 2010: 621). For Iraqi detainees, the body becomes the site where two distinct biopolitical agendas, Islamic piety and liberal secularism, collide. Biopower is identified as having two distinct forms: one concerned with the life of the individual, the other concerned with the life of the species. Biopolitics is the encasement of a disciplinary power targeting the individual within a state power targeting the social body. Sexualized violence does not just punish; it attempts to reorder the subject according to a different moral logic, using the language of flesh to dismantle the authority of faith. Sexualised violence works precisely because it leverages Islamic moral codes; it succeeds not just in humiliating the prisoners but in desecrating his religious self-conception. Significantly, these violated modesty codes are not external to gender hierarchy but constitutive of it; the same religious framework that prohibits unsanctioned contact between men and women also structures the terms of female subordination. The torture thus exploited a double bind through instrumentalising religious prohibition as a mechanism of humiliation whilst simultaneously reproducing the gendered hierarchy embedded within that very prohibition. In Mann’s writing, we can see ‘the intersections of religion with gender, class and colonialism’ (Freidman 2015: 109). What a single axis or purely gendered analysis misses in this context is how sexuality operated not just as a vector of power, but as a culturally loaded site of spiritual violation. Queer perspectives might identify sexualised violence as tools of masculine domination or heteronormative control, but they often misrepresent the centrality of religious meaning in how such violence is experienced. The effectiveness of this torture cannot be disentangled from the specific religious and cultural prohibitions it was designed to violate. To read this torture solely through the lens of heteronormativity is to impose a secular analytical vocabulary onto an experience whose most devastating dimension was spiritual rather than sexual. Religion is often a site of complex negotiation that is not fully explained ‘by a binarist model of oppression/ resistance’ (Freidman 2015 :105). Religion occupies a ‘complex and contradictory role,’ (Friedman 2015: 105) simultaneously oppressive and ‘generat[ive]’ of identity, much like sexuality, which is both ‘creative and enjoyable’ yet ‘dangerous and corrupting’ (Beckmann 2010: 621). Adding religion to our understanding of sexuality is not additive but ‘transformative’ (Friedman 2015 107), it restores the full complexity of what was at stake in the violation of the detainee's body. It requires a thinking beyond an exclusive focus on ‘power over and power against’ (Friedman 2015 107). It makes clear how the assault on Muslim male bodies simultaneously targets their faith, ethics and communal identity. Intersectionality forces scholars to grapple with the inherent entanglements of power, embodiment and social structure, where ‘the complexity that arises when the subject of analysis expands to include multiple dimensions of social life’ demands new forms of inquiry that resist reductionism (McCall 2005:1772). Intersectional analysis reveals how sexuality operates as a conduit for power across religious, racial, and gendered lines, whilst also remaining attuned to the corporeal intensity of that violence; the ways in which shame, pain, and bodily exposure mark the limits of what can be fully explained by structure or discourse alone.
Overall, neither case study resolves neatly into a story of domination and resistance; what they share, and what intersectionality makes visible, is the constitutive instability of the very categories through which power operates. Indeed, defining sexuality has become increasingly complex. Questions of ‘power, pleasure, survival, labour, consumption, symbolic meanings, emotion and agency’ (Lyons 2006: 156) must all be considered in approaching this vital domain of human life. In colonial settings, not only indigenous women but also European women were shaped by imperial logics, at once enforcers of racial purity and subjects of patriarchal control. Shame, desire and the management of proximity expose how sexuality mediates collective identities and moral authority. The aforementioned are not just scenes of violence, but of categorical instability; where desire becomes discipline and care, control. Intersectionality does not resolve these tensions; it keeps them open. It turns away from the comfort of linear causality and towards the generative recognition that the body is where histories sediment, and where new possibilities might still emerge.
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