Imperial Terroir

Abstract

Accounts of White male violence in the Americas are often profoundly ahistorical. While sociocultural analyses have sometimes framed this violence as a contemporary, emergent, and rapidly worsening problem, scientific approaches have sometimes alternatively framed male violence as a consequence of deep evolutionary processes. Both these approaches have tended to neglect the ways in which the ties between maleness, masculinity, and violence shift in historically contingent ways, including in relation to histories of colonization. Writing in connection with queer, Two-Spirit, and Indigenous feminist thinkers, this article takes up the role of White male violence in both the foundation and ongoing existence of colonial states and traces colonial masculinity as a gender formation that is born of that violence. Given these historical contingencies, I work to shift questions on the nature of male violence from the biology of maleness to the material conditions that colonial masculinities bring into being, tracing some of the emerging molecular ecologies of the colony.