Imperialism and the regulation of sexuality: colonial legislation on contagious diseases and ages of consent

Abstract

This paper examines the production of systems for the regulation of colonial sexualities. Challenging binarised imperial discourse, which attributes the production of sexualised imperialism and imperial sexuality to the metropolitan centre, the paper acknowledges the productivity of colonial margins, and begins to map the complex dispersal of agency across the multidimensional colonial divide. Three case studies in this paper illustrate mechanisms of imposition of British legislation in colonial contexts, but they also identify forms of agency that allowed colonists to either follow or deviate from British models. These case studies, drawn from South Australia and New South Wales at crucial junctures in the production of their legislation on the regulation of sexuality, reveal sexualities that were produced and regulated not simply through crude relations of domination and subordination, but by and through a more complex historical–geographical web of power relations. This paper contributes to a broader complication and deconstruction of imperial binaries and, by examining agency and productivity on the colonial margins, widens the scope of histories and geographies of moral regulation.