Ann Laura Stoler

Intimate domains-sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement, and child rearing figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule.intimacy in the making of empire

Intimate matters and narrative about them figured in defining the racial coordinates and social discriminations of empire. Common to all was a fashioning of moral policies that shaped the boundaries of race. Each points to strategies of exclusion on the basis of social credentials, sensibility, and cultural knowledge. Foucault defined such technologies of rule as biopolitics as part of the political anatomy of states, governing techniques that relied on the disciplining of individual bodies and the regulations of the life processes of aggregate human populations. Colonial state projects attended minutely to the distribution of appropriate affect to the relations in which carnal desires could be safely directed, to prescriptions for relations for comportment that could distinguish colonizer from the colonized- and as important, to those that finely graded the distinctions of privilege and class among colonizers themselves Civility and racial membership were measured less by what people did in public than in their private lives- with whom they cohabited; who slept with whom, when and where: who suckled which children: how children were reared and by whom Colonial regimes based on overseas settlements did more than produce their overseas others. They also policied the cultural protocols and competencies that bounded their interior frontiers. In monitoring those boundaries they produced penal and pedagogic institutions that were often indistinguishable orphanages, workhouses, orphan trains, boarding schools, childrens agricultural colonies- to rescue young citizens and subjects in the making. Such colonial institutions, designed to shape young bodies and minds, were central to imperial policies and their self-fashioned rationalities