Bodily Exposures: Beyond Sex?

In the past decade colonial scholars have ably demonstrated how and why sexuality has served as key site of imperial control and colonial anxiety and as a dense transfer point of power its positioning as part of the “moral logic” of postcolonial situations, and “the colonial present,” may be less clear now. This chapter asks why this may be so and why this moment marks and demands new thinking. It argues that our understandings of “the carnal,” with an emphasis more on the sexual than “on the flesh,” have been too constricted to account for the sorts of bodily intrusions and manipulations to which designated populations have been, and continue to be, exposed.