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Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things

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Drawing on the extensive postcolonial studies of the 1990's, Stoler critiques Foucault (and Freud) by making the startlingly obvious observation that neither in their respective theories of sexuality recognized one suspect member of the bourgeois family: the servant (and that servant's breathren in the colonies). She writes that "[w]ithin this racialized economy of sex, European women and men won respectability (especially within the colonies) by steering their desires to legitimate paternity and intensive maternal care, to family and conjugal love; it was only poor whites, Indies-born Europeans, mixed-bloods and natives who...focused too much on sex. To be truly European was to cultivate bourgeois self in which familial and national obligations were the priority and sex was held in check--not by silencing the discussion of sex, but by parcelling out demonstrations of excess to different social groups and thereby gradually exorcising its proximal effects."

Missing from her study, and that of post-colonial studies generally, was the manner in which this discourse was recuperated following the Second World War. Today, far from being held in check, the world is increasingly understood psychosexually as bourgeois households come to identify, albeit from a distance and mediated by the commodities they purchase, with those whom they perceive as 'dangerous.'