Often considered as a masculine endeavor, this course explores women and their roles in the making and unmaking of colonial power. Rather than provide an overview of a specific empire and time-period, this course will use case studies from across the world over different points in time. Partly, this is to show the historical contingencies of gender and power as well as to consider the persistence of gender as a key feature of colonial subjugation and resistance alike.
Students will examine how some women participated in empire as missionaries, educators, reformers, and bureaucrats, as well as how other women navigated, resisted, and reshaped the gendered structures of imperial rule. Topics include the politics of domesticity, race and reproductive control, sexuality and respectability, female labor in colonial economies, and the afterlives of empire in feminist and postcolonial thought.
A central aim of the course is to analyze how gender operated not merely as a social category but as a tool of imperial governance and cultural control—and, conversely, how it also informed anti-colonial activism and resistance. Students will engage with a variety of sources, including personal letters, government records, visual materials, and recent historical scholarship, to develop a critical understanding of how gender and empire were co-constituted.
Students will be assessed according to their study requirements and are welcome to submit work in either English or German.
Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop 5, 1978.
Eds. Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (1992)
Ed. Philippa Levine, Gender and Empire, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford, 2007)
As per Studienordnung.
