This talk will explore the racialised and gendered dimensions around nakedness in colonial narratives in Victorian Britain. It will shed light on the biopolitical frontiers of sexual regulation surrounding the naked body, manifested across several pedagogical terrains historically, like the disciplines of History and Anthropology, School Textbooks, Photography, Museums, and British Colonial Exhibitions. This lecture will address questions such as: How were markers of civilisation, primitiveness, savagery, and indigenous people’s inferiority, essentialised and catalysed around the naked body? In what manner did colonial scientific and ethnographic projects aid in the establishment of racialised hierarchies around the orientalised naked body? In answering these, this event will examine how discourses around the native naked body were tied into geo-political goals of establishing civilisational supremacy, towards consolidating forms of imperial control as well as legitimating racial hierarchies in colonised worlds. In demarcating binaristic spheres of “colonial respectability” versus “native savagery”, Philippa Levine will discuss the standardisation of truth claims around the figure of the native naked bodies in mid-Victorian Britain, along with its implications for historiographies of gender, sexuality, and global health paradigms.

About the speaker

Philippa Levine is Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin (USA) and Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. She has written on the history of feminism, of socially transmissible diseases, prostitution, reproduction, and eugenics as well as the British Empire. She is currently completing a book on nakedness.

This lecture will be followed by a roundtable discussion with Nicole Bourbonnais, Aditya Bhardwaj, and moderated by Shriya Patnaik.

This event is convened by PhD candidate Shriya Patnaik (Department of International History and Politics) with support from the Gender Centre as part of the research project funded by SNSF on Re-constructiong and Re-imagining the Matriarchal Community of Mahari-Devadasis: Gender, subalternity and human rights projects in postcolonial India (1947-2015).