Imperial Leather Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest

Anne McClintock explores the sexualizing of the terra incognita, the imperial myth of the empty lands, the dirt fetish and the "civilizing mission", sexuality and labor, advertising and commodity racism, the Victorian invention of the idle woman, feminism and racial difference, and anti-apartheid culture in the current transformation of national power.
Using feminist, post-colonial, psychoanalytic and socialist theories, Imperial Leather argues that the categories of gender, race and class do not exist inisolation, but emerge in intimate relation to one another. Drawing on diverse cultural forms-novels, advertising, diaries, poetry oral history, and mass commodity spectacle-the book examines imperialism not only as a poetics of ambivalence, but as a politics of violence. Rejecting traditional binaries of self/other, man/woman, colonizer/colonized, Anne McClintock calls instead for a more informed and complex understanding of categories of social power and identity.