"Closure to Nature" Colonial Anthropology and Sexualisation of Indeginous Women

How did colonial anthropology construct Indeginous women as "natural" – that is, primitive, hyper sexual and biologically determined – to legitimise racial hierarchy and imperial domination?

Abstract

This article examines the construction of the figure of the Indigenous woman in the colonial contexts of the nineteenth century, showing that it does not come from an empirical observation, but from a discursive and complex material device at the crossroads of anthropology, iconography, biopolitics and imperial spatialisation. I argue that the representation of the colonised woman as "closer to nature" — hypersexual and primitive — constitutes a central operator of colonial naturalism, making it possible to transform historical relations of domination into supposedly objective biological truths.

First, the article analyses the emergence of physical anthropology and racial taxonomies, which replace religious hierarchies with a scientific classification of bodies, anchoring inferiority in biology. The sexuality of racialised women is constructed there as instinctive and excessive, serving as proof of their alleged civilisational backwardness. The second part examines the iconographic production of this knowledge, showing how figures such as that of Sara Baartman crystallize a racial and sexual otherness, transforming the black body into a pathological sign and an object of knowledge. This process of iconisation erases the historicity of the subjects in favour of a fixation in archetypes.

The article then demonstrates that this construction is a true imperial technology. By pathologising the sexuality of colonised women, colonial knowledge organises surveillance, segregation and reproductive control devices, while stabilising the standards of respectability within European societies. Finally, the analysis of the colonial space as a sexual theatre highlights the interweaving of body and territory, where the feminisation of space and the territorialisation of the body participate in the same logic of domination.

By articulating these different levels, this article shows that the hypersexualisation of colonised women is not a marginal effect, but a structuring mechanism of the colonial order, at the crossroads of gender, race and empire.