Effeminism
Subtitle: the economy of colonial desire
By: Revathi Krishnaswamy.
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Ann Arbor
Language: eng
Number of pages: 191
Subjects: English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; English literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; India -- History -- British occupation, 1765-1947.; India -- Politics and government -- 1765-1947.
Description: This book attempts to chart the flows of colonial desire in the works of British writers in India. Arguing that the Indo-British colonial encounter is based on an ideological opposition between masculinity and effeminacy, rather than on a more conventional distinction between masculinity and femininity, the book investigates masculinity as an overdetermined site on which the multiple axes of domination and subordination are simultaneously constituted and contested.

Uncovering an intricate nexus among race, caste, class, gender, sexuality, nation, moral legitimacy and economic/political power - a nexus designated by the term effeminism - the study establishes the homosocial dynamics of colonial desire. This book will interest not only scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and colonial and postcolonial literatures, but also those working in the areas of cultural studies, gender studies, and South Asian studies.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p.169-188) and index.
Table of contents: title: Reading colonial erotics; title: The economy of colonial desire; title: Manufacturing masculinity; title: Imperial feminism in an age of homosocial colonialism : Flora Annie Steel's On the face of the waters; title: Cartographies of homosocial terror : Kipling's gothic tales and Kim; title: A grammar of colonial desire : E.M. Forster's Passage to India.