The Dutch Empire and its Legacies A Comparative Analysis of Sexuality and Gender Regulation in Asia, the Americas, and South Africa

The Dutch empire’s relationship to sexualities and genders is analyzed in Chapter 6, which brings together varied colonial contexts—the Dutch East Indies (especially now Indonesia), the Dutch Cape Colony (South Africa), or the Dutch West Indies (Caribbean territories)—that are usually analyzed in isolation. The chapter critically examines Dutch Roman law that made sodomy a criminal offence in the seventeenth century, but also other forms of Catholic gender, sexuality, and morality disciplining, interplaying with racialization, including fictional prose (influenced by Stoler). The examination of imperial legacies focuses on the six islands of the “Dutch Caribbean,” of which three are “special Dutch municipalities,” and uses Puar’s homonationalism frame to interpret post-colonial paradoxes of sexual politics. A close observation is also made of how the entanglements of “queer activism” in former colonies and transnational financial partnerships with Dutch NGOs reproduce colonial hierarchies and imperialist imaginations of backwardness and modernity.