27. Narayan. Oil 24" x 18". 2011.

Narayan argues “justifcations for colonialism and slavery in terms of crude self-interest

alone seem to have been rare. These enterprises were made morally palatable

by the rhetoric of responsibility and care for the enslave and colonized Others." (N,

134) Further, the colonization was not simply justifed by one's care for another free,

human being. Instead, we see a model wherein the colonized people's subjectivity and

agency itself was stripped away – where the colonized were constructed as "childish

and inferior subjects in need of the paternalistic guidance and rule of their superiors

(see Said 1993)." (133) It is worth noting that such justifcations work both ways – just

as intersex people are rendered primitive, so victims of colonialism are often denigrated

through appeals to a mythology of their “sexual degeneracy” or hermaphroditism on

the level of an entire race.

 

----The Gift of Monstrosity: Turning Surveillance Against Itself (A Scholarly Paper I wrote for a Genocide and Human Rights Course)

Done