Effeminism

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.