What's Love Got to Do with It?

Ramón A. Gutiérrez

To the popular singer Tina Turner's bittersweet song that repeatedly asks, "What's love got to do with it?," Ann Laura Stoler would surely reply, "Everything, girl." No secondhand emotions here. For in the workings of the intimate domain, through sentimental education, through child rearing, and through sex, Stoler sees the making of race, the management of empire, and the congruence of imperial projects about the globe. Stoler's stunning essay forces our gaze to the politics of intimacy, to those spaces and places in Asia, Africa, and the Americas where "colonial regimes of truth were imposed, worked around, and worked out."1 Her provocations to comparative historical work, to frames of analysis that move beyond nation-states, to circuits of knowledge production and circulation that tie core and periphery, metropole and colony as one, are of great import. Stoler and her interlocutors ask us to see as commensurate colonial projects that might otherwise escape notice as exceptional and unique.	1
Such insights seem to stem from the tenor of our time, from our own institutional locations as professors in the United States with passports, frequent-flier miles, and Internet connections that give us relatively free movement about the globe, which only a very small fraction of the world's population enjoys. That images, people, ideas, and money are crossing the globe in previously known but unimagined ways has recently replaced the not-so-old mantra on the intersection of gender, race, and class and the even older pronouncement that all history is the history of class struggle.	2
Provocative as this analysis of intimate frontiers and tender ties is, what is sorely missing from this adroit emplotment of Michel Foucault's "grids of intelligibility" and "governmentality" are bodies.2 Bodies that talked back, fought back, and actively resisted the technologies and regimes of their colonial lords. Material bodies that were conceived, born, and died, that were sexed and engendered differently into at least two categories worldwide and that required different gender strategies of rule.	3
The celibate Franciscan friars who narrated and witnessed the 1598 conquest of New Mexico's Pueblo Indians understood this well when they noted quite matter-of-factly that, while the Spanish soldiers exercised force with impunity to maim, cripple, and kill native men, on the women they employed other violent "techniques du corps," as the sociologist Marcel Mauss called them. "Only with lascivious treatment are Indian women conquered," the soldiers openly pronounced. "To fornicate with Indian women is necessary so they will not resist." Centuries later and thousands of miles to the south, the Argentine political philosopher and statesman Juan Bautista Alberdi would have been in absolute accord. For when he pronounced in 1852 that in America "to govern is to populate," his maxim was accompanied by a legion of "white" Argentine and immigrant women whose mission was to procreate in the pampa in order to improve the nation's racial stock, replacing those decadent male descendants of Spanish colonials that Alberdi saw as hampering Argentina's economic prowess and virility as a modern state.3	. . .