Matters of Intimacy as Matters of State: A Response

Ann Laura Stoler

Cross-disciplinary dialogues are as interesting as the openness of those engaging in them. It is my good fortune to have thoughtful and able commentators whose concerns confirm, challenge, and take seriously my own. While there are marked differences in emphasis, their resonant queries suggest a need to clarify two fundamental points: (1) how and why I see the intimate as a strategic site of colonial governance, not a supplementary point of entry into the subtle injustices of the colonial order, but a charged space of colonial tensions; and (2) why a focus on empire and its racialized regimes is not a distraction from local, subaltern histories and the quotidian struggles of ordinary men and women, but a critical vantage point for identifying how categories of exclusion were fortified and made common sense, shaping the constraints in which subjects and citizens were produced, their refusals framed, and their lives lived. Thus, rather than rehearse the common ground that the commentators have so clearly stated, in the spirit of furthering debate and specifying the scholarly and political issues at stake in our differences, I focus here on the misrecognitions that remain and some sources of them.	1
Let me start with the comments of Ramón A. Gutiérrez. Professor Gutiérrez misconstrues my argument, and ironically, the position he takes here represents an odd retreat from his own. He critiques my focus on intimacies as a "naturalized, tenderized" study of colonialism, which is thereby "made palatable and opaque." Yet in his own work on eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century New Mexico, he attends explicitly to the distinctions between "the head and heart," "between sentiment and reason" that, he once argued, provided colonizing Hispanics with the "categories to explain their behavior." His related worry that attention to "affective histories" voids colonialism of "blood and sweat and tears" narrows the range of sentiments that should be under consideration: It includes ressentiments and their virulent expression.1 In so doing he ignores the work of fellow historians of the Americas who have argued that the emotional economy of colonialism has been central to the strategies of labor control of colonial regimes and has constrained the domestic and conjugal arrangements of those ruled.	2
A focus on "management of the intimate" leads to a "tenderized" study of colonialism if it ignores the violences and inequities lodged in privatized space and turns away from the uses and abuses that unsolicited and even desired intimacies may entail—lessons that feminism long has schooled us to identify and to which his own work has contributed.2 The politics of intimacy offers, not a gloss for a sweetened study of tender interracial contacts, but an opportunity to recognize that the distinctions between the public and the private—what government strictures regulated the movements of household servants, what legal dictates made it impossible for a native woman to demand child support from the European father of her "mixed-blood" offspring, what social norms made domestic rape of a native housekeeper by a European man a private issue and the "attempted rape" of a European woman by a native man an incitement to stricter labor laws and a public call to arms—were the concerns of those who ruled and categories fundamental to racialized imperial states. These are not merely good illustrations of how colonial privileges and deprivations were unequally distributed; they are the ground of contestations.	3
Robert J. McMahon is concerned that in a "rush to explore new and academically fashionable topics" we might "forget that older, still-critical topics also demand sustained scrutiny." I agree. The "older, still-critical topics" ("the use of coercive and noncoercive means to maintain order and control," "empire's role in domestic politics") seemed, to those who governed the Netherlands Indies, French Indochina, and British India, problems that were exacerbated and might be resolved by a redistribution of sentiments and sexual access.3	. . .