Description: The "femininity" of colonized territories and subjects has provided Orientalist narrative with its most abiding metaphor for the exoticism of the East, and rape has served as the most enduring paradigmatic trope for colonial relations. Revathi Krishnaswamy argues, however, that this ravishment is often more about emasculating a male than about possessing a female. She suggests that the real goal of this feminization of colonized territory is actually effeminization -- a process in which colonizing men use women and womanhood to delegitimize, discredit, and disempower colonized men. Uncovering an intricate nexus of race, caste, class, gender, sexuality, nation, moral legitimacy, and economic/political power -- a nexus Krishnaswamy terms "effeminism" -- this study establishes the homosocial dynamics of colonial desire.

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