Imperialism
Imperialism has long been a keyword for gender and sexuality studies, especially if we take Indigenous, Black, transnational, and woman of color feminisms and queer of color theories as the field’s starting point and its foundational moment. In these scholarly conversations, imperialism has two primary meanings. The first refers to the expansion of a nation-state through force and violence into territories, contiguous or noncontiguous, by taking over land or “holding political dominion or control over dependent territories,” as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED Online, “imperialism,” n.d.) puts it, or some combination of the two. The second meaning focuses on what the OED refers to as “the extension and maintenance of a country’s power or influence” through “commercial imperialism, economic imperialism; cultural, dollar, linguistic imperialism.” Both land and influence-based forms of imperialism, which often overlap in practice, are inseparable from gender and sexuality in terms of how imperial nation-states and sites of empire are imagined as well as in imperialism’s entanglement with formations of race, gender, and sexuality, such as the white patriarchal family, in struggles over land and political, economic, and cultural power.