Unnatural 'Crimes' and 'Natural' rights: Theorising Queer White Colonialisms

Abstract

Within the discipline of history there has of late been an important move towards acknowledging queer histories, including recounting the experiences of ‘queer pioneers’, archiving the achievements of early movements, and rereading historical narratives for the queer stories they contain. Lacking, however, has been a sustained engagement with the role of white people (variously identified as ‘queer’) in the project of colonialism. This paper attempts to map out some of this largely neglected terrain by exploring how it is that white men who we may now tentatively label ‘queer’ were indeed often subject to laws pertaining to sodomy or ‘indecent exposure with a male’, yet were also recognised at times as property owning subjects, and were thus complicit with what Moreton-Robinson terms ‘the possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty’. Through a brief examination of one particular case brought to court between two white men in the mid 1800s, I highlight the importance of examining such accounts for the traces of both homophobic violence and white race privilege contained within them. From this perspective, accounts of queer race privilege may be understood not as yet another ‘tool for the oppressor’, but rather as a mode of accountability that recognises the paradoxes that shape white queer lives.