The Cost of "Reproducing Empire"

In the first part of Brigg’s text she outlines the implications of the imperial distribution of prostitution laws in British India. By creating laws such as the CD Acts, the British government created a new dimension of classes organized by means of upper-class officers, and the working class short-term enlisted men. By constructing norms of an upper-class officer as forming a nuclear family, and the short-term enlisted men as potential heads of a nuclear family, the CD Acts implemented racial purity that would essentially provide for a white, English, family. In an effort to further the means of racial purity, the British imperialists manifested a panic over syphilis that resulted in the bureaucratization of the monitoring of prostitutes. By forcing all prostitutes in British India to be registered and to receive gynecological investigation, the government was able to enforce class systems within the society surrounding the enlisted men. The prostitutes became limited in “their mobility to segregated districts…and sometimes restricting their clients by race” (Briggs, 27). By monitoring and registering prostitutes, the imperialists were then able to monitor the racial interaction that took place with men that they would later expect to become the heads of nuclear families. Out of all of this is the perpetuated idea that it is women who cause the ailing of Puerto Rico. The Puerto Rican feminist is ignored because they do not play the part assigned to them by western feminisms, which deem they must be poor and uneducated. All of this to further the role of the western feminist as the savior to the Puerto Rican woman, who is adamantly opposed to colonialism yet prescribes to the belief that it is western domesticity and liberal democracy that are the solutions to the Third World status. There is a western narrative of the Puerto Ricans who would never lobby for birth control and sterilization because of their inability to be a progressive, their dark complexions, and their primitive ahistorical beliefs. The same western feminist idea of progress that reduces the Puerto Rican feminists to a status in which they are not like “real natives” is what ultimately works against these same western anti-colonialists. These liberal anti-colonialists who rant about the equality of women ignore Puerto Rican feminists accomplishments to further the narrative that they are the true defendants of the future of a Puerto Rican feminism. Those who claim to be defendants of sexual exploitation and oppression use sexuality as a political tool. By using

            Universalism of women gives women more political and legal agency. It affords them a status of a class that must be legally and politically equal. Yet, when these feminists in the west homogenize the third world woman it is ultimately counterintuitive in this instance. Because the narrative of a Puerto Rican genocide subconsciously aligns them with the idea of sterilization and birth control as a genocide that has been preached against by the Catholic Church and anti-feminists alike. Therefore, the cost of legal and political agency is a loss of individual identity. At what point is it clear that the agency granted to one nation of women is at the cost of the women of another? Is this agency worth the degradation and political weakness of women in another nation? Can one consider themselves a feminist to say yes?