Bitchy History - Exporting the Binary： How the Empire Made “Man” and “Woman” the Only Options

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Bitchy History, where we cut through the myths and nostalgia to get to the raw, 1.00

00:00:17.380 unvarnished truth about the past. With sharp analysis, a feminist lens, and just the right 0.99

00:00:22.640 amount of bitchiness, we're here to show you that history isn't just something to study, 0.97

00:00:26.300 it's something to question. Let's get started. 1.00

00:00:30.000 And welcome back! This episode is a day late, if you're keeping count. For those of you that

00:00:36.620 read my substack, you'll know that I am back in school for a second master's in gender studies,

00:00:40.880 and there's quite a lot of reading for that, which I fell behind on last week. That took

00:00:45.620 priority over recording, and I know you all understand that. Also, I have a meeting to

00:00:50.400 discuss a PhD application later this week, so that's exciting. Now on to today's episode,

00:00:55.780 Exporting the Binary, How Colonialism Made Man and Woman the Only Options.

00:01:00.800 Imagine this. You're a European missionary in the days of the Age of Discovery.

00:01:04.860 You've brought your Bible and the smug conviction that you know best. 0.99

00:01:08.520 You look around at a world full of gender systems that don't make sense to you. 0.88

00:01:12.780 Women who own property, men who wear skirts, people who are neither or both, 0.96

00:01:16.720 and you think, well, that won't do. 0.91

00:01:19.560 That moment, right there, is when gender as we know it became a colonial export.

00:01:24.780 Empires didn't just claim land and labor, they colonized identity itself. 0.77

00:01:29.460 The British, Spanish, French, and Portuguese empires remade entire societies in their own image,

00:01:34.820 which meant enforcing their favorite myth, that humanity comes in only two flavors, 0.96

00:01:39.700 man and woman, and that one of them should always be in charge.

00:01:43.560 When we talk about colonization, we usually picture ships, guns, flags, 0.95

00:01:47.340 but just as important were the softer weapons, schools, censuses, marriage laws, and the missionary classroom.

00:01:53.960 all enforcing a binary that had never existed in most of the world before Europeans arrived.

00:01:59.600 That's what this episode is about, how the colonial world order wasn't just a hierarchy

00:02:04.020 of race or class, it was a hierarchy of gender, and the blueprint for it still structures our

00:02:09.300 world today. Colonialism was many things, a land grab, a labor system, a global trade network, 0.53

00:02:14.800 but it was also the institutionalization of Western patriarchy on a global scale.

00:02:20.300 That's not to say that patriarchal or hierarchical power structures didn't exist globally before

00:02:25.260 colonialism, but Europeans exported their particular version obsessively.

00:02:30.540 In her analysis of gender in colonial societies, archaeologist Suzanne Spencer Wood argued that

00:02:36.060 empire didn't just bring guns and governance, it also brought domestic ideology.

00:02:40.620 The household became a microcosm of the empire.

00:02:44.240 Men ruled, women obeyed, and everyone else was conveniently written out of existence. 0.78

00:02:48.220 From British India to the Caribbean plantations, colonial rule built gender as an administrative 0.99

00:02:53.540 category. Women's labor was reclassified as help, men were recast as head of household, 0.99

00:02:59.620 and the ideal home, orderly, paternalistic, and Christian, became the moral justification for 0.85

00:03:04.960 empire. Missionaries and colonial officials described this as civilizing indigenous societies.

00:03:11.040 In practice, it meant criminalizing matrilineal inheritance, dismantling women's market networks,

00:03:16.060 in outlawing third-gender and non-binary identities. Gender was standardized to fit

00:03:21.120 Western European expectations, one that defined the masculine European subject as the only full

00:03:26.160 person and everyone else as a derivative. You can see this logic spelled out in bureaucratic detail.

00:03:31.920 The census, one of the favorite tools of empire, literally forced colonized people into male and

00:03:36.860 female boxes, even in societies where gender had been fluid or status-based. In Yoruba land,

00:03:42.420 for instance, social hierarchy was once based on age and seniority, not sex. But under British 0.58

00:03:47.440 rule, the colonial state declared women as a separate subordinate category, essentially 0.84

00:03:52.200 inventing the idea of gender difference in Yoruba law. And once you name something difference,

00:03:57.980 you can justify controlling it. That's the coloniality of gender, a term coined by

00:04:02.980 decolonial feminist Maria Lugones, who describes how empire didn't just exploit existing 0.94

00:04:08.860 patriarchies, it built a new global one. Race and gender became co-constructed. Whiteness was

00:04:14.740 masculine, reasoned, modern, and everything else was feminized, emotional, and backward. 1.00

00:04:19.860 Colonialism didn't discover gender, it produced it, as a tool for managing bodies and power. 0.97

00:04:25.660 Colonialism needed the gender binary as much as it needed private property and Christian morality. 0.72

00:04:30.740 Long before the British started filing census forms or the French drafted civilizing missions, 0.86

00:04:35.800 Columbus was already writing the world's first instruction manual on gendered conquest. 0.99

00:04:41.580 In her brilliant essay, A Breast of Columbus, scholar Margarita Zamora shows how the so-called

00:04:46.340 Age of Discovery was never just about geography. It was about sex, gender, and power. The capitulations

00:04:52.400 of Santa Fe, the royal contract commissioning Columbus's 1492 voyage, use the language of

00:04:58.360 complir, meaning to fulfill and to satisfy. That word alone tells you everything. Conquest as

00:05:05.100 consummation. Columbus literally framed his journey as complying with the queen's command,

00:05:10.360 transforming imperial expansion into an act of penetration, loyalty, and desire. From its very

00:05:16.160 first mention on paper, the new world was feminized, a blank waiting body to be filled, 0.97

00:05:21.480 tamed, and renamed. Zamora points out that Columbus's journal read like a seduction diary,

00:05:27.260 the sea as a woman, the land as a virgin, the voyage as intercourse. His words turn discovery

00:05:32.560 into textual seduction, writing as domination, mapping as possession. And he wasn't alone. For

00:05:38.740 centuries afterward, European explorers wrote about the Americas in erotic metaphors. The land

00:05:44.260 wasn't simply fertile, it was fertile and ripe to be conquered. Sir Walter Raleigh described Guinea

00:05:50.000 as a country that hath yet her maidenhead, comparing an entire region to a virgin bride

00:05:55.660 waiting for the right man to claim her. Every map, every letter, every report returned the same

00:06:01.460 metaphor, the new world as a woman, untouched, pure, and available, if only the right European 0.99

00:06:07.160 could make her yield. Conquest was never just economic or political, it was sexual. The act 0.97

00:06:13.020 of taking land was imagined as taking a woman, her fertility proof of its worth, her virginity 0.98

00:06:18.340 proof that it was waiting to be used. But the metaphor didn't stop with the land, it extended 0.73

00:06:22.880 to the people who lived on it. Indigenous women were eroticized, fetishized, and feared. Their 1.00

00:06:28.080 nakedness appeared in nearly every European travel log, presented not just as titillation,

00:06:33.200 but as evidence of moral inferiority. Unclothed meant uncivilized, ungoverned, and therefore

00:06:38.700 available, for conversion or for exploitation. Indigenous men, on the other hand, were depicted 0.95

00:06:44.360 as impotent. Their society's divisions of labor didn't align with Europe's gender hierarchies.

00:06:49.220 Across much of the Americas, women farmed while men hunted or fished, a balance that worked

00:06:54.020 perfectly well with indigenous ecological systems, but to European eyes, it looked backward. By the

00:06:59.840 15th century, European masculinity had very much tied itself to agriculture and technology.

00:07:05.160 The invention of the steel plow, the horseshoe, and new high-yield crops had turned farming into 0.94

00:07:09.580 a mark of masculine control over nature. Real men cultivated the land, or they employed the men who 0.99

00:07:15.420 did. Hunting was for leisure and sport among classes that dictated gender norms. So when 0.91

00:07:20.780 explorers saw indigenous men hunting while women farmed, they concluded that native men were lazy,

00:07:26.420 effeminate, and undeserving of the land they occupied. To them, a society where women tilled 0.99

00:07:31.180 the soil and men didn't was unnatural, a gender inversion that proved in their minds the need for

00:07:36.680 European intervention. In letters and diaries, colonizers described the land itself as a woman 0.93

00:07:42.300 whose womb lay barren, not truly cultivated until plowed by European hands. This wasn't just

00:07:48.120 misogyny, it was legal logic. If the people of the Americas were failing to husband the earth 0.97

00:07:53.180 properly, then they didn't deserve it. The accusation of laziness became the moral loophole 0.98

00:07:58.220 for dispossession, the perfect justification for taking what others had nurtured for centuries. 0.83

00:08:03.360 European explorers didn't just eroticize indigenous women, they also demonized them. 0.99

00:08:07.780 The New World was full of stories of dangerous women that haunted European imaginations.

00:08:13.180 Amerigo Vespucci wrote lurid tales of female cannibals who attacked and devoured Spanish

00:08:18.460 sailors. Columbus and Cortez spread rumors of Amazon-like warrior women who lived without men,

00:08:24.120 hoarded gold and jewels, and killed any male who entered their territory. 0.98

00:08:28.100 Other accounts warned of women who supposedly forced their husbands to enlarge their penises 0.94

00:08:32.240 through painful and dangerous rituals, exotic fantasies masquerading as ethnography.

00:08:38.100 These stories weren't anthropology. They were pornography. The wild woman of the New World 0.96

00:08:43.060 became the erotic opposite of Europe's ideal housewife, powerful where she should be submissive,

00:08:48.620 sexual where she should be modest, free where she should be owned. Such narratives served

00:08:53.540 double purpose. They warned European men of the dangers of ungoverned femininity and justified 0.99

00:08:58.900 their conquest as a moral rescue. If the land was wild, it needed cultivation. If the women 0.82

00:09:04.140 were dangerous, they needed civilization. In both cases, domination was recast as salvation. 1.00

00:09:10.580 And the more the empire expanded, the more it had to police who counted as man or woman. 0.95

00:09:15.960 Colonialism defined gender as a European possession, something either had correctly

00:09:20.400 or didn't. Colonized people were said to lack proper gender. African men were effeminate or

00:09:26.180 primitive, indigenous women unfeminine or beastly. Gender became a metric of civilization. For the 1.00

00:09:32.520 British, this binary logic justified domination. Victorian officials claimed to protect colonized

00:09:38.220 women from their own cultures, outlawing sati in India, polygyny in Africa, and female labor

00:09:44.420 outside the home. As Gayatri Spivak famously summarized it, white men saving brown women from

00:09:50.000 brown men. But as Shirley Foster's article Colonialism and Gender in the East shows,

00:09:55.380 the empire's rescue missions were never about women's rights. They were about proving British

00:10:00.240 moral superiority. Colonial administrators built ideal femininity into the machinery of empire. 0.61

00:10:06.480 Women were supposed to be pious, domestic, and delicate, a living emblem of civilization. 0.99

00:10:11.540 At the same time, they fetishized the other woman. Veiled, mysterious, sexualized, exotic. 0.99

00:10:17.300 French and British Orientalist art from the 18th and 19th century turned the harem into a visual

00:10:21.980 metaphor for empire, the colonizer's fantasy of control over both land and women. Foster notes

00:10:28.360 that female travelers like Lady Mary Wortley Montague and Isabella Bird sometimes resisted

00:10:33.520 this narrative, but even they couldn't escape it. Their writing simultaneously admired and

00:10:38.540 civilized the women they encountered, sympathy as supremacy. This wasn't just voyeurism,

00:10:43.900 it was governance. By defining colonized women as victims, empire legitimized its paternalistic role. 0.70

00:10:49.580 And by defining colonized men as dangerous, it justified their surveillance, imprisonment,

00:10:54.120 and emasculation. The colonial gender order was a perfect paradox. It claimed to uplift women 0.98

00:10:59.560 while silencing them, to protect virtue while policing their bodies. And it was always, always, 0.66

00:11:05.140 always racialized. Black, brown, and indigenous women were branded as hypersexual and immoral, 0.99

00:11:11.360 excuses for enslavement, exploitation, and sterilization campaigns that lasted well 0.87

00:11:15.700 into the 20th century. European women, meanwhile, were portrayed as moral beacons whose purity 0.92

00:11:20.920 proved imperial rightness. Gender wasn't a side effect of colonization, it was the manual for it. 1.00

00:11:27.400 But how do you change generations of indigenous culture? Well, you start with the kids, 0.99

00:11:32.460 and that's exactly what colonial education did. Missionary schools didn't just teach reading and

00:11:37.740 religion, they taught gender. In Japan, as Junko Dazono writes in Teaching Alternative

00:11:43.120 Indigenous Gender Systems, colonial and missionary curricula defined boys as future leaders and girls

00:11:49.080 as future wives. Indigenous and local pedagogies that valued cooperation, communal roles, or gender

00:11:55.040 diversity were replaced with Western character education, discipline, hierarchy, and the two-sex

00:12:00.820 model. This wasn't accidental, it was a long-term strategy to reproduce empire through the family.

00:12:06.940 Colonial classrooms made the binary seem natural. Girls were trained for domestic crafts, boys for 0.92

00:12:12.360 governance. Even the architecture of schools reflected it. Separate entrances, uniforms,

00:12:17.180 even textbooks that reinforced who belonged in public life and who didn't.

00:12:21.680 Dazono argues that one of the most radical things educators can do today is to teach the

00:12:25.820 uncolonized past, to remind students that gender diversity existed long before Western science

00:12:31.460 discovered it. The two-spirit identities of indigenous North Americans, the Hijra of South

00:12:36.580 Asia, the Mukse of the Oaxaca, the Mahua of the Hawaii, all of which I've probably horribly

00:12:42.520 mispronounced, all predate European contact. They were erased by colonialism, not invented by woke 0.53

00:12:49.100 blue-haired liberals. And the erasure wasn't just ideological, it was violent. The British Criminal

00:12:55.040 Tribes Act of 1871 labeled hijras as habitual sodomites and banned their ceremonies. In North

00:13:01.660 America, Christian boarding schools cut two-spirit children's hair, burned their clothes, and beat 0.99

00:13:06.320 them for cross-dressing. This was more than assimilation, it was gender genocide, and Europe 0.97

00:13:11.460 had been perfecting it on their own people for years, so they were pretty damn good at it. 1.00

00:13:16.060 Long before European ships left port, the continent had already declared war on women's 1.00

00:13:20.320 bodies through the witch hunts. As Mona Chollet points out in In Defense of Witches, these weren't 1.00

00:13:26.340 isolated moral panics. They were a systemic purge of women, and sometimes men, who refused to fit

00:13:31.740 patriarchal order. Healers, widows, midwives, spinsters. By the 16th century, tens of thousands

00:13:37.960 were tortured and killed across Europe. Ronald Hutton notes that the witch became a prototype 0.82

00:13:42.440 of fear itself, the embodiment of what happened when women acted without male permission.

00:13:47.700 The witch trials coincided with what historians call the dawn of modernity, 0.83

00:13:51.740 not the Middle Ages. Printing presses churned out manuals like the Malleus Maleficarum,

00:13:56.900 which insisted that women were weak-minded, oversexed, and easily seduced by the devil. 0.99

00:14:01.780 Basically an early version of she was asking for it. This violence wasn't medieval superstition, 0.98

00:14:07.220 it was bureaucracy. Civil courts, not the Inquisition, carried out executions. Witch

00:14:12.640 hunting was modernization in motion, paperwork, procedure, and patriarchy working hand in hand. 0.72

00:14:18.380 And as Chalet reminds us, the mindset didn't vanish, it just evolved. Today we still put

00:14:23.260 women on trial, for aging, for being single, for not having kids, for having too many kids,

00:14:28.280 for saying no, and for not saying no loud enough. When European empires expanded, 0.90

00:14:33.020 they took that fear of unruly women with them. Colonized societies were civilized by stamping 1.00

00:14:38.440 out whatever resembled witchcraft, midwifery, or female spiritual authority. Traditional healers 0.99

00:14:44.000 and shamans were demonized. Their knowledge recast as superstition. Colonialism didn't just

00:14:48.960 create racial hierarchies. It built global misogyny. The witch became a transcontinental

00:14:54.480 figure. African diviners became labeled sorcerers. Indigenous medicine women branded devil worshipers.

00:15:00.280 By the 18th century, Europeans believed they'd outgrown witchcraft.

00:15:04.620 The superstition was something only other cultures still clung to.

00:15:08.240 Europeans projected their own past onto colonized peoples,

00:15:11.440 treating them as living fossils of Europe's Dark Age.

00:15:14.780 So while witch trials declined in Europe, they were revived in Africa and Asia, 0.98

00:15:18.940 this time to combat native backwardness. 1.00

00:15:22.420 British colonial officers in Kenya and Nigeria outlawed witchcraft,

00:15:26.240 but the laws were based entirely on European fantasy.

00:15:29.400 Colonial courts tried thousands of people for crimes they couldn't define,

00:15:33.520 while missionaries observed native witch dances as evidence of savagery. 0.71

00:15:38.060 The same logic governed gender. 0.87

00:15:39.940 Colonized women were treated as Europe's pre-modern counterparts, 0.96

00:15:43.500 proof of how far the West had progressed. 1.00

00:15:46.040 Colonialism feminized the colonized and demonized femininity.

00:15:49.920 European men presented themselves as rational fathers

00:15:52.680 correcting emotional, childish societies. 0.61

00:15:54.940 It was patriarchy masquerading as progress.

00:15:58.600 So how did these ideas shape the years after colonialism fell out of fashion

00:16:02.280 and Manifest Destiny came into vogue?

00:16:04.980 American expansion was justified through the same concept, domesticity. 1.00

00:16:09.380 Settler women were depicted as helpless homemakers surrounded by dangerous savages. 0.98

00:16:13.940 Their protection became the moral excuse for conquest. 0.98

00:16:17.060 This cult of domesticity spread through newspapers, sermons, and schoolbooks, 0.99

00:16:21.040 the same cultural machinery that taught British girls to be angels of the house 0.86

00:16:24.900 and African girls to be servants in one.

00:16:27.540 Spencer Wood calls this the architectural arm of patriarchy. 0.99

00:16:31.200 Kitchens, parlors, and schoolrooms as ideological backgrounds.

00:16:34.960 Colonial architecture literally encoded hierarchy.

00:16:37.700 The master's quarters elevated, the servant's hut sunk, and women's spaces completely enclosed. 0.92

00:16:43.300 When we talk about gender today, who gets paid, who gets heard, who has to get home before dark,

00:16:48.220 we're still working through those blueprints.

00:16:50.960 The colonial gender order didn't die with independence, it went corporate.

00:16:54.260 Post-colonial nations inherited colonial laws that policed sexuality and family life.

00:17:00.360 Britain's Section 377 criminalized unnatural acts in India, Singapore, and Nigeria,

00:17:05.800 and it wasn't repealed in India until 2018.

00:17:09.140 Anti-cross-dressing laws from the Victorian era survive across the Caribbean and Pacific today. 1.00

00:17:14.580 Meanwhile, Western feminism often repeats imperial habits, 0.98

00:17:18.360 saving Muslim women through military intervention,

00:17:21.640 exporting empowerment while ignoring local women's opinions and cultures. 0.56

00:17:25.860 Spivak's warning, white men saving brown women from brown men, 0.51

00:17:29.380 still describes half of foreign policy today. 0.79

00:17:32.560 Maria Lugones' idea of the colonial and modern gender system explains why these patterns persist. 1.00

00:17:38.440 Empire hardwired the world to think of gender, race, and civilization as one thing, 0.99

00:17:43.580 binary, hierarchical, and profitable. 0.80

00:17:46.120 Undoing that requires what Lugones calls decolonial love.

00:17:49.680 relationships based on mutual recognition rather than domination.

00:17:54.020 Across the world, that work is beginning to happen.

00:17:56.700 Hijra activists in South Asia demand legal recognition.

00:18:00.080 Two-spirit collectives reclaim sacred space in the Americas.

00:18:03.740 Afro-Brazilian priestesses lead feminist movements rooted in ancestral beliefs.

00:18:08.580 So what did the empire really leave behind?

00:18:10.760 Not just borders or railways, but the operating system of identity itself.

00:18:15.840 Colonialism, as I said, didn't invent patriarchy.

00:18:18.760 it just industrialized it. It took thousands of ways of being human and fed them in through the

00:18:24.180 same factory line, flattening them into two stamped molds marked man and woman, branded by

00:18:29.680 race, religion, and reproductive duty. But here's the good news. Those molds are cracking. Not

00:18:35.440 because the West suddenly got enlightened, but because the people it tried to erase refused to

00:18:40.220 stay invisible. Thank you so much for tuning in to the first three episodes of the first arc of

00:18:45.480 Bitchy History's new season on the history of women. This arc in particular is titled Inventing

00:18:50.900 Womanhood, and it's all about how society is built, defined, and weaponized the very idea of

00:18:55.680 woman, from theology to science to empire. We'll be finishing up this arc with an episode that

00:19:01.120 takes us back to one of the most cataclysmic turning points in Western history, the Black

00:19:05.200 Death. It's the mid-1300s, and half of Europe has died, and suddenly there's a labor shortage so

00:19:11.000 bad that the patriarchy has to improvise. With men dead or gone, women step in, running shops, 0.97

00:19:17.000 managing farms, brewing beer, healing the sick, and even taking over trades that had always been 1.00

00:19:21.660 men's work. For a brief, strange moment, the apocalypse opened doors that centuries of custom

00:19:26.960 had nailed shut. But, as always, equality was treated like a temporary fix, not a long-term

00:19:32.380 upgrade. In The Great Reset, Women After the Black Death, we'll explore how crisis created

00:19:37.260 space for women, and how that space was swiftly taken away once the emergency was over. Because

00:19:42.560 if history has taught us anything, it's that women's advances are too often treated as accidents

00:19:46.820 of necessity, not rights of humanity. That's it for this episode of Bitchy History. If you enjoyed 1.00

00:19:55.000 the show, don't keep it to yourself. Subscribe, review, and share it with someone who loves

00:19:59.480 history as much as we do. Until next time, stay curious and keep questioning the world around you.

00:20:05.080 history history history history what a bitch right 0.99

00:20:35.080 Thank you. 1.00

00:21:05.080 Thank you.

00:21:35.080 Thank you.

00:22:05.080 Thank you.

00:22:35.080 Thank you.

00:23:05.080 You

Bitchy History - November 10, 2025

Exporting the Binary： How the Empire Made “Man” and “Woman” the Only Options

Episode Stats

Transcript