Governing sexuality helps states and institutions to bootstrap into power; sexual rules and norms are not expressions of preexisting power.

Sexual categories and classifications are the means of producing colonial institutions, not the other way around. By arrogating the power to define, name, and govern subjects to themselves alone, colonial institutions produce the very power they presume.

Moral discourses about sexuality are strategies for naturalizing institutional classifications and obscuring the existence of sexual variation. For example, moral frameworks the position the white nuclear family above other forms of kinship is a means by which colonial institutions justify their claims to authority.

To write about “colonized sexuality” isn’t to recover or include sexual minorities in an existing system of representation or adjudication; it is to recognize how colonial power informs all sexual practices and to seek a transformation in the relations of intimacy, kinship, and reproduction.