Minor Articulations: Racialized Emotions and the "Malayan 'Sexual Perversion' Cases" in Late Colonial Singapore, 1938.
Jack Jin Gary Lee is Assistant Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. His scholarship explores how race and law shape the social logics and processes of governance in modern empires and (post)colonial states.
Gary’s projects and publications range across historical sociology, colonialism and empire, law and society, global health regulation, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and international migration. Together with Professor Lynette J. Chua, he co-edited Contagion, Technology and Law at the Limits (Hart Publishing). His recent article, “Racialized Legalities: The Rule of Law, Race, and the Protection of Women in Britain’s Crown Colonies 1886-1890,” in Law and Social Inquiry, was recognized with the 2024 Best Scholarly Article Award by the American Sociological Association’s Section on Global and Transnational Sociology.
For his GIDEST seminar, Gary will present a paper in progress entitled Minor Articulations: Racialized Emotions and the “Malayan ‘Sexual Perversion’ Cases” in Late-Colonial Singapore, 1938.
In 1938, colonial officials in Singapore and London were fixated on the fate of a magistrate R, who was suspected of sexual misconduct with Asian men. His case was a sign of things to come, as other high-ranking male officials and elites were also implicated in what the Colonial Office called the “Malayan ‘sexual perversion’ cases.” As this article narrates, such same-sex relation between European men and their Asian counterparts formed part of the repressed underlives of the modern British empire: in practice, colonial domination fostered unequal, sticky intimacies – what I call “minor articulations” – that unsettled the rule of colonial difference. Adapting Patil’s (2022) methodology of “thinking sideways” to feel sideways and pursue the affective ties that actors form with others, I draw on a declassified file on R’s disciplinary hearing and delve into the pivotal testimonies of the Asian witnesses who spoke against him. Bringing their utterances and embodied standpoints to the foreground, this methodological shift unsettles the colonial gaze and disposition of the archives. Conceptualizing minor articulations as ambivalent feelings and relations that point to differing social horizons, this article offers a counter-history to demonstrate how researchers might re-orient ourselves toward obscured practices at the margins.
