Whiteness, Masculinity and the Ambivalent Embodiment of ‘British Justice’ in Colonial Burma

Abstract

When British judges in colonial South Asia attempted to perform their duties with detached objectivity they were also performatively enacting a particular construction of imperial white masculinity. This was an ambivalent embodied enactment. When the figure of the objective judge was confronted by critics as white and male, its claims to be objective were under threat. As a result of this ambivalence, it was an imperial white masculinity that could not name itself. Instead, it was a white masculinity constructed through a differentiation that was made with feminised, non-white bodies that were deemed partial.