Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into ‘Houseboys’

Abstract

In Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, Aboriginal men made up more than half of the domestic servant population by 1938. They replaced the Chinese and Malay male servants who had worked for British colonists in the early colonial period. Much of the historical work on male domestic servants in colonial situations plots the construction of the ‘houseboy’ as emasculated, feminised and submissive. In contrast, colonial constructions of Aboriginal men as ‘houseboys’ in Darwin emphasise the masculinity of the Aboriginal hunter. Aboriginal men were characterised as requiring constant discipline and training, and this paternalistic discourse led to a corresponding denial of manhood or adulthood for Aboriginal men. While male domestic servants in other colonial settings were allowed some privileges of masculinity in relation to female workers, amongst Aboriginal domestic workers, it was so‐called ‘half‐caste’ women who, in acknowledgment of their ‘white blood’, received nominally higher wages and privileges for domestic work. Aboriginal men were denied what was referred to as a ‘breadwinning’ wage; an Australian wage awarded to white men with families. Despite this, their role as husbands was encouraged by the administration as a method of controlling sexual relations between white men and Aboriginal women. These sometimes contradictory images can be understood as manifestations of the racialised construction of gender in Australia.

“The Weight on Our Shoulders Is Too Much, and We Are Falling”

“…Indeed, the words “man” and “hunter” in the Inuit language of Inuktitut are derivative of each other, and hunting has decreased among Inuit male youth. Colonization has been gendered, so that Indigenous masculinity has been devalued (Brody ; Kapila ; Lawrence ; Martinez and Lowrie ; Said ). Other gender‐related behaviors changed within Inuit settlements.…”

Tropical whites: Hegemonic masculinity and menswear at the crossroads of Australia and Asia, 1900–1939

“…In Darwin, Aboriginal servants of either sex received two shillings a week plus clothes, far less even than the six shillings a week paid to female servants categorised by racist officials and laws as 'half-caste'. 61 In Broome, government legislation only required employers to provide board, clothing, and just enough money to go to the pictures and buy tobacco and sweets each week. 62 Before the Immigration Restriction Act came into force (1901 in Western Australia, and 1911 in the Northern Territory), Chinese, Indian or Malay servants had been mostly responsible for the upkeep of white menswear.…”

“…The power differential was greatest between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men working as domestic servants and their employers clad in well-laundered made-to-measure white suits, given that most of the former had to settle for second-hand clothes provided by their employers. 64 The material difficulties of maintaining white cloth and shoe-leather in the tropics was thus integral to the prestige they bestowed on their wearers, and the thrill of empowerment they allowed some to feel.…”

Introduction to the Special Issue: Men in a Woman’s Job, Male Domestic Workers, International Migration and the Globalization of Care

“…Studies on men employed as domestic workers in contemporary societies are rare (Bartolomei 2005;Scrinzi 2005;Sarti 2009;Ambrosini and Beccalli 2009) and mainly focus on Asian and African countries (Tranberg Hansen 1989;Chin 1998;Bujra 2000;Ray 2000;Chopra 2006). Unlike social scientists, historians have devoted some attention to male domestic workers (Sarti 1997a with further references), probably because they were often numerous in the past, both in Europe (Sarti 1997a) and, as far as we know, in many other regions of the world (e.g., Banerjee 2004;Martinez and Lowrie 2009). Yet more or less everywhere, domestic service-because of a variety of factors too complex to be discussed here-underwent a process of feminization, although the timing and intensity of this process, of course, were not the same in every context (Sarti 1997b;Moya 2007).…”