Within colonialism, or the expansion and maintenance of the sovereignty of one group of people over another, sexuality has played an important role in the representation of the colonized Other, in the drawing and policing of racial, ethnic, and cultural boundaries, and in the ways in which colonial subjects produced livelihoods and imagined futures. Through sexual imaginaries, colonial actors constructed and contested arguments about race and culture, difference and sameness, superiority and inferiority, morality and indecency. By classifying the intimate desires and bodily pleasures of the colonized as “sex,” for example, colonials could prove that these deviated from bourgeois standards of morality and thus required their “enlightened” intervention and reform. The historical legacies of colonial sexual politics continue to shape the lived realities of postcolonial subjects in a variety of ways.