Esther Captain is the author of the chapter ‘Sexual restraint, substitution, transgression and extreme sexual violence across the late-colonial and postcolonial Indonesia’ in: Dagmar Herzog and Chelsea Shields (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism, New York/London: Routledge, forthcoming June 2021. A book on gender, sexuality, race, global studies, world history, Indigeneity, and settler colonialism.

In Captain’s chapter, the sometimes opaque, hidden and contradictory manifestations of sexuality in the late-colonial Dutch East Indies and postcolonial Indonesia are read alongside each other. Strict control and policing of intimate interactions, relations, sexuality, and reproduction was paramount in order to create and maintain racial hierarchies with its embedded inequality between Europeans and Indonesians. It is based on scrutinizing diaries written by (Indo-)European women and men during the Japanese occupation (1942-1945) as well as the subsequent Bersiap-period (1945-1946).

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