"Virgin Territory"

This week an aspect of our discussion stuck with me because in another class we discussed something similar, the idea of "Virgin Territory." In my other class and in ours we discussed how men feminize foreign lands to make the taking over of it seem feasable. In my other class we read an excerpt by Anne McClintock entitled "Women as the Boundary Markers of Empire." It discusses the way in which men feminize foreign lands, uncharted oceans with depictions of mermaids and sirens, and epitomize "truth" as female. They do this to offset their "male anxiety and boundary loss" that is ignited by the unknown lands. This sense of boundary loss connected in my mind to Frauds idea of castration, in which a male sees the woman's lack of a penis and fears his own castration, in this way the male conqueror sees the foreign lands vulnerability and lack of finite borders and therefore feminizes that land to ease his mind that the same will not happen to his country. So this idea of feminizing the land so that its "virgin territory" can be "penetrated" is one that goes as far back as the colonization of America and continues today.