This term, employed by Robert Young in a recent study (1995), indicates the extent to which colonialist discourse was pervaded by sexuality. The idea of colonization itself is grounded in a sexualized discourse of rape,penetration and impregnation,whilst the subsequent relationship of the colonizer and colonized is often presented in a discourse that is redolent of a sexualized exoticism.Thus,even the positive features of colonial attitudes in discourses such as orientalism, reflect an eroticized vision that is fundamentally reductive. Ideas of the seductive but enervating world of the ‘native’, to which the colonizer yields at his (or even more her) peril,lead to formulations such as going native, which embody the simultaneous lure and threat of the other.As Young has shown,the discourse of colonialism is pervaded by images of transgressive sexuality, of an obsession with the idea of the hybrid and miscegenated,and with persistent fantasies of inter-racial sex. He concludes that sexuality is the direct and congruent legacy of the commercial discourse of early colonial encounters, the traffic of commerce and the traffic of sexuality being complementary and intertwined:

as in that paradigm of respectability, marriage, economic and sexual exchange were intimately bound up,coupled with each other, from the very first. The history of the meanings of the word ‘commerce’ includes the exchange both of merchandise and of bodies in sexual intercourse. It was therefore wholly appropriate that sexual exchange and its miscegenated product, which captures the violent antagonistic power relations of sexual and cultural  diffusion, should become the dominant paradigm through which the passionate economic and political trafficking of colonialism was conceived. (Young 1995: 181–182)