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Aware of the contribution of the literate elite to British imperialism, this paper investigates, by examination of fictional texts and essays by Victorian writers and literary critics such as Alfred Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, the instrumentality of gender in the invention of racial difference that sought to justify the colonization of Ireland. Through the sources investigated, we found that the Celts were feminized as antitheses of the "manly" Anglo-Saxons because of their alleged emotional and intellectual weakness, being thus equated to metropolitan women in representations which amalgamated racism and sexism. Thanks to the concatenation between racial and gender stereotypes, the antinomy male/female allowed the elaboration of disjunctions aimed at naturalizing asymmetries between empire and colony under the alibis of "natural" gender complementarity and hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]