This dissertation aims to explore the complex network of practices, relations and imaginaries that underwrote the intimate and the everyday lives of women in colonial Netherlands during the first half of the 20th-century. This period was marked by intense development in the cities, rural exodus and migration from/to/within the colonies, changes in housing patterns, and policies regulating family and female life. Although the Dutch colonial empire was a center of capital flows during colonialism, its participation in these dynamics of violence and asymmetry remains underexplored and unaccounted for in contemporary political discussions. In contrast, this dissertation attempts to bring forth other modes of seeing and narrating the Dutch colonial archive by observing multiple networks of power embedded in diverse and correlated processes of representation and narration of dynamics surrounding female intimacy in social, racial, sexual and gendered dimensions. The central argument is these power relations brought forth imaginaries, fantasies, affective relations, as well as disciplinary and regulatory practices producing the limits of female intimacy through the colonial encounter between the colonies (particularly Indonesia and Suriname) and metropole. The theoretical support for this project is situated within aesthetic, post-strutucural and post-colonial engagements in IR, particularly through the work of Michel Foucault and Homi Bhabha. The analysis is conducted by a triple process of archival review of documents, reports and photographs about these women; of archival contrapuntal reading (as proposed by Edward Said) and critical fabulation (as proposed by Saidiya Hartman). With these engagements, I hope to contribute to new modes of interacting with the colonial archive, thus providing a complex understanding of the international in the context of female intimate life.