2024, Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X24000080…
27 pages
In this article, I examine how the fear of miscegenation developed as a raison d'être for the construction and maintenance of apartheid. I argue that despite its efficacy at reproducing racial-caste formations, miscegenation taboo ultimately undermined its own hegemonic mythology by constructing contradictory erotic desires and subjectivities which could neither be governed nor contained. I consider how miscegenation fears and fantasies were debated in public discourse, enacted into law, institutionalized through draconian policing and punishment practices, culturally entrenched, yet negotiated and resisted through everyday intimacies. While crime statistics show that most incidences of interracial sex involved White men and women of color, the perceived threat to "White purity" was generally represented through images of White women-volks-mothers and daughters-in the Afrikaner nationalist iconography. White women's wombs symbolized the future of "Whiteness." This article offers a critique of the prevailing South African "exceptionalism" paradigm in apartheid studies. Detailed analyses of government commission reports (1939, 1984, 1985) and parliamentary debate records (1949) reveal considerable American influence on South Africa's "petty apartheid" laws, and especially the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and Immorality Amendment Act (1950). While these "cornerstone" policies of apartheid developed from local socio-political conflicts and economic tensions, they were always entangled in global racial formations, rooted in transoceanic histories of slavery, dispossession, and segregation. This historical anthropological study of race/sex taboo builds on interdisciplinary literatures in colonial history, sociology, postcolonial studies, literary theory, art history, cultural studies, feminist theory, queer studies, and critical race theory.
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Journal of Southern African Studies, 2020
Lawrence Mbogoni undertakes in this book a sweeping survey of interracial sexuality, the production of mixed-descent children and the anxious racialised debates that these two
For online access go to http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjis20/33/3 Across various times, spaces and struggles the papers brought together in this special issue share a critical perspective on the relationship between sexuality, the nation and the global. Informed by postcolonial and transnational feminist thought, the contributions tackle the critical role played by processes of racializing sexualities in maintaining local and global hierarchies and attend to the contradictory workings of hegemonic discourses of Western modernity. The questions addressed in the articles reflect three major tendencies of recent research on sexuality: a renewed interest in wider socioeconomic structures and global capitalism; an explicit focus on the interplay between race, nation, (neo)imperialism and sexuality; and a growth of interest in the state. The special issue aims to create a space of critical reflection and emancipatory knowledge production that not only renders differentiated analyses but also tools for struggles to confront racialized sexualities.
The Prize and the Price Shaping Sexualities in South Africa, 2009
Intimate encounters between people of different caste, tribe, faith, race and nation have been recorded, mythologised and condemned since long before the era of imperialism. The development of colonialism introduced a new frontier for sexual relations between remarkably different people. Since then, a huge body of literature, folklore, and public and private debate has been devoted to the intimate encounters between the European and the ‘native’. Intimate relations–sex, love and marriage–are often viewed as the most private and personal matters of one’s life. Within the colonial realms, however, the private became political. In South African history, intimate interactions between members of different race groups have been deeply politicised. Public, religious and political discourse on interracial intimacy was and remains imbued with notions of hierarchy, race, gender and morality. Since the arrival of the first settlers at the Cape in the mid-seventeenth century, South African history has been characterised by interactions among different groups of people. As European settlement led to colonisation, South African society was developed by mixed communities of indigenous people, Dutch and English settlers and missionaries, and slaves brought from the east. This diverse society, dominated by the Europeans, was regulated by a system of power hierarchy mediated through discourses of religion, race, civilisation and gender. Throughout this history, contact between different groups has led to sex–in forms including forced sex, concubinage, marriage, clandestine relations and cohabitation.
History Compass, 2010
The notion that Africans share a common sexual culture distinct from people elsewhere in the world has for many years been a staple of popular culture, health, academic, and political discourse in the West as well as in Africa. Sometimes overtly racist (Black Peril) but sometimes intended to combat patronizing or colonialist stereotypes, the idea of a singular African sexuality remains an obstacle to the development of sexual rights and effective sexual health interventions. Where did the idea come from, and how has it become so embedded in our imaginations right across the political spectrum? This article traces the idea back in time to its earliest articulations by explorers, ethnographers, and psychiatrists, as well as to contestations of the idea in scholarship, fiction, and film influenced by Africa's emerging gay rights movement. It asks, what can we learn about the making of 'African sexuality' as an idea in the past that may suggest ways to challenge its enduring, harmful impacts in the present? 'African sexuality'-the idea that Africans share a common sexual culture distinct from people elsewhere in the world-has had numerous incarnations over the centuries. These include as 'Black Peril' (McCulloch 2000), 'African as Suckling' (Ritchie 1944), 'Voodoo Eros' (Bryk 1964 [1925]) and MCP (Multiple Concurrent Partners-Kenyon and Zondo 2009). Despite differences in emphasis and veneer of science, the overarching theme has been that African sexuality is a problem. In colonial times, Africans' supposed stunted or brutish sexuality was thought to oppress and degrade women, engender laziness and stultify intellectual growth in men, threaten public health and safety, and impoverish culture and the arts (no love or higher emotions, just lust and steely transactions). In modern times, African sexuality has been invoked to explain the high rates of HIV ⁄ AIDS in much of the continent (and by implication in the Diaspora). An influential article by Australian demographers Caldwell, Caldwell and Quiggan (1989) surveyed the ethnography to conclude that Africans were less prone to feel guilt, less concerned with female virginity or fidelity, and hence more relaxed toward having multiple sex partners than Asians or Europeans. More controversially, Phillipe Rushton (1997) argued that there was a direct co-relation between penis size, intelligence, respect for the law, and sexual behavior. 'Negroids', in this analysis, were genetically predisposed to be sexually precocious, permissive, and criminal. 1 African sexuality, in short, needed to be fixed by propaganda, legislation, and perhaps a global rescue mission. It is tempting to decry this stereotyping and the policies that have stemmed from it as straightforward racism-'five hundred years… of white racist imperialism' and 'white words' as Greg Thomas puts it (2007, 21). Certainly, those who uncritically draw upon on nineteenth-century European travelers for their empirical facts about African sexuality are at the very least extremely naive. But racism cannot explain why so many African
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2019
Critical Studies on Security, 2021
In a first section, this article introduces three postcards narrating sexual politics in three different States. Each postcard was inspired by a way of conceptualising ‘race’ in world politics: as a powerful structure altering the starts and ends of wars, as a social construction of bodies creating economic and political (hierarchical) institutions, and as a historical and material global order engendered through colonial encounters and dehumanisation processes. In a second section, this article constructs a theory of sexual ethical horizons for global political action obtained through aesthetics of trauma and movement. It argues that narratives emanating from pleasure itself can resist the formation of a (new) science of sexual politics and, instead, they can create conocimientos (decolonial knowledges) for political movement amidst global trauma and violence.
Psychology in Society, 2013
In her book, The cultural politics of female sexuality in South Africa, Gunkel develops a comprehensive analysis that powerfully illustrates the complex ways in which sexuality is socially and historically constructed. In particular it highlights the importance of the concept of “intersectionality”, which emphasises the varied and complex ways in which a number of “social positionalities” (or “axes of social power”) such as politics, gender, race and sexuality intersect, shape and constitute each other (Steyn & van Zyl, 2012: 8-9). More specifically it highlights the importance of what Steyn and van Zyl (2012: 9) refer to as “a politics of location”, that is, a recognition of the way in which sexualities are constituted in particular ways in particular sociohistorical locations. In this way the overall project of Gunkel’s book is, in her own words, “centered around, and seeks to account for, the sexual politics that have emerged out of post-apartheid South Africa” (p 4).
While European patterns of miscegenation in colonial situations tended to be influenced by the demographic composition of the population, and in particular the proportion of non-whites and the ratio of white women to white men, there are other factors that need more emphasis. First, miscegenation was used to control and dominate the colonised peoples, and second miscegenation itself can be looked at as proof of the white man's desire and sexual appetite for the black woman. In the colonial situation, black women sat at the focal point where two exceptionally powerful and prevalent systems of oppression come together -race and gender. The dynamics between race, sexuality, class and gender cannot be overstated. It is therefore plausible to argue that European men were prone to have sex with black women, not only from a shortage of white women, but also from the need to exercise power and authority as well as to satisfy their sexual desires for black women. The desire for domination and the desire for 'otherness', propelled by the sexual attractiveness of black women was at the centre of the white man's obsession with sexuality, fertility and hybridity. But while European men sexually abused black women, they denied African men access to white women by legal means. This, they did under the guise of patriarchal tenets of 'ownership' of women and children and the old insecure feeling that white women might, if granted equality sexually prefer black men. This paper therefore makes two propositions about miscegenation in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). First, European men needed miscegenation to control, dominate and reinforce and sustain white domination and black subordination; and second, miscegenation itself was a testimony to the fact that white men saw black women as sexually desirable and attractive. Using the qualitative descriptive analytical approach, archival and secondary sources are interwoven to bring to the fore the said propositions.
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The paper reveals that anxieties surrounding racial purity, colonial supremacy, and the politicization of White womanhood significantly fueled miscegenation fears, particularly among Afrikaners.
The findings indicate that the 1949 Act not only criminalized interracial unions but also ingrained cultural taboos, leading to further stigmatization of interracial relationships.
The study illustrates that colonial media frequently sensationalized alleged interracial sexual violence, which contributed to widespread hysteria and reinforced racial segregation policies.
The analysis shows that the Immorality Acts epitomized the sexual and moral policing of Black and Coloured bodies to uphold colonial racial hierarchies and White supremacy.
The research finds that South African lawmakers drew constitutional inspiration from U.S. anti-miscegenation laws, particularly citing parallels during parliamentary debates in the late 1940s.
Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, 2017
This article traces both the centrality and fragility of the figure of the heterosexual white male to the moral and ideological core of the apartheid regime. Through a comparative reading of Zakes Mda's The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) and Gerald Kraak's Ice in the Lungs (2006), the article examines how apartheid's Immorality Act functioned as the legislative mechanism to produce and police heteronormative whiteness. The randomness and unpredictability of sexual desire in both historical novels expose the tenuousness of this idealised heteronormative whiteness that lay at the centre of the apartheid project. Situated within the moral panic and political turmoil of the 1970s, the novels identify sex as a powerful lens through which to read the history of apartheid. While Mda's satirical novel focuses on transgressive interracial sexual desire, Kraak's realist text explores same-sex desire and intimacy. My reading of the two novels engages with the political history of apartheid's sexual policing and insists on the inextricable entanglement of its heteronormative and racial supremacist provisions. The traditional ideological centrality of the vulnerable white woman is displaced in the novels by white men whose transgressive sexual desires for black women (in Mda's novel) and other white men (in Kraak's) refuse the certainty and naturalness of heteronormative whiteness.
Based on a 1915 report on "Black and White Peril" that was written by a Superintendent in the British South African Police in Rhodesia, this chapter analyses the treatment of inter-racial sex in the early days of colonial Rhodesia. A time of violent moral panics about the dangers of miscegenation, this striking document and other historical analyses bring vividly to life the powerful dynamics that emerged from settler hysteria around inter-racial sex, and lays out a strong basis from which to start considering more recent intersections of sexuality and race in Zimbabwe. With attention keenly focused on the dangers of sex between white women and black men, white civilisation's vulnerability was seen to be embodied by colonial women; while the settlers' preoccupation with the dangerous threat of black men, was not matched by any concern about relationships between white men and black women (despite far greater levels of vulnerability). This chapter discusses these particular dynamics and offers an opportunity to reflect on how the continuities of history become more clearly evident as the legacies of historical moral panics rebound in contemporary politics and national identities.
Index on Censorship
American Ethnologist, 1989
With sustained challenges to European rule in African and Asian colonies in the early 20th century, sexual prescriptions by class, race and gender became increasingly central to the politics of rule and subject to new forms of scrutiny by colonial states. Focusing on the Netherlands Indies and French Indochina, but drawing on other contexts, this article examines how the very categories of “colonizer” and “colonized” were increasingly secured through forms of sexual control which defined the common political interests of European colonials and the cultural investments by which they identified themselves. The metropolitan and colonial discourses on health, “racial degeneracy,” and social reform from this period reveal how sexual sanctions demarcated positions of power by enforcing middle-class conventions of respectability and thus the personal and public boundaries of race.[sexuality, race-thinking, hygiene, colonial cultures, Southeast Asia]
‘What do we see when we look at ourselves?’ asked South African visual activist/artist Zanele Muholi in her 2006 photographic collection Only Half the Picture. The question, a deeply challenging introspection, required black women in particular to reflect on the ways in which history has made us not look at ourselves, but be looked at. The images Muholi presented were viewed as both troubling and liberating. This article, using a queer framework, is concerned with recoding the ways in which black women's bodies and female sexuality have been represented in post-colonial contexts. Using Zanele Muholi's photography, the article opens possibilities for claiming an erotic position for the black female's ‘queer’ body. This is further complicated by racial dynamics. The article argues that such representations work against painful colonial histories of black female torture while also desexualizing the black female.
Ethnic Studies Review, 2020
Race, war, and geography remain unmarked domains within the historiography of sexuality. This article analyzes the work of Joseph M. Carrier, a seminal figure who helped develop the study of homosexuality. In this article, we examine the ways Carrier incorporated studies of various populations from the Global South, from Vietnamese refugees to Mexican MSM (men who have sex with men). In his attempt to collect knowledge about subaltern groups—first as a RAND Corporation researcher and later as an anthropologist and epidemiologist—Carrier shows us that the genealogy of homosexuality studies is not clear-cut. It is situated across multiple spaces of (inter)disciplinary power and knowledge. By comparing these trans-regional areas of study, we examine the ways in which Western social scientists can draw research from one social context into another.
2010
This paper is premised on an empirical study of administrative policies towards black women on the Rand in the 1920s and Thirties, presented as 'Popular Representations of Black Women on the Rand and their Impact on the Development of Influx Controls, 1924-1937* at the 1990 History Workshop Conference. Unless otherwise specified, the assertions made here are derived directly from that paper. The purpose of this paper is to develop a new analysis of the empirical material contained in the History Workshop paper, • ... • / am indebted to Debbie Posel for her criticisms of my History Workshop paper, and grateful to the Human Sciences Research for its financial support. In a number of valuable studies, Deborah Gaitskell has explored the discrete worlds of white female missionaries and newlyurbanised black women in Johannesburg before.the Second World War. In one seminal article, 'Housewives, Maids or Mothers: some Contradictions of Domesticity for Christian Women in Johannesburg, 1903-1939'*, she explores the contradictions inherent in WASP missionary attempts to win acceptance for a particular Christian family model-'male breadwinner, dependent housekeeping wife and mother, dependent school-going children'-among black women. As she demonstrates, this model could never be more than a remote ideal as long as poverty required most women to work outside the home. 2 She argues, however, that these efforts were endorsed by 'Johannesburg lobbies for missionaries and urban manufacturers'-broadly speaking, liberal capital-1 (1983) 24 Journal of African History, pp241-256. 2 Ibid, p252.
Sebastian Jackson