Sexuality in South Africa and South African academic writing

Abstract

‘Sexuality in South Africa and South African Academic Writing’ has two goals. Its first is to examine and account for the existence of a particular discourse around black sexuality in contemporary academic writing, where that discourse is productive of a view that black sex is almost always problematic. Here I look at the emergence of writing about sexuality in South Africa, beginning with some of the work penned by European travel writers, and others, moving on to looking at the emergence of government discourses around black sexuality as well as the emergence of sexuality as a subject of academic practice, which was a characteristic of the twentieth century. Although sexuality as written about has had a diverse disciplinary history, more lately writing about it has been over-determined by the existence of HIV/Aids. Clearly, there are exceptions to this trend, but much recent writing concerned with sexuality tends to examine it only in relation to HIV/Aids. My second goal relates to an attempt to counter the tone of this discourse by writing about the permeation of sex in everyday life. In order to do this I look at the everyday treatment of sexuolity in black Christian society in the early 20th century. Here my intent is both to write about positive understandings of sexuality, and to write about these in a positive fashion. I examine both some of the factors — such as class and location — which impacted upon perceptions of sexuality, as well as the perceptions that people had of sexuality. Notwithstanding popular discourses around immoral women, it is possible to see that for some black South Africans and under certain circumstances, sexuality was regarded as a positive force.