Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Racist sexualisation and sexualised racism in narratives on apartheid

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In an effort to disentangle the threads of the complex, interwoven fabric of apartheid sexualities, this paper draws on narratives of the Apartheid Archive Project to explore the sexualizing force of racism and the racialising force of gendered sexuality. We do this by isolating three key dynamics operating on both the material and the psychical terrains of apartheid: the construction of the black male body as physically and sexually dangerous; the white ‘neurotic’ desire for the black ‘other’, a desire shaped by the historical conditions of apartheid; and white masculine power and entitlement. Our analysis suggests that it is the very demonization of the black male body that facilitates in white females a desire for that which is terrifying and forbidden and that both dynamics are ultimately in the service of entrenching and rationalizing white male power and privilege.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Afrikaans term translated as black terror.

  2. Here we use black in the political sense to include all those disenfranchised by apartheid.

References

  • Allen, D. (2002) Race, crime and social exclusion: A qualitative study of white women's fear of crime in Johannesburg. Urban Forum 13 (3): 53–79.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Apartheid Archive Project (2010) http://www.apartheidarchive.org/site/index.php?

  • Bhana, D. and Pattman, R. (2010) White South African school-girls and their accounts of black girls at school and cross-racial heterosexual relations outside school. Ethnicities 10 (3): 371–386.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Biko, S. (1979) I Write What I like. London: Heinemann.

    Google Scholar 

  • Botsis, H. (2010) Making public politics private: A narrative study of apartheid racial ideology and its effects on white teenage female sexual desire in post-apartheid South Africa. Unpublished MPhil thesis, University of Cape Town.

  • Carrigan, T., Connell, W.R. and Lee, J. (1985) Toward a new sociology of masculinity. Theory and Society 14 (5): 551–604.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davis, A. (1982) Women, ‘Race’ and Class. London: Women's Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Edwards, T. (2005) Queering the pitch? Gay masculinities. In: M.S. Kimmel, J. Hearn and R.W. Connell (eds.) Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 51–68.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Fanon, F. (1967, 1952) Black Skin, White Masks, Translated by C. Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fuss, D. (1994) Interior colonies: Frantz Fanon and the politics of identification. Diacritics 24 (2/3): 19–42.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gibson, N.C. (2003) Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gilman, S. (1985) Difference and Pathology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gordon, L.R. (1997) Race sex, and matrices of desire in an antiblack world: An essay in phenomenology and social role. In: N. Zack (ed.) Race/Sex: Their Sameness, Difference and Interplay. New York: Routledge, pp. 119–132.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hall, S. (1996) The after-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why now? Why black skin white masks? In: A. Read (ed.) The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Interpretation. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, pp. 13–137.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hawkes, G. (1996) A Sociology of Sex and Sexuality. Philadelphia: Open University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hogan, K. (1998) Gendered visibilities in black women's AIDS narratives. In: N. Roth and K. Hogan (eds.) Gendered Epidemic: Representations of Women in the Age of AIDS. London: Routledge, pp. 165–190.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hook, D. (2008) Postcolonial psychoanalysis. Theory and Psychology 18 (2): 269–283.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • hooks, b. (1990) Yearning: ‘Race’, Gender and Cultural Politics. Toronto: Between the Lines Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Horrell, M. (1966) A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa. Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jansen, J.D. (2009) Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past. Cape Town: UCT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jungar, K. and Oinas, E. (2004) Preventing HIV? Medical discourses and invisible women. In: S. Arnfred (ed.) Re-thinking Sexualities in Africa. Uppsala Sweden: Nordic Africa Institute, pp. 97–114.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marshall, A. (1994) Sensuous sapphires: a study of the social construction of black female sexuality. In: M. Maynard and J. Purvis (eds.) Researching Women's Lives from a Feminist Perspective. London: Taylor and Francis, pp. 106–124.

    Google Scholar 

  • McClintock, A. (1997) No longer in a future heaven: Gender race and nationalism. In: A. McClintock, A. Mufti and E. Shohat (eds.) Dangerous Liaisons: Gender Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 89–112.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pattman, R. and Bhana, D. (2009) Colouring sexualities: How some black South African schoolgirls respond to ‘racial’ and gendered inequalities. In: M. Steyn and M. Van Zyl (eds.) The Prize/The Price: Shaping Sexualities in the New South Africa. Cape Town: HSRC Press, pp. 21–38.

    Google Scholar 

  • Patton, C. (1990) Inventing AIDS. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ratele, K. (2001) The sexualisation of apartheid. Unpublished DPhil thesis, University of the Western Cape.

  • Ratele, K. (2009a) Sexuality as constitutive of whiteness in South Africa. Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 17 (3): 158–174.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ratele, K. (2009b) Apartheid, antiapartheid and postapartheid sexualities. In: M. Van Zyl and M. Steyn (eds.) The Prize and the Price: Shaping Sexualities in South Africa. Cape Town: HSRC Press, pp. 290–305.

    Google Scholar 

  • Seidel, G. (1993) The competing discourses of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa: Discourses of rights and empowerment vs discourses of control and exclusion. Social Science and Medicine 36 (3): 175–194.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Soudien, C. (2007) Youth Identity in Contemporary South Africa: Race, Culture and Schooling. Cape Town: New Africa Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spillers, H.J. (1984) Interstices: A small drama of words. In: C.S. Vance (ed.) Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Boston MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 73–100.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stopford, A. (2007) Psychoanalysis and interraciality: Asking different questions. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 12: 205–225.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Suttner, R. (2008) The ANC-led Underground up to 1976: A Social and Historical Study. Johannesburg: Jacana.

    Google Scholar 

  • Union of South Africa. (1927) Immorality Act, No. 5 of 1927. Cape Town: Union of South Africa.

  • Union of South Africa. (1950) Immorality Amendment Act, No. 21 of 1950. Cape Town: Republic of South Africa.

  • Weeks, J. (1989) AIDS: The intellectual agenda. In: P. Aggleton, G. Hart and P. Davis (eds.) AIDS: Social Representations, Social Practices. London: Falmer Press, pp. 1–19.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the anonymous reviewers and especially to the special issue editors, Derek Hook and Carol Long, for their valuable and incisive guidance in shaping this paper.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Women's and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape, Private Bag X17, Bellville, Cape Town, 7535, South Africa

    Tamara Shefer

  2. Medical Research Council-University of South Africa Safety and Peace Promotion Research Unit, Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa,

    Kopano Ratele

Authors
  1. Tamara Shefer
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Kopano Ratele
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Shefer, T., Ratele, K. Racist sexualisation and sexualised racism in narratives on apartheid. Psychoanal Cult Soc 16, 27–48 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2010.38

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2010.38

Keywords

Search

Navigation