Much of this book was written within the warmth of supportiveness of the sociology department at the University of Aberdeen. I am indebted to my colleagues there in so many ways and I continue to miss their laughter. The book was finished at Flinders University and I apologize for ruining some of our pleasant lunches […]
День: 29.10.2015
THE SECOND SHIFT
When I was thirty-one, a moment occurred that crystallized the concern that drives this book. At the time, I was an assistant professor in the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley, and the mother of a three-month-old child. I wanted to nurse the baby—and to continue to teach. Several arrangements were possible, but […]
Signe Arnfred
structures among Creole women of African descent in Suriname, where such relationships are called mati. In Suriname, ‘mati-work’ is part of working-class culture, as opposed to the middle-class, where according to dominant values women must be ‘feminine’ and dependent on men; as seen from middle-class positions ‘mati-work’ is perceived as ‘rowdy, unseemly behaviour’ (Wekker 1997:338). […]
Same-sex relations
Amazingly, until recently, same-sex relations have been understood as (largely) non-existent in Africa, the official (and widespread) opinion being that same-sex is decadence, imposed on Africa from the outside. Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe made that very clear in his (in)famous speech at the opening of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair in 1995: “I find it […]
Signe Arnfred
Thabo Mbeki’s speeches (above) are a case in point. This politics further tends to keep desire out of the politics of ‘race’, as well as that of sex and gender. Nevertheless, particularly as not acknowledged, this politically incorrect desire goes on working as an active force in the continued re-producing and re-fetishisation of ‘race’. Pleasure […]
Re-Thinking Sexualities in Africa: Introduction
Every intellectual gain requires a loss in sexual potential. The civilized white man retains an irrational longing for unusual eras of sexual license, of orgiastic scenes, of unpunished rapes, of unrepressed incest. […] Projecting his own desires onto the Negro, the white man behaves ‘as if’ the Negro really had them (Fanon 1952/1986:165). Whatever the […]
Signe Arnfred
Problems of Pleasure and Desire Increasingly, as shown above, sexuality for pleasure—for men and for women— is acknowledged as a social fact, and investigated as such by sociologists, anthropologists and historians. A direct focus, however, on pleasure and desire opens a wide field of investigations, the contributions in this volume showing a range of possible […]
. Re-Thinking Sexualities in Africa: Introduction
is a lot of difference, between calling a secret lover ‘the top of the pot’—signifying something extra, something nice, a pleasure and luxury—or stigmatising a married woman with a lover as a ‘loose’ woman. Nevertheless, in the period with which Hunter is concerned (the 1920s and 1930s) a married woman with one or more lovers […]
Signe Arnfred
man control through modern contraceptives (so-called family planning). The assumption regarding people in Africa (or in the Third World in general) being more ‘primitive’ than the West, would be that they are also more ‘natural’, with sex as a matter of course being linked to procreation. This however is not the case. There are many […]
. Re-Thinking Sexualities in Africa: Introduction
which parts Christian, which parts not? The major reason for such endeavour in the context of this volume, is to broaden the vision, to keep alert a notion of possible alternatives, and to maintain a perpetual awareness regarding what otherwise might very easily pass as implicit assumptions. The fact that virtually all African ‘traditions’ and […]