Heterosexual masculine desire and racialised difference

Paul is a twenty-something year old man. He works as a trainer in a non-govern­mental organisation. His essay is about his sexual affairs with “Coloured”[102] wom­en. These affairs he opposes to his experience with African or black women. This means that Paul deploys apartheid identity categories where coloureds although they were not white were neither black nor African. Paul says some of the reasons “why black men” and specifically he “got attracted to Coloured women” are that

Arnfred Page 142 Wednesday, March 3, 2004 2:38 PM

Kopano Ratele

“Coloured women are more exposed to making love” and “more open than black women”. The phrase ‘more open’ is intriguing. It becomes clearer what Paul means by it later on when he says “Coloured women I went out with are more civilized when it comes to making love”.

One must always be cautious when interpreting second or third language speakers, even when they are university students. Does Paul really mean ‘civilized’ or was he short of a more appropriate word? Still the word is there. Coloured women are more ‘civilized’ (than African/black women). This advanced civilisa­tion of coloured females he deduces from their lovemaking as well as the fact that “they are more open discussing on how you performed”. We could speculate if there is some anxiety buried in Paul’s need to have women discuss his perform­ance or if his interest to know is motivated by a desire to be a better lover for his partners?

Paul relates coloured women’s civilisation to his view that “they are very ro­mantic”. Once again, what are we to understand by ‘very romantic’? Is what Paul wants us to understand that they like walking hand in hand, candle-lit dinners, rose petals on satin covered beds, Taban La Liyong before and Marvin Gaye af­terwards? Or are we to connect being ‘more open’, ‘civilized’ and ‘very romantic’ with his opinion that coloured females are “sexually… very stimulating and open minded to do and explore different types of sex positions”.

These sentiments from Paul’s essays of course beg Fanon’s question. It may be important to note that that question, which Fanon was directing firstly at white French society and then educated blacks in France, gets complicated by the his­torical South African situation where, instead of two races there were, according to the Population Registration Act of 1950, three official racial categories and sev­eral ethnic and tribal categories. On the other hand, according to the national democratic movement, at least that led by Steve Biko and his associates, there were essentially two groups in South Africa: the black and the white. In his essay Paul, as we said, plays not in the re-defined identity field charted by Biko and his comrades, or that staked out by Fanon, but squarely within the official apartheid territory. He sees coloured women and coloured men as different from, and as not, black. They are also not African.

Closely tied to the deployment of the racial categories of the government, at the heart of Paul’s text, lies what I mean by kinky politics. By kinky politics I want to indicate racial perversion. Kinky politics follows the fetish of, and refetishises, race. There can be no racism without this constant re-fetishisisation. Indeed, one could say, racism is kinky politics as it always involves a sexual warping of identity politics. Racism, together with (hetero)sexism, then, is what keeps us in awe, or fear, or ignorance of black and white, male and female bodies and sexualities in this society. For example, Mzi, the second student whose essay I use, wrote that ever since a certain incident I will come back to later, he tries to avoid looking “at naked white women” when he is at the beach. As with Paul’s words, caution is advised: I suspect nakedness here might mean dressed in a bikini. But even if it is it not complete nudity that he is talking about, it gives away a certain perception

Kinky Politics

of what Mzi thinks about (white women in) bikinis. In any event, he writes that “whenever I happen to get an eye contact with a white body I always pretend as if I am looking somewhere to avoid eye contact”. He says because of the incident “when my friends organize a date for me if it is a white lady I always come up with some excuses”.

Kinky politics is personal and institutional practices, politics, programmes and cultures that naturalise, objectify, and stabilise difference, refusing to allow for its characteristic of movement and change. In respect to racial difference, kinky pol­itics shows itself when that difference is held permanently constant and becomes an explanation of what the idea of race or the policy of racial domination gener­ates in the first place. For instance, this is how Paul explains his attraction to the females of the coloured race: “There are certain features that turn me on when I look at Coloured women. They have beautiful legs and light in complexion”. To put it a bit more bluntly, the light complected races are beautiful because a light complexion is more beautiful.

Notwithstanding the historical and geographic specificity of Fanon, the point of his question can thus be easily stretched to cover whether it is coloureds or Af­ricans, as opposed to whites and Indians (that is in South Africa; elsewhere it could be some other races, ethnicities, religious, or other opposed groups), who are naturally more sexually superior. Or, to put it differently, why is the relation of sexual potency to political, social and economic power generally inverted? But, perhaps even more importantly, we must investigate what conditions make it pos­sible for someone like Paul to talk in these sorts of ways, for anyone to talk in such ways in a specific cultural situation and period, about these kinds of things.