Race and the construction of threat and desire

In his analysis of desire in an antiblack world, Lewis Gordon, like Fanon, destroys the link between the penis and the phallus. His response to “the extensive litera­ture on the reduction of black males to their penis” is that to deal effectively with the link between black genitals and black powerlessness we should attend to the significance of not just penis size but penis colour also. “Penises of equal length”, he argues, “are not of equal length significance when they are of different ‘col­ours’. For, in an antiblack world, a black penis, whatever its size, represents a threat” (1997:128). Gordon argues that a black penis spells threat because it is a declaration and a demand of masculinity that is denied by white society. Thus, to put it in another way, the penis of the black man does not have to be longer or thicker to pose a threat to white society. Fanon had revealed and cut down in a highly perceptive manner this constructed threat of the black penis. After show­ing that the black person is “the incarnation of a genital potency beyond all mo­ralities”, Fanon would simply state, “we have shown that reality destroys all these beliefs” (1986:177). But it appears that the threat of the black penises is deeply embedded in many societies, as evinced in this next extract:

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Mzi: I could not understand why because everybody was wearing underwear and we were also prepared to wear the same. The security personnel escorted us to our braai space. Whenever my coloured friend and I looked at bypassing women he would ask what are we looking at because we were there only for a braai and nothing else. The other guys would pass some remarks when seeing women and this guy keep quiet. This security showed us the place, which is about a kilo­metre away from everybody else.

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Kopano Ratele

One interpretation that can be made from this extract is that for an African to be thought capable of giving sexual pleasure or posing a sexual danger he does not have to be biologically well-endowed or sexually skilled. As in the case of Paul’s othered females, the African male plays into the sexual anxieties generated by a racist history by simply being there. It may help, but in fact it is not necessary that he speaks Afrikaans or the language of the women. In both the cases of Mzi and Paul, Gordon’s hypothesis about penis colour is germane. Furthermore, as one can read in Sellon’s account of his sexual escapades, and the accounts of both stu­dents’ more recent personal relations, racial masculinities specifically and racial — ised identities generally tend to contain voyeuristic or fetishistic elements.

Colours of bodies used to produce and govern social relations point to spec­tacle. The spectacle is one of difference. In other words, differently raced bodies are the narrative motif, and possibility of physical relations between them is spec — tacularised. The spectacle, Toni Morrison has said, monopolises appearance and social reality. There is therefore an unmistakable and prurient fascination with the colour of bodies of others. For the dominated the fascination can be dangerous to the point of self-hate, at least hating oneself for being fascinated in the first place with such bodies, with colour, with the strangeness itself.

Voyeuristic/fetishistic racial masculinities thus refer to the fact that a man like Sellon, as an example, views women of other colours as offering a sexual trip, or that someone, like Paul, constructs himself (or other African males) as capable of offering adventure to people of other races simply because he is of a different race. In the case of African men this is another version of the “cold black hustler” who “claws his way into the whiteness of his desire” chanting, “brother, sister, revolution, power to the people” (Kgositsile 1975:90). In the practices of racial voyeurs or fetishists sexual desire tracks the desire for ‘othered’ objects. In Paul’s case, for instance, sex cannot be understood without looking at how it follows a colonial or colonised attitude towards ‘othered’ female bodies. In both Sellon and Paul’s cases sex relations are interesting insofar as they are exoticised, fetishised, that is, objectivised.

Race and the construction of threat and desireBut to say sexual desire tracks racial practices and identification is only partly true. It is very difficult, except only for the aim of analysis, to separate what orig­inates together. Sexual and racial differences are almost inseparable in real life. Desire for sexual identity is interwoven with the work people put into other kinds of identity making. Desire in racially segregating cultures is made from its birth by both elements of attraction for othered skin colour and sexuality. Racial voyeur­ism and fetishism are precisely about histories of social hierarchies, about what social life in these cultures makes us put first. Racialised sexualities are construct­ed such that young heterosexual males like Bo’nkosi and Paul want to have fe­males of other races because the females are of other colours, and not just female. The females are desirable because they are white or coloured first, and this makes them sexually attractive. What makes the women attractive is not their figure but the colour of their bodies, not their individuality but the colour of the genitals.

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Kinky Politics

Conclusion

In addition to the question about the sexual superiority of black people, this chap­ter was prompted by the question whether issues of sexual superiority are worth our serious attention. In responding to the question, the chapter used three pur­posively selected semi-autobiographical essays on race and sexual practices and identities written by African male students for a psychology of racism class in 1999 at the University of the Western Cape. The essays were analysed using dis­cursive psychological understandings for how individuals’ practices and identities are produced, naturalised and what gets left out and how they are related to racial — ised hetero-masculine desire. The accounts of these males showed themselves to be anything but straightforward, revealed by often contradictory discourses of sexual and racial identities and practices. Sexual and racial identities and practices, it was argued, are founded within and must be seen as part of complex economic, sociopolitical, cultural and interpersonal histories.

Updated: 06.11.2015 — 21:30