Sexuality in Africa: Colonial Perceptions, Postcolonial Debates

1
Sexuality in Africa Colonial Perceptions,
Postcolonial Debates

• K1 course F09
• Signe Arnfred
• Institute for Society and Globalization

2
Overview

• Investigating sexualities in Africa
• dominant discourses
• Colonial Perceptions
• Postcolonial debates

3
Investigating sexualities in Africa dominant
discourses

• Perceptions of sex as risk and danger
• HIV/AIDS
• gendered sexualized violence
• Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)
• Discourses of sexual and reproductive health and
  
• rights (SRHR) rights-based approaches
• medicalized approaches

4
Sex risk and danger rooted incolonial
legacies of African Sexuality

• Disavowal of sexuality / projection to colonized
  populations
• Black women icons of sexuality
• Dynamics of Othering
• by defining the Other you define yourself

5

• Colonial perceptions
• Sexualization of the land
• Rider Haggard King Solomons Mines
• Sexualization of the colonized Other
• the Sarah Baartman story
• Postcolonial debates
• FGM (Female Genital Mutilation)
• Rights
• HIV/AIDS

6
Colonial perceptions, 1

• Sexualization of the land
• Rider Haggard King Solomons Mines"
• Sir Henry Rider Haggard 1856 1925
• African landscape as a female body
• King Solomons Mines first published 1885
• since then never out of print
• Sigmund Freud 1856 1939
• Female psychology as dark continent

7
(No Transcript)
8
(No Transcript)
9
Colonial perceptions, 2

• Sexualization of the colonized Other
• the Sarah Baartman story
• Sarah Baartman the Hottentot Venus
• icon of (dangerous) sexuality
• KhoiKhoi woman taken to Europe
• from Cape Town 1810
• on display in freak shows in
  England and France
• died 1815, dissected by George Couvier
• buried in South Africa 2002

10
Colonial perceptions / Postcolonial critique

• Rider Haggard Sigmund Freud
• Female sexuality risk, danger, death
• Sander Gilman
• blackness large buttocks perceived as sexual
• the spectre of Syphilis Sex brings death
• Powerful images homeless
• after antibiotics in the 1940s
• Powerful images find a new home HIV/AIDS

11
Postcolonial Debates,1

• Female Genital Mutilation (Obioma Nnaemeka)
• Disagreement not about putting and end to
  FGM/FGC/Female circumcision,
• but about the type of campaigns against it
• Campaigns against FGM
• construct African women as Other
• Barbaric vs civilized
• HTP vs modernity
• Victimized African women in need of help and
  protection

12
Obioma Nnaemeka

• The resistance from Africans to FGM
  interventions is not
• necessarily against the termination of the
  practice rather it
• is against the strategies and methods used to
  bring about
• this desirable goal
• To combat female circumcision we must first
  diagnose the
• problem and to do that effectively we must ask
  questions
• (lost of questions) we must have a sense of
  history we
• must have the humility to learn, (not to teach)
  we must
• have the capacity to listen (not to preach)
• Important to be mindful of context, complexity
  and interrelationships