The Prize and the Price doc

THE PRIZE
AND
THE PRICE
SHAPING SEXUALITIES IN SOUTH AFRICA
Edited by Melissa Steyn and Mikki van Zyl
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Published by  Press
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First published 2009
 (soft cover) 978-0-7969-2239-7
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Foreword v
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction
1 The prize and the price
3
Melissa Steyn and Mikki van Zyl
Negotiating new deals
2 Colouring sexualities: How some black South African schoolgirls respond to ‘racial’
and gendered inequalities
21
Rob Pattman and Deevia Bhana
3 Glamour, glitz and girls: The meanings of femininity in high school Matric Ball
culture in urban South Africa
39
Elaine Salo and Bianca Davids
4 E-race-ing the line: South African interracial relationships yesterday and today 55
Rebecca Sherman and Melissa Steyn
Flipping the coin
5 Renegotiating masculinity in the lowveld: Narratives of male–male sex in
compounds, prisons and at home
85
Isak Niehaus
6 Fauna, flora and fucking: Female sex safaris in South Africa 112
Haley A McEwen
7 Are blind people better lovers? 129
Reinette Popplestone

8 Sexuality in later life 144
Helena B Thornton, Felix CV Potocnik and Jacqueline E Muller
Contents
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Paying the price
9 The weather watchers: Gender, violence and social control
169
Lillian Artz
10 Nurturing the sexuality of disabled girls: The challenges of parenting for
mothers
192
Washeila Sait, Theresa Lorenzo, Melissa Steyn and Mikki van Zyl
11 A decent place? Space and morality in a former ‘poor white’ suburb 220
Annika Teppo
12 Less is (M)orr: Après le déluge (or rather: more or less…): An essay about and
conversation with Margaret Orr
234
Joan Hambidge and Margaret Orr
Holding onto the prize
13 Heterosex among young South Africans: Research reflections
267
Tamara Shefer and Don Foster
14 Apartheid, anti-apartheid and post-apartheid sexualities 290
Kopano Ratele
15 ‘Astride a dangerous dividing line’: A discourse analysis of preschool teachers’ talk
about childhood sexuality
306
Jane van der Riet
Que(e)rying the contract
16 Criminalising the act of sex: Attitudes to adult commercial sex work in

South Africa
329
Jillian Gardner
17 Queer marriage: Sexualising citizenship and the development of freedoms in
South Africa
341
Vasu Reddy
18 Beyond the Constitution: From sexual rights to belonging 364
Mikki van Zyl
Conclusion
19 Shaping sexualities
391
Melissa Steyn and Mikki van Zyl
Contributors 397
Index 404
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v
  ‘’  known to me before 1995. However, as a
straight man who considered himself socialist pro-feminist, I assumed that the
concept was primarily important only to people who identified as homosexual or
bisexual. It was their enemy. While I certainly supported their struggles against
that enemy in my heart, my head was focused on what seemed to be obviously much
bigger struggles. Male violence against women, /, structural adjustment,
and other broad anti-democratic forces were all depressingly evident at the time in
both my homes (southern Africa and North America).
An inkling of doubt about this confident ordering of priorities came soon
after I took up a lectureship at the University of Zimbabwe in 1995. Robert Mugabe
and his supporters began attacking gays and lesbians with such hyperbolic rhetoric
that one could hardly fail to notice a disproportion. Why such a fuss over a gay
rights movement that was politically and socially so utterly marginal? I assumed

some gay scholar somewhere would take up the challenge to explain (as indeed
several did, quite convincingly).
The pertinence of heteronormativity to my own research interests only began
to dawn on me at a conference that I attended on the history of women and gender
in South Africa around this time. After two or three intense days, an anonymous
comment appeared on the bulletin board – something to the eect of, ‘Gawd,
this conference is so heterosexist!’ It was not too dicult to intuit who among my
fellow delegates was the author, and indeed, when I approached him to enquire he
readily confessed. More to the point, my new friend patiently walked me through
the meaning of the term and the importance of the critique it oered. Exclusive,
lifelong heterosexuality is not a natural condition but has to be carefully cultivated
and constantly recreated as a hegemonic ideology in the face of changing material
circumstances and in relation to multiple marginal identities and practices. Many
aspects of the dominant expressions of heterosexuality that we commonly assume to
be natural and normal (notably, men are active and penetrators, women are passive
and penetrated, but also, old people, children and disabled people are asexual) are
in fact deeply contested and contingent. Homophobia (and heterosexism) are not
simply the concerns of a non-normative minority but are central to the ways that
sexuality for the whole of society is organised and experienced.
All my work on the history of gender up to this point suddenly seemed
embarrassingly simplistic. My passivity in response to homophobic politics in
Zimbabwe suddenly seemed unconscionable. I felt compelled to go back to my
Foreword
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vi
sources, and to re-examine my vocabularies and other choices, to see where and how
they were aected by this invisible juggernaut, heteronormativity. I felt like a fish
discovering he lived in the sea.
More than a decade since that epiphany, what a thrill it is to see hetero-
normativity so squarely and thoroughly problematised in this erudite yet accessible

volume. The book is directed at people like the old me, which is to say, you know
about and generally sympathise with gay rights or queer theory, in theory. In
practice, you are not quite clear how these might apply to (and enrich) your own
work. You might even avoid some of the issues out of anxiety that some uninten-
tional mangling of the latest terminology identifies you as embarrassingly out of
touch. This book says, don’t worry about it. Just get on board.
I don’t mean to be flippant here. On the contrary, much of The Prize and
the Price makes for heavy reading. Many of the chapters deal with horrific abuses
and dehumanising tendencies in social practice that take place within the rubric of
‘normal’ – rape, paedophilia, layer upon layer of racism, exploitative and degrading
sex work or sex tourism, and more. This will not really surprise most readers, I
expect. South Africans since 1994 have had to begin to renegotiate the norms of
race, class, gender and other identities laid down over centuries of ideology, violence
and law. It would have been dicult and painful even without the explosion of
heterosexually transmitted /.
The authors do try to bring out elements of positive change, dignity and
pleasure to be found within this discouraging menu. Still, it is hard to avoid the
feeling that even with good intentions and lots of money, South Africans will be
working to resolve these issues for a long time. We should probably not assume that
good intentions and money can be relied upon.
Happily, as the chapters in this book demonstrate, there is room for
optimism that currently hegemonic heteronormativity is being challenged in
promising ways. People’s dignity, creativity and complex sexuality can be freed up
from the toxicity and limitations of the past. It also gives me a feeling of optimism
that works such as this are strong enough to be noticed beyond the roiling but small
environment of South African academe. Much of the theorisation of sexuality in the
west, for example, including supposedly cutting-edge queer theory, is terribly westo-
centric, parochial or patronising towards African scholars and theorists. My hope,
which the editors modestly articulate, is that The Prize and the Price can contribute
to the enrichment and maturity of sexuality studies globally.

Marc Epprecht
Associate Professor, Department of Global Development Studies,
Queen’s University, Kingston
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vii
Firstly we would like to thank our authors for their patience and commitment
to the project. We are also grateful to i and Simply Said and Done
for logistical and administrative support, and thank the reviewers for their
thoughtful comments.
Melissa
I appreciate Reg for his love and support and Thembisa for her constant assistance
that frees up my time.
Mikki
I cannot express my gratitude to Pauline, for her enduring love, support and loyalty.
Melissa Steyn and Mikki van Zyl
Cape Town, June 2008
Acknowledgements
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viii
For everyone who has ever wanted to enjoy their sexuality.
Melissa
For Emily: may she have the freedom to be herself.
Mikki
For my mother, who taught me to think for myself, and always to Pauline.
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Sex is for pleasure. It is for the nation and people.
(Nomxolisi Dandaza, nursing sister and mthwasa, sangoma ‘initiate’)
(in Thornton 2003: 4)
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3
1
The prize and the price
Melissa Steyn and Mikki van Zyl
    of exclusive heterosexuality in
society. Based on the assumption that there are only two sexes and that each has
predetermined gender roles, it pervades all social attitudes, but is particularly visible
in ‘family’ and ‘kinship’ ideologies. Heteronormativity constructs oppositional
binaries – for example woman/man, homosexual/heterosexual – and is embedded
in discourses which create punitive rules for non-conformity to hegemonic norms
of heterosexual identity.
Sexual beings
This book has been a long time in the making. The authors, we are sure, would
agree that it has been far too long, yet the theme of the work has remained pertinent
throughout the political and social changes that have marked the democratic
South Africa’s recent past. The concern of the book is the invisible power of
heteronormativity as the enduring dominant ideological formation in post-apartheid
South Africa, exercising control over who we are and who we should be, and the
costs of being dierent. The title, The Prize and the Price, alludes to the manner
in which the desired and the desirable are constructed through the simultaneous
constellation of the undesired and the undesirable, deeply knotted into our gender,
‘race’, age, class and our times and place – integral and complex parts of our sense
of self, of where and how we fit into the world.
Collectively, the authors of the chapters in this book throw light on how South
Africans engage with this dialectic of desires within the context of their newly achieved
democracy. Some negotiate new possibilities for their desires, some attempt to have
old desires newly recognised, some attempt to perpetuate prized positionalities, while
others continue to pay the cost of being undesired. A key challenge has been presented
to the edifice of heteronormativity through the ‘queering’ of the Constitution with
the protection against discrimination of sexual orientation.

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4 the prize and the price
Informing this work is the belief that our sexuality is shaped within our
social understandings of selfhood, how we make sense of our relations to others
and how we fit into our cultural institutions – the laws, religious institutions,
schools, social venues and, above all, families. These are sites of energetic social
pressures, evoking equally energetic agencies on the part of individuals to
conform, perform, enact, resist, undermine, revise or transform the constraining
and enabling influences. We express our sexualities through a diverse range of
subjective experiences, filtered through social frameworks of ideologies, theories,
politics and ethics. Sexuality gives meaning to our experiences of ourselves in
dierent and varied contexts and social milieus – even as our desires may seduce us
beyond the social discourses provided for us to make sense of ourselves. Sexuality is
more than sex; it is the entire way we ‘come out’ of our bodies to be in the world.
Disciplining the body
Our sexuality is a deeply political issue, continually subject to various contesting
discourses of moral regulation. The intersection of various historical strands of
political struggle put sexuality in the political limelight in post-apartheid South
Africa – women’s struggles for equality, lesbian and gay liberation, the rampaging
/ pandemic in Africa and the negotiations for a peaceful settlement in South
Africa. In popular ideology, the transition also marked a liberalisation of sexuality
in contrast to the puritanism of the apartheid era, which was founded on the tenet
of racial purity and policed through a prohibition on interracial sex. Therefore a
study of sexuality must recognise how socio-political and cultural processes of
creating ‘races’, genders, sexualities and disabilities are expressed through and upon
our bodies. It is through the meanings attached to non-hegemonic bodies and their
desires that Othering is perpetuated, and upon whom dierent forms of exclusion,
oppression and violence are perpetrated. The body becomes the site of discursive
power struggles.
Within the broad modernist western tradition, hierarchical social values

would construct the most prized sexual being as the white, adult, heterosexual
male – virile, able-bodied, handsome and healthy, and of good social standing – the
eligible husband. The most prized sexual liaison would be a monogamous same
‘race’, heterosexual union between two able-bodied adults (not too young, not
too old) for the purpose of raising a family. The sexualities of those dierently
positioned are all subject to constructions of Othering in some form or another.
The black penis is exoticised (Ratele 2004), and African men are understood to
have a rampant sexuality which leads to rape (Arnfred 2004; Fanon 1988). Women’s
sexual autonomy is constrained by discourses that ‘fix’ them in terms of a natural
disposition towards emotion – romance, nurturing and maternity, as closer to
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the prize and the price 5
nature and nurture (Hird 2007). Disabled people are considered asexual, as are the
elderly and children. Youth are sexually explosive and need to be controlled.
The powerful norming action of taboos and stigmas draws the boundaries
on a social continuum moving from the actively pursued, the desired and the
accepted, through the tolerated, restricted and constrained to the outlawed. At the
marginalised end of the continuum, social meanings constitute and are constituted
by institutional regulations which control sexualities through labelling them as
sinful, sick or criminal, where individuals pay the price for their desires that oend.
At the centre, reproductive marriage confers the prize and signifies the victory of
the heteronormative.
The hierarchisation of sexualities is written into westocentric cultures
through discourses which value individualistic, rationalist, biologistic, techno-
scientific, biomedical, psycho-medical explanations of ‘the sexual’. Women’s
bodies are frequently pathologised or medicalised, even for the apparently ‘natural’
processes of menstruation, childbirth and menopause. Bodies that desire people
of the same sex are psychologised into perversion. On the other hand, many social
theorists have treated the body as a peculiarly ‘bloodless’ object constructed within
socio-cultural discourse. Postcolonial, feminist and queer theorists have provided

deep critiques of these dynamics in the construction of sexualities and gender,
leading to the ‘reintroduction’ of the body in social theory and challenging the
Cartesian body/mind split which characterises much of the western intellectual
tradition (Connell & Dowsett 1999). There are numerous other current discourses
on sexuality framed by westocentric knowledge systems – approaches in public
health, kinship and marriage studies, human rights, gender studies and popular
literature on sexuality – which do not contextualise sexuality within a nexus of other
intersecting cultural meanings. Yet, as is often pointed out:
Sexual meanings are central to concepts of self and of the person, and to the
values we associate with others. The values we attach to pleasure also dier.
Accordingly, where social structures, concepts of the person, and values
dier, we may find dierences in sexual culture that coordinate with these
dierences. (Thornton 2003: 11)
In South Africa, the persistent history of hegemonic whiteness together with
postcolonial globalisation has resulted in the dominance of westocentric meanings
of sex and sexuality. Indigenous southern African meanings have largely been
silenced by the violence of the colonising project (Osha 2004), and the practice
of sacralising knowledges and philosophies of sexualities within the secret
domains of traditional healers (Thornton 2003). Over the last century, influences
of westocentric knowledge production have generated many texts which explore
African sexualities, initially through a western lens but increasingly from more
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6 the prize and the price
African-centred perspectives, for example Amadiume (1987), Gevisser and Cameron
(1995), Epprecht (2004), Arnfred (2004), and Morgan and Wieringa (2005).
Contemporary discourses shaping South African sexualities, then, are
a complex mix of the dominant western discourses, both the contemporary
global strands and the often still colonial local inflections, and the tensions in
postcolonial African heteropatriarchies as they formulate re-imagined African
national identities. We see these dynamics operate in critical issues such as /

 (Steinberg 2008), and in positions on homosexuality (Hoad 1998; Salo &
Gqola 2006) where it is often claimed that homosexuality is ‘unAfrican’. Current
historiography of sexual practices in Africa (see Epprecht 2004; Morgan & Wieringa
2005; Murray & Roscoe 2001) indicates that homophobia – as discrimination and
Othering – not homosexuality – as same-sex practices – was a colonial import (see
also Aarmo 1999; Phillips 2000, 2003, 2004). Yet the contemporary discourse
reveals the complex engagements between colonial discourses of ‘sin’, ‘perversion’,
‘bestiality’, ‘primitivism’ and ‘crime’ and the silences around sexuality and sexual
practices in traditional African discourses.
It can be argued that we see these intertwined disciplinary processes at work
also in the meanings assigned to sex as the nexus of social continuity – linking past
and future, linking individuals through social and political arrangements in the
present – underpinned by values which are deeply gendered. Social and political
roles incorporate the distinctions between masculinity and femininity, established
within sexual roles, as ‘root metaphors’ for broader aspects of daily social and
political life. During the apartheid struggle women activists were frequently typified
as ‘mothers of the nation’, showing the imbrication of politics, nationalism and
gendered identities. In the Jacob Zuma rape trial the defendant used the power of
his political position to ‘speak’ on behalf of a Zulu ‘traditional’ masculinity (Ratele
2006), re-imagined into a postcolonial political identity. The continuities between
military power, political power and sexual power, often played out in dominant
western masculinities, too, were explicit, reflecting the entanglements of inequality
and dierences such as status, generation, gender and ethnicity.
Embodiedness
As it shapes our sexualities, social and cultural regulation not only informs our
sense of self, but also contours our actual bodies. Bodies become vehicles of cultural
ideals and notions of etiquette. For example, in South Africa, the population group
with the highest rise in anorexia is young African girls, who increasingly see
themselves through western discourses that valorise thinness, and reject more
traditional approaches to female ideals that encourage an ample female figure as a

marker of health and prosperity. The materiality of the body in culture raises the
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the prize and the price 7
question of ‘which bodies come to matter – and why’ (Butler 1993: xii). Philosophers
and critical social theorists such as Michel Foucault (1992, 1998), Judith Butler
(1993, 1999) and Susan Bordo (2004) have grappled with the dialectical tensions
between bodies and cultures, and the constitution of subjectivities and identities
in the face of hegemonic discourses which place dierential values on people
depending on their bodies. Butler (1999: 19) queries the constitution of sexual
subjectivities in culture:
[W]ho is it who is able to recognise him or herself as a subject of sexuality,
and how are the means of recognition controlled, dispersed and regulated
such that only a certain kind of subject is recognisable through them?…One
might very well be the bearer of a sexuality in such a way that one’s very
status as a subject is destroyed by bearing that sexuality.
Discussions focusing on the materiality of the body and its desires are underpinned
by various tenets regarding ‘nature’. Sexuality does not arise ready-made from
‘nature’, discoverable by science; as a discursive construction ‘nature’ has a history
of being massively deployed to write the ‘inevitability’ of heterosexuality into
sexuality and gender (Schiebinger 2000, 2004). ‘Nature’ is used as the yardstick
for hegemonic normativity through which regulation of bodies is defended. Yet any
examination of the history of what has been regarded as ‘natural’ at dierent times
even within the same cultural tradition shows its ideological embeddedness within
place and time. For example, the notion of two complementary sexes as the material
basis for gender and heteronormativity is itself a construction of modern medicine,
an ‘advance’ on the Aristotelian views of one sex where woman was a ‘falling away’
from the perfection of man:
In the one-sex model that dominated anatomical thinking for two millennia,
woman was understood as man inverted. The uterus was the female
scrotum, the ovaries were testicles, the vulva a foreskin, and the vagina was a

penis. (Laquer 2002: 61, emphasis in original)
Through its physicality, intersex as a category particularly disrupts the ‘natural’
binary sex system, while critical queer scholarship has unearthed a variety of
cultural permutations of sexual and (trans)gender subjectivities and identities that
perform as dissident sexualities – beyond the boundaries of normativity.
Like sexuality and ‘nature’, physical desire has a history. In westocentric
discourses desire is perceived to arise in and through sex, which is also naturalised.
Yet ironically, these ‘natural’ phenomena become the focus for rigorous social,
political and moral regulation. The realm of sex-desire is built upon ‘asymmetrical’
gender norms and the precept of continuous heterosexual becoming of ‘women’
and ‘men’. Therefore desire is deeply marked by sex and gender, and central to an
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8 the prize and the price
analysis of sexuality and power. The histories detailing the physical phenomenon of
orgasm in the west have conflicting explanations for males and females, originating
in searches for rational explanations of the ‘biological imperative to procreate the
species’. From a masculinist perspective, ‘desire’ and ‘pleasure’ were therefore
constructed as necessary for the procreation of the species. Yet, once female clitoral
orgasms had been ‘discovered’, and Freudian-inspired debates around vaginal
orgasms had been laid aside, theorists of sociobiology failed to find a persuasive
‘biological purpose’ for the female orgasm, thus making the clitoris a conundrum.
Even many feminists have found it hard to accept the argument that females may
experience orgasms purely for pleasure (Lloyd 2004).
The issue of women’s sexual pleasure in Africa is put under the microscope
in discourses drawing attention to the prevalence of female genital cutting
(Dellenborg 2004), and widespread gender-based violence (Bennett 2001). Attempts
to redress the perception that female sexualities in Africa are underscored by pain
and violence have elicited responses from African feminists focusing on sexuality
and pleasure (McFadden 2003; Spronk 2007). Others point out that despite the
historic silences on African sexualities, desires and pleasure have always been

present through fantasy (Ngwena 2007). Elder (2003) demonstrates how
apartheid was built on assumptions of heteronormativity. We are left with these
distortions wrought in African traditional sexual relations through the periods
of colonial oppression and their subsequent interpellation into postcolonial
hegemonic discourses.
The chapters in this book address the materiality of desires through
describing sexual practices which arise in the spaces defined by a potent mix of
historic and contemporary cultural regulation.
Intersectionality
Meanings and materialities of desire, forms and technologies of pleasure,
ways of practising sex, and the sexual identities which attach to all of these,
form and re-form within other hierarchies of dominance and the contestations
they provoke. (Posel 2003: 3, our emphasis)
The categories of conventional identity politics, such as ‘race’ or gender, for example,
are complicated by other salient dierences which dehomogenise positionalities.
In response to work by theorists focusing on ‘race’, postcoloniality or gender,
the concept of intersectionality has come increasingly into currency, and is
recognised as a sub-field in its own right.
1
Intersectional analyses show that social
positionalities such as class intersect with gender and ‘race’ or sexuality, and ‘are
simultaneously subjective, structural and about social positioning and everyday
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the prize and the price 9
practices’ (Brah & Phoenix 2004: 75; Bakare-Yusuf 2003). Not only do these axes of
social power intersect, but they also shape each other, even constitute each other.
For example, gender is likely to ‘look’ very dierent in contexts that vary along lines
of class and ‘race’. Therefore it is helpful to think in terms of a ‘politics of location’:
the way power lines operate within a particular location to create conditions for
identities to emerge (or be submerged) – the conditions for belonging, ‘passing’ or

being ‘closeted’:
We regard the concept of ‘intersectionality’ as signifying the complex,
irreducible, varied, and variable eects which ensue when multiple axes
of dierentiation – economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and
experiential – intersect in historically specific contexts. (Brah & Phoenix
2004: 76)
While this work on intersectionality is well established in much postcolonial,
feminist and ‘race’ theorisation, where it interrogates dierentiating gender
and global/local power relations, until recently relatively little has been done to
particularise and de-essentialise sexualities beyond the well-established line of
writing on gender and homo/hetero sexualities. This is a state of aairs changing
quite rapidly, as witnessed by the advent of journals dedicated to the task, such as
Sexualities; Sexualities in Africa; Culture, Health and Sexuality; Sexuality Research
and Social Policy; and Body & Society. Work has been done on particularising
homosexualities (Performing Queer being one example amongst many similar
African and international publications; see Van Zyl & Steyn 2005). The Prize and
the Price takes heteronormativity and deconstructs its marginalised domains,
examining some articulations of dierently located sexualities in contemporary
South Africa – on or o the edge of marginality. It shows that heteronormativity
is not monolithic, and points to how all the marginalised positionalities within
heteronormativity are actually co-constituted through dominant heteronormative
cultural constructions. The goal of disaggregating the hierarchies present in
heteronormativities is important to contribute to our understanding of post-
apartheid sexualities.
The reason for the silence into which our book speaks is the enormous
invisible power which heteronormativity holds as the dominant ideological
formation. In this respect it is very much like whiteness, which maintains its
invisibility through its power as the norm. The imperative to ‘out’
2
whiteness

and particularise its operations in specific contexts is now accepted as a major
theoretical contribution in Race Studies. Similarly, numerous publications on
hegemonic masculinities have problematised the multiple sites of constructions
of masculinities. We contend that in making an analogous move in ‘outing’ the
‘taken for grantedness’ of heterosexuality from within heteronormativity, tracing
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10 the prize and the price
both continuities and departures from the apartheid past, this volume makes
a substantial contribution to our understanding of the multiple workings of
heteronormativity in particular, and sexuality in general. In South Africa, academic
interest in marginalised sexuality has focused almost exclusively on homosexuality
and, where it has focused on heterosexuality, it has done so overwhelmingly in
the context of / and gender-based violence. While not ignoring these
important aspects of heterosexuality, our book foregrounds lesser discussed areas of
heterosexualities, and shows how these articulate together.
The Prize and the Price highlights the historical continuities in our deeply
racialised society. The profoundly racialised construction of sexuality in South
Africa needs to be recognised as one of the particularities of our ‘politics of
location’. At the same time, and similar to the global queer scholarship where
South African sexualities are frequently represented, this book will contribute to
scholarship on sexuality well beyond South African borders.
Overview
The Prize and the Price is organised into five sections. Each section reflects a
dierent set of responses to normativising and normalising discourses on sexuality
within post-apartheid South Africa. The chapters represent a range of conversations
with dominant hegemonic pressures, from rearticulating agency within prevailing
social and cultural (con)formations, to changing the terms of engagement.
Negotiating new deals
In this section experiences of young post-apartheid South Africans, the ‘rainbow
children’, are narrated. Facing the challenges of democratisation and changing

laws, they explore possibilities for new subjectivities and identities. They negotiate
aspects of the old and the new, engaging with and contributing to emerging
cultural forms.
The high school pupils that Pattman and Bhana interviewed are conscious
of the residual racialisation of their identities. The authors explore how class
dierences shape the experiences of girls from an African school in contrast
with those from a ‘formerly Indian school’. The African girls deploy their
racialised sexualities as a ‘resource and source of self-esteem’ in contexts of racial
subordination, but remain firmly rooted in heterosexual desire and desirability.
Salo and Davids write on the sexualities of matriculants from working-class
schools in ‘coloured’ Wynberg, Cape Town. They elaborate on the semiotically
charged Matric Ball as a rite of passage which inscribes desirable ‘femininity’
through global discourses and mediascapes of consumption intersecting with
local gendered heteronormativities. The Matric Ball also becomes an intense focus
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the prize and the price 11
for parents – particularly mothers – as they invest in their daughters’ social début
through their own desires of romance and marriage for their daughters. They
demonstrate how ‘race’, space and gender intersect in new and localised ways.
The trajectory of interracial relationships in South Africa is explored in
the chapter by Sherman and Steyn. Giving a brief historical review, they place a
preoccupation with ‘race’ in sexuality within the context of colonial South Africa
and shifting expressions of whiteness. They explore a site of interracial dating –
middle class, driven by neoliberal notions of individualism – where racial-group
boundaries break down with relative ease. This small sample illustrates how since
the repeal of the miscegenation legislation new spaces for sexual freedom and
identity mobility are emerging, demonstrated here by the apparent irrelevance of the
political dimensions of ‘race’, power and the enduring inequalities of class written
through ‘race’ in the broader South Africa.
Flipping the coin

The chapters in this section show dynamics of engagement with enduring
conditions and conventions in contexts that allow little room for negotiating
identities. The participants in the studies manoeuvre within the confines of power
structures to change the terms of their positioning within dominant discourses that
attempt to fix their sexual subjectivities.
Writing about prison life in rural South Africa, Niehaus asserts that
dominating heteronormative masculinities are recast into men having sex with
men. Disentangling the tension in discourses about male–male sex in ‘total
institutions’, he problematises explanations that reassert essential heterosexuality
as much as those that romanticise male–male sexualities within queer discourses
of masculine desire. In this account, sexual intercourse becomes the mechanism
by which relationships of domination and subordination are constructed, not only
between individuals, but also between rival gangs, thereby creating hierarchies of
masculinities which are sustained through violence and fear. Niehaus emphasises
the contingency of masculine identities, and how the men’s sexualities are shaped
by place.
Normative assumptions about ‘sex work’ and female sexuality are challenged
by ‘Fauna, Flora and Fucking: Female Sex Safaris in South Africa’, as McEwen
explores the issues of gendered power relations and how they intersect with ‘race’,
class and age. By casting the relationships between young males selling sex to
female tourists in a romantic light, dominant discourses about ‘female’ sexuality
mask transactions that are fundamentally economic. This chapter interrogates the
shifting relations of class, ‘race’ and north/south in the context of selling sex, and
disrupts many readings of sex work that emphasise gender inequalities without
addressing economic, ‘race’ and macro structural dynamics.
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12 the prize and the price
Popplestone presents a deeply personal account of the impact of her
blindness on her sexuality and how it has aected her sense of herself as a woman,
sometimes being a marker of ‘interesting’ dierence, and often a spur to be more

and better than her peers. With wry humour she exposes herself and her human
frailties, her susceptibility to falling into the traps of stigmatisation and Othering of
people with disabilities. She grapples with the complex question of ‘what qualifies
or disqualifies us as legitimate objects of desire’ and concludes that it is to be seen
as whole, not only by others, but by ourselves. She longs for integration with the
norms of society, while lingering on the margins. Unlike, for example, lesbian-gay-
bisexual-transgender-queer-intersex groups who seek recognition for their dissident
sexualities, people with disabilities are marginalised even when they desire very
normative sexual relationships.
Addressing sexualities in old age, Thornton, Potocnik and Muller show that
older people remain interested in and often enjoy sex well into their eighties and
nineties. They argue that stigmatisation and discrimination against the elderly can
cause great pain to people who want to experience intimacy and live full lives in
their old age.
Paying the price
The violent reassertion of dominant racialised and heteropatriarchal hegemonies
is the subject of this section. Underlying values around blackness and whiteness,
femininities and masculinities, and age continue to permeate the social regulation
and exploitation of certain sexual subjectivities through structural and actual
violence.
In ‘The Weather Watchers’, Artz interrogates ‘what the law means to women
and how we should use the law – if at all – in the protection of women’. Her study,
based on the life stories of women in rural communities in the Western Cape,
demonstrates how coercion and violence are central in ‘shaping, maintaining and
restricting women’s sexuality’. She shows how social institutions, the women
themselves, families, as well as the justice system, which is supposed to protect
women, are used as tools to control women’s sexuality. The gendered nature of
social institutions raises questions about whether the criminal justice system is
capable of protecting women.
The issue of disability and sexuality is addressed again in the chapter by

Sait, Lorenzo, Steyn and Van Zyl. While media exposés of paedophilia often focus
on ‘man to boy’ abuse, the statistics on child sexual abuse indicate that female
children are far more frequent victims, being especially vulnerable in their families.
This underscores the power of heteronormativity where abuse of the girl child is
so commonplace as to be almost taken as normal. In this chapter the challenges
that mothers face in managing the sexual development of their daughters with
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the prize and the price 13
disabilities highlight the intersectional marginalisation of young black girls with
disabilities in an impoverished area of the Northern Cape. Living in communities
where gender-based violence is rampant, their mothers are challenged by the
environmental dangers as well as by moralistic discourses of purity and biologistic
decisions regarding the girls’ reproductive capacities. Besides the disabilities of the
daughters, the challenging living conditions, the girls’ lack of autonomy, and the lack
of support and information make parenting an anguishing task for the mothers.
Henri Lefebvre (1991) has noted that societies produce spaces to facilitate
their own reproduction. Teppo examines the history of policing whiteness in
former white working-class neighbourhoods in Cape Town – an ideological task
of fashioning ‘white respectability’. The structuring of physical spaces according
to ‘race’ corresponded to the ideological boundaries between ‘civilisation’ and
‘barbarism’; location and class intersect in the search for respectability. Tracing
the historical shifts from apartheid’s policing of whiteness to the ‘upward mobility’
of coloured people moving into the area after 1994, she demonstrates shades of
whiteness as, post-apartheid, their ‘race’ privilege fails to protect the ‘poor whites’
who are looked down upon by their new upwardly mobile neighbours. Central to
the search for respectability is the regulation and self-regulation of sexual behaviour
and gender presentation.
Moving into locations which are deemed ‘asexual’ – i.e. work – Hambidge
and Orr show how disciplinary performances make visible the taken-for-granted
sexualities through enforcing particular configurations of dominant hegemonies.

As two women caught at dierent ends of ‘sexual harassment’ policies, the
similarities of their experiences show how apparently ‘sexless’ and ‘genderless’
institutions are founded on notions of heteronormativity. The conversation dances
around notions of ‘spoiled identity’ which have sinister echoes of what happened to
the rape survivor during the Zuma trial. The political repercussions experienced
by these two academic women in South Africa are reproduced in other sites –
institutional warnings to women who are successful in a man’s world to ‘keep in
their place’?
Holding onto the prize
Holding the centre involves hard discursive work, and involves ongoing
maintenance of practices which (re)energise dominant hegemonies. Discourses
under challenge need to be reworked, recoded and sometimes even renamed in
order for privileged positionalities to be (re)secured.
Focusing on heterosexuality and discourses about / among some
students at the University of the Western Cape in the late 1990
s, Shefer and Foster
present their contributions to debates about theory and interventions through the
lenses of gender and heterosex. They find that research on sexual practices in South
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14 the prize and the price
Africa follows the global trend of focusing on behavioural interventions in unsafe
sexual practices. The proliferation of studies on heterosexuality mostly illustrates
how unequal gender power relations play out in the negotiation of heterosex,
which is generally presented as essential. They conclude with the importance of
articulating alternative discourses of sexual subjectivities and asserting women’s
sexual desires to shift the binarisms implicit in heterosexual society.
The intimate relationships between politics, language, ‘race’ and identities
are explored in Ratele’s provocative chapter on the post-apartheid constitution
of sexualities. He argues that the ‘race shape of apartheid sexualities’ continues
through colonial historical configurations, where ‘many South Africans continue to

live out the sexual identities, desires, fears, and relationships that apartheid fathers
sought to cultivate on this land’. Racialisation is reinscribed in sexual identities
through naming practices, sexual fear and ignorance, which endure and permeate
post-apartheid South Africa.
Like disabled people, children and old people are seen as ‘asexual’. Jane
van der Riet explores the perceptions that adults have of children’s sexualities,
and shows how the regulation of children’s sexualities follows from varying
assumptions. The nature of children’s sexuality is highly contested, ranging from
‘nice’ and ‘natural’ to ‘deviant’ and ‘dangerous’, but somehow the idea that adults
should ‘take charge’ of it is persistent, though the answers to how this should
happen are varied. Children’s sexuality is a contested topic, sitting on the boundary
between protecting children against potential sexual abuse while arming their
bodily integrity and autonomy.
Que(e)rying the contract
The final three chapters focus on sexual rights. By interrogating marginalised
sexualities and the manner in which they have been written into or omitted from the
Constitution and its articulation through the legal framework, the authors in this
section highlight the relationship between the post-apartheid state and its citizens.
Focusing on the more prevalent forms of women selling sex to men, Gardner
makes a case for decriminalising adult sex work on the basis of the negative impact
it has on the lives of sex workers. Criminalisation of sex work has led to coercion
from law enforcers and lack of protection from criminals. Bringing adult sex work
into the open would clarify the distinction between consenting commercial sex and
under-age sex work, which is criminalised, thereby facilitating the apprehension of
oenders against vulnerable people like children. It would also open possibilities for
addressing sexual health issues such as /.
Reddy tackles the prickly topic of same-sex marriage, arguing that not only
same-sex practices but also gay identities were present in African communities
during apartheid. Using the legal framework as an entry point, he examines the
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the prize and the price 15
meanings of same-sex marriage in South Africa, which complicates the notion of
marriage itself as well as the meaning of homosexual identities. He concludes that
the law in post-apartheid South Africa has been powerful in constituting queer
identities by arming intimate sexual relationships through marriage, though it
has not erased homophobia in the society.
South Africa was the first country in the world, and remains the only
country in Africa, to protect citizens against discrimination on the basis of
sexual orientation in its Constitution. In the final chapter Van Zyl examines the
conjunction of various historical processes of struggle which made it possible. By
exploring the significance of these struggles of belonging and society’s reactions
to them, she assesses their potential impact on sexual rights. Belonging speaks to
the values of diversity which are promoted as characterising South African national
identities, and symbolised in the motto ‘Strength in diversity’.
Notes
1 As shown by the five-day symposium dedicated to the field in the International
Sociological Association World Congress of Sociology in Durban in July 2006.
2 We use the term ‘out’ as broader than a homosexual identity, but rather as a politicised
identity because it is publicly proclaimed. See the explanation of ‘coming out’ by Van Zyl
(2005: 90).
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