Policing the Desire of the Treacherous ‘Blood-Mixer’: State Imposition of Afrikaner Puritan Masculinity on White South African Manhood during Apartheid

For centuries in the region that became South Africa there were relatively few social consequences for settler white men who had extramarital sex with colonized women. The longstanding colonial sexual status quo was abruptly overturned after the election of the National Party government. To the surprise of the white electorate, the new regime immediately set out to impose Afrikaner nationalism’s strict public morality on to all of white society. This included using sex law as a biopolitical weapon to reinforce the arbitrary boundary demarcating whiteness. Explicitly targeting white men, the National Party government passed The Immorality (Amendment) Act 1950 that criminalized extramarital interracial (hetero)sex, and for decades the state relentlessly applied the law to straight white men, regardless of ethnicity, and the Black women they desired. In doing so, the National Party deployed sexuality to solidify whiteness generally and impose Afrikaner puritan masculinity on the whole of white South African manhood. However, as the regime was rapidly obliged to learn, desire is notoriously unruly: heterosexual white men resisted state interference in their erotic lives and continued desiring, and acting on their desire, for Black women.

On the Series: Critical Engagements with Histories of Whiteness

In providing a nuanced dissection of the realities of racialisation across the expanse of South Africa’s pasts, this seminar series seeks to explore the makings of racialised whiteness as individual and collective identity. While steering away from a simplified analysis of white lived experiences in a historically racialised society, this series seeks to understand how whiteness was simultaneously afforded great privilege, policed and disciplined. Moreover, this series seeks to expose the ways in which markers of idealised whiteness have been transferred, transformed and reconfigured over time.  In doing so, we seek to track expressions and experiences of whiteness today, considering the current state of the global political landscape. In placing histories of racialised whiteness within the context of South African historiography more broadly, this series also occupies itself with the contemporary implications surrounding processes of racialisation and race-making in South Africa.

Susanne M. Klausen

Susanne M. Klausen is the Julia Gregg Brill Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. Her main areas of research are the history of fertility politics in modern South Africa, nationalism and sexuality, and transnational movements for reproductive justice. She is the author of Race, Maternity, and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa, 1910-1939 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa (Oxford University Press, 2015) that won the Women’s History Prize awarded by the Canadian Committee on Women’s History (2016) and the Joel Gregory Prize awarded by the Canadian Association of African Studies (2016). Prof Klausen has published articles in a range of scholarly journals and is currently writing a monograph on the criminalization of interracial heterosex in South Africa during apartheid.

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