Between 1950 and 1985, tens of thousands of South Africans were arrested for contravening the Immorality Act (1950) that prohibited extramarital heterosex between whites and Blacks and was extended in 1957 to also criminalize the attempt to have interracial sex. Aimed at maintaining whites’ mythical purity, the law was both a weapon to mould the sexual behaviour of transgressive heterosexual white men and a means to constitute race and reproduce racial inequality. Implementing the law inflicted great harms, not only on white men, but also on the Black women with whom they were arrested, harms that were gendered, racialized and sexualized in particular ways. In this presentation, Susanne M. Klausen discusses the state’s policing of ‘mixed’ sex during apartheid, from its role in cultivating a culture of surveillance, to the brutal methods of enforcement, to some of the ways the ugly “lessons learned” about race, desire and sex continue to haunt South Africa today.

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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