The Afterlife of Apartheid’s Immorality Act – Enduring Legacies of the Criminalization of Interracial Desire
May 28 @ 12:30 pm - 1:45 pm
In 1950 the apartheid regime passed the Immorality (Amendment) Act that criminalized heterosexual desire between “Europeans” and “non-Europeans.” During the 35 years the Act was on the statute book over 19,000 South Africans, mostly white men and Black women, were fully prosecuted and more than 11,000 convicted for crossing the colour line for sexual intimacy. The brutality with which the state enforced the Act has been all but forgotten since the democratic transition; the enduring legacies of that brutality have yet to be fully acknowledged let alone addressed by the state and civil society. This presentation will discuss some of the ways the Immorality Act haunts contemporary South Africa. In particular, Prof Klausen will explain how the Act greatly expanded the South African Police’s discretionary power and access to Black women’s bodies, both of which the police vigorously exploited. She argues that centering this dimension of policing during apartheid helps us better understand the ongoing operation of sexual violence perpetrated by police officers against Black women today.
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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