Sex Talk Is Everywhere in South Africa at Present

1

Debating Sex Talk in South Africa

Desiree Lewis

Presentation for "Realising Sexual Rights" Workshop

Institute of Development Studies, Sussex University, 28-30 September 2005

Introduction

Vocal sex talk is everywhere in South Africa at present. This includes public talk about and action against sexual violence, media coverage of same-sex relationships, television talk shows on sexuality and the wide-scale information dissemination about sexual practices and behaviour in relation to HIV/AIDS. Our current climate of sex talk therefore contrasts dramatically with the censoring of representations of sexuality in the public sphere and the policing of sexual practices under apartheid, when so-called "inter-racial" sex, in terms of the Immorality Act, was tabooed and various laws criminalised homosexuality. Paradoxically, sex was also selectively considered to be private, so that domestic violence was not believed to be a subject for state intervention.

The rapid shifts around sexual discourses suggest swiftly changing social attitudes and an environment in which citizens have numerous freedoms and choices. Yet the nature of the prominent sex talk seems to be setting limits on what kinds of freedoms are possible, and who articulates these freedoms. I reflect on this by considering two sites of public sex talk in contemporary South Africa: domestic violence and same-sex relationships. Each of these, one being the explosion of the private into the public, and the other contesting the foundations of heteronormativity and patriarchal dominance, are at the centre of public talk about sexual rights in South Africa. Domestic violence and same-sex relationships uncover complex emotional, cultural and personal perspectives and experiences. They therefore raise the need for a broadened understanding of political activity as this defines individual and collective agency in securing rights.

As a feminist with a deep interest in how cultural texts open up imaginative meanings, I am often demoralised by the tone of sex rights talk, by its tendency to universalise and generalise, by its focus on women as supplicants or recipients of rights, rather than as agents able to contest injustice and conceptualise their own needs. In starting fito, a feminist webzine ( I was motivated to contribute to broadening the existing discussion, and consider how this can be done in the last section of this paper.

Domestic Violence

In South Africa, the Domestic Violence Act was passed in 1998 and replaced the Prevention of Family Violence Act. The Act has been viewed as groundbreaking. It acknowledges that domestic violence is a serious social problem and infringement of women's rights and security. Defining "domestic violence" to include different forms of abuse, the Act offers protection to any victim of domestic violence in an abusive domestic situation. The Act makes it obligatory for the Police Services to inform a victim of his or her rights at the scene of the incident of domestic violence. It also requires the National Commissioner of the SAPS to provide national guidelines for dealing with domestic violence.

Domestic violence in South Africa has been shaped by endemic violence across the society that is not always linked to economic or social status.

Butmuch research in South Africa has drawn attention to the close connections between domestic violence, economic circumstances and political legacies of marginalisation. This is strongly evident in especially high levels of violence in South African farming contexts, and the situation of many women farm workers affected by domestic violence graphically raises the limitations of the Domestic Violence Act. South African farm workers have a unique history of violent exploitation, this being captured in the fiction of well-known South African writers like JM Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Andre Brink. The legacy of this violence haunts labour relations in the present, and the dynamic this creates in the domestic sphere and inter-personal relationships.

Although women have always played an important part in agriculture, their contributions are not valued, and their social status is especially low. Among the extensive reasons for the high vulnerability of women to abuse on farms is the deep belief that women belong to or are extensions of men. Thismeans that they oftenobtain only seasonal work or work without contracts. They do not have the bargaining power or rights that men have. It also means that women do not receive housing without male partners, which leads them to seek or remain in highly abusive relationships with men.

Moreover, the racial power relations associated with farm labour place women at risk of sexual abuse at the hands of both their partners and farmers. Limited educational opportunities and skills or illiteracy can constrain their efforts to find alternative employment. Women typically earn less than men, experience greater rates of unemployment, are concentrated in the lowest-paying sectors of the job market and over-represented amongst the poor of South African society. As a result, finding a man and then sticking to him, is often as much a matter of economic necessity as it is a romantic choice.

The web of economic and patriarchal domination for many poor and unemployed women blatantly raises the inadequacies of thinking about solutions solely in terms of legal routes and any straightforward need for women to be "freed" from abusive relationships. A woman's dependence on her partner can constrain her ability to: lay charges of abuse (a partner's imprisonment would mean the loss of income); divorce or separate from a partner (which can lead her into financially even more precarious situations or complete destitution); leave home (which can lead to homelessness and increased vulnerability to gender-based violence in impoverished and violent living environments).

The result of women's economic dependence in abusive relationships is often an ever-spiralling cycle of violence. Men's sense of entitlement (and the corresponding levels of violence they may use) can increase in proportion to their partners' dependence on them. Consequently, for many poor women, effective policing, new legislation and severe forms of punishment of perpetrators do not automatically lead to an improvement in their quality of life. Placing people in situations where they are expected to choose between living in abusive circumstances, or circumstances of economic hardship, is a form of coerced decision- making.

The double bind confronting many women in the face of domestic violence is compounded by the inadequacy of shelter services. Many working-class and unemployed women who wish to leave their abusive partners simply cannot afford to find alternative accommodation. At present, there are approximately 50 registered shelters for battered women in South Africa. In view of the statistics on domestic violence in the country, and the huge needs of survivors for counselling, these shelters are wholly inadequate. Furthermore, shelters are concentrated in metropolitan areas.

All this points to the need for holisticways of confronting domestic violence. By showing that gender-based violence must be addressed through an "intersectional" approach, many South African activists argue that fragmented strategies are hugely inadequate. In terms of the intersectional approach, linkages are made between different social problems. So, for example, poverty is connected to violence both in determining the causes of violence and assessing how to assist with prevention and support for survivors, with socio-economic rights and justice being seen as key and overarching.

The upsurge of gender-based violence at many different levels also casts serious doubt on the efficacy of legislative approaches to violence as an endemic phenomenon. When a culture of violence so deeply pervades society, it is clear that its roots lie largely in learned modes of behaviour, in mindsets and in cultural values. Moreover, gender-based violence surfaces inrelation to very particular political and economic processes, and varies throughout the different provinces and population groups.

This indicates that localised strategies and responses, rooted in the particular needs of different communities, must play a pivotal role. Civil society organisations and NGOs can therefore initiate far more proactive and context-sensitive approaches than the over-arching measures taken by the government and in legislation. Capturing this "needs-based" approach in the outlook of the Masimanyane Women's Support Project, Lesley Foster argues:

In order to develop and sustain a democratic society, there has to be deep, rapid and fundamental change on a number of levels. In line with this has to be the recognition that we cannot legislate for change. Social justice and social change requires more than laws and policies. Women's organisations in South Africa believe it is imperative that we begin to address the problem by placing it both within a historical and political perspective. ... We need to acknowledge the pain of the past and the influence this has on the entire nation.[1]

By referring to the "pain of the past" Foster draws attention to interventions that transcend both the setting of "national" or "universal" needs and the heavy literalism that is usually associated with rights activism in third-world contexts. Issues related to consciousness-raising, individual expression and cultural expression are often seen as unimportant in relation to the urgency of the "practical" and "bread-and-butter" issues that have national developmental relevance. Consequently, consciousness-raising and cultural expression tend to be seen as "indulgences" suited to first-world contexts, and spurious distinctions end up being made between what is "practical" and what is not.

Broadly, "needs" raise the importance of storytelling, and the airing of personal registers that can resonate emotionally and psychologically and in ways that legalistic or political language cannot. I explore these briefly in the section, "Other Voices". In what follows, however, I focus on challenges to heteronormativity with reference to the equality clause in the South African constitution.

Legal routes for contesting heteronormativity

Before the drafting of the Constitution, negotiations in the early 1990s provided a window of opportunity for lesbian and gay organisations to include "sexual orientation" in the Equality Clause of the Bill of Rights.

This states that:

3. The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on any one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour sexual orientation, age disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.

4. No person may unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds in terms of subsection 3. National legislation must be effected to prohibit unfair discrimination. (Chapters 2, Section 9 Bill of Rights).

Gays and Lesbians of the Witwatersrand and the Organisation of Lesbian and Gay Activists (OLGA) and by 1994, the National Coalition of Gay and Lesbian Equality (NGCLE), later Lesbian and Gay Equality Project drove ongoing struggles for the recognition of rights, especially through the courts. There are two main achievements here. One involves domestic partnerships, and the other involves court cases resulting from the Equality Clause.

In terms of domestic partnerships, at present, the South African Law Reform Commission is using the Equality Clause as a motivation to pursue more inclusive and multi-faceted formulations of family law. This would mean the recognition of same-sex relationships by law, with the legal options being: marriage for same-sex couples; civil unions for same-sex and opposite-sex couples; registered and unregistered domestic partnerships for same-sex or opposite-sex couples. This process is ongoing and protracted, and will need to entail major legislative reform. Consequently, discussion and lobbying in South Africa have come to be focused on the pros, cons and implications of legalised same-sex partnerships.

The Equality Clause has led to cases in the constitutional court being brought by individuals or the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project. This has resulted not only in important economic rights and benefits for individuals, but also in the scrutiny of the deeply hetenormative underpinnings of much legislation enacted before the Constitution. Areas affected include adoption, with same sex couples contesting the confining of joint custody to married couples only; and conditions of employment, where same-sex couples have fought for the same employment benefits that married opposite-sex couples have for their partners.

What, however, does this mean for the majority of lesbian and gay people in South Africa, as well as for broader challenges to "heteronormativity". Many black gays and lesbians, especially black lesbians, often have neither the material resources nor the supportive networks that many white lesbians, white gay men and black gay men have. As a number of commentators have shown, they are especially vulnerable to hate crimes, with legacies of racial and gender discrimination meaning that they do not have the means or scope to enter into court cases in the ways that are publicised in relation to many white gays and lesbians who have won certain victories. The litigation route that has been much publicised in relation to lesbian and gay struggles also assumes that individuals have a certain socio-economic status, that they are part of mainstream society and assert their rights in relation to secure employment and so on.

Moreover, talk about same-sex relationships in terms of litigation and provisions within the Equality Clause tends to assume the centrality of the legal ratification of same-sex relations, as though this were a goal for all gays and lesbians, and as though this in itself would address freedoms for making personal choices and the resistance of homophonic attitudes in the broader society. The prominence of talk about legalising same-sex marriage largely neglects considerations of pleasure, desire and choice, the centrality of "freedom of sexual expression and orientation".

Where, then, are the voices within the public sphere that are airing issues related to the exclusion of historically marginalised vantage points and the suppression of discussion about independence, pleasure and desire?

Other Voices

Apart from the role of NGOs in drawing attention to the different factors that impinge on violence, writing and cultural expression that highlights this complexity has rapidly grown in recent years, especially among black women singers, artists and poets. An example is Makhosazana Xaba's poem, "The Silence of a Lifetime", which traces the story of a woman who is repeatedly raped throughout her life.

It starts in the following way:

At seven she was raped

By her uncle

In the middle of the night

Under a dining table

In the lunge-cum-dining room

Of their four-roomed home

Where eleven of them lived

In the township.

Everyone else was asleep

On every available floor space.

She muffled her cries

As his penis suffocated her.

He kept whispering to her

"Don't tell anyone."[2]

In the next five verses, the poem continues to describe the subject's rape at the age of fifteen, eighteen, twenty-six, forty-five and sixty.

At a workshop a few months ago, I facilitated a session dealing with what feminism in south Africa means with regard to violence. Following a reading of Xaba's poem, a group consisting of 12 black working-class women between the ages of 30 and 60 animatedly discussed the range of issues that this poem raised, including the self-esteem of rape survivors; how this affects their behaviour in the public sphere; how violence has been linked to militarism and the anti-apartheid struggle; and what communal and individual strategies are needed to combat violence. There was a strong feeling that solutions needed to be emphatically communally oriented and focused around individuals' needs for psychological support and consciousness-raising, including the provision of shelters that did more than simply provide short-term refuge.

Overall, the poem, written by a black woman and focusing on the details of a poor black woman's life, opened up in crucial ways discussion about the very particular challenges surrounding sexual rights in relation to particular needs and circumstances.

This kind of discussion continued in relation to an episode of a South African soap opera, Isidingo, in which an older woman, who had decided to speak out about her experience of rape, was pressurised by her family, including her apparently liberated daughter, not to do so.

What the workshop session revealed was that women require the spaces and opportunities to articulate their needs, rather than being passive recipients of pre-conceived rights, and that cultural production and reception can offer crucial spaces and opportunities for this.

This potential for cultural production is evident in the work of Zanele Muholi, a lesbian activist and photographer, who has recently been making major inroads into the existing talk about lesbian experiences in South Africa. The photograph below is called, "Aftermath", and is an image of the scarred thigh of a lesbian survivor of rape.