SNR between surfaces

Foucault’s work on sexuality was not the origin of the sexual revolution but it was a development on already extant work by feminist, gay, lesbian and other radical social movements.

The focus of early studies on sex evolved to compare the interconnections between the biological, the psychological, the social and the cultural. Although the work by scholars like Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Freud, Magnus Hirschfield and Alfred Kinsey were initially focused on the Western world, with colonisation, studies on sexuality were also undertaken in the colonised spaces. However, what is intriguing is the fact that while on one level the European colonial anthropological bias permeated the findings, on the other hand they were also were applied beyond the colonial domains . Weeks, Holland et. al (2003, p.3) argued that

Evidence collected during colonialism demonstrated a huge variety of cross-cultural patterns of attitudes towards the family, gender divisions, reproduction and what the sexologists called the ‘perversions’.

Ironically, this dossier of evidence led the Euro-centric scholars to challenge the

‘perverse’ attribution of such behaviours in their own societies and instead advocated for sex reform. An example of such behaviour was noted from Alfred Kinsey’s research which showed that 37% of his male participants reported some form of homosexual experience leading to orgasm. Such findings led to reconsidering the ‘perverse’ as being on the same continuum with the ‘normal’

(Weeks, Holland et al. 2003).

In order to understand sexuality today and its impact on people, there is need for taking cognisance of the diverse contexts in which meanings are attached to the intimacy and eroticism as well as the complex social interactions which shape the erotic cultures of those contexts. The major determinants of gender, race, class and ethnicity exist both on micro and macro levels of societal groups.

Foucault’s critique of sexuality is framed on his analysis of the relations of power and how these are instantiated through various institutions like religion, the clinic, schools, the judicial system, the law and others. As a heuristic lens and an analytical tool, it enables the interrogation of how sexuality is defined, understood and affected within various locations and experiences. Basing her citation on Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vol 1, Stoler (Stoler 1995, p.3 ) argues that Foucault considered

Sexuality was a result and an instrument of power’s design, a social construction of a historical moment.

For Foucault, sexuality is not opposed to and subversive of power. On the contrary, sexuality is a dense transfer point of power, charged with instrumentality.

The binary division between heterosexual and homosexual has since been undermined by various permutations of alternative sexualities. This has sometimes taken the form of ‘reverse discourse’, in which Foucault treats sex as an effect rather than the origin of the resistance approaches to the norm (Foucault 1976). As a result, sexuality has become a site for both the cultural and the political confrontations in both the West and Non-Western worlds in

which old and new narratives of sexuality compete for recognition. In the same vein, the argument of whether or not sexuality is a private or public discourse is itself essentially contested.

Socially constructed views of sexuality by both Western imperialism and non-Western (Zimbabwean) societies was a product of the colonial and post-colonial discourses (Weeks, Holland et al. 2003).

Foucault is relevant in understanding how bio-power and part of the colonial project entails not just what is and what is not acceptable sexuality but also birth control (see item 2.4.7 in this thesis) in the colonised nations of which Zimbabwe was one. The colonial is relevant in elevating how the project was not only about colonising the natural resources and the minds of the indigenous people, but is was also evidently about colonising their bodies. This point is illustrated by Pat McFadden a Swaziland-born feministic researcher, academic and activist who has done extensive work on Zimbabwe and the wider global Black Women’s Discourses. She critiques how religion and colonisation have framed sex and sexuality in Zimbabwe (and beyond) as masculine and dominant tools and symbols to control women’s bodies so that pleasure and choice are essentially restricted from their domain of experience(McFadden, undated). In the same paper, she argues that

The systematic suppression of women’s sexual and erotic inclinations has led to the conflation of sexuality and reproduction within a hetero-normative cultural and social matrix.

In the same paper, McFadden emphasises how engaging in feministic sexuality issues becomes a securitised issue within the African/Zimbabwean context in so far as it explodes the dominant patriarchal myth and status quo. Thus in her own experience, that kind of discourse translated into how

Homophobia, xenophobic claims that I constituted a ‘national threat, and deep anxiety about women’s sexual freedom and choices permeated the rumours and statements surrounding efforts to deport me (own italics for

emphasis), and strongly informed the suspicion, caution and hostility with which I was treated by many within the Movement.

By his own admission, Foucault’s views evolved as he developed his ideas over time. To that extent, he considered himself more of an ‘experimenter’ rather than a theorist. He argued that he wrote not in order to uniformly apply the same systems across his different fields of research but in order to change himself and his thinking (Stoler 1995, p. ix).

Feminism as a project has not been exempt from internal criticism in terms of the differences between the two broad and sub-categories of ‘Western’ versus

‘African/Black/Third World’ contexts. In my introduction to this section, I pointed out the differences of priorities regarding scholarly activity on issues of sex and sexuality between the West and Africa. In the same context, while some feminist advocates have propounded for

a global sisterhood linked by invariant, universal characteristics, i.e.

essentialism (McNay 1992, p.2),

such an approach has been criticised as being an uncritical assessment of the reality on the ground. The fact of the matter is that there are differences within differences, namely that Black and Third World feminists have tended to be ethnocentric in their approach and have not always resonated with (white) middle class feministic aspirations (McFadden, undated, Sawicki 1991, McNay 1992). Beyond the ethnographic considerations, categories of race, geographical location, politics, religion and historical considerations inform the power relations and the types of feminisms that would be pursued.