Sexuality is as much a product from culture as it is of nature, pertaining to both individual experience and shared ideas. It is to be studied as a relational concept defined in relation to axis of difference like, among many, gender, morality, age, ethnicity. To further knowledge on sexuality in African societies, this panel seeks to encourage detailed ethnographic studies on sexual behaviour in which sexuality is studied as a topic on its own.
In the current academic context, AIDS has put sexuality prominently on the research agenda. This is a positive development, given the fact that the study of sexuality hardly exists as an established research topic. However, AIDS research has largely framed the study of sexuality in a particular perspective, namely its relation to HIV infection. This approach only highlights a specific aspect of what sexuality covers while ignoring others, such as the different meanings of sex according to gender, age or ethnicity or the difference between sexual behaviour and sexual identity. This blindness has lead to a void in both the study of sexuality and the study of AIDS. Although HIV/AIDS and sexuality are intricately linked, it is of importance to critically assess this relation with regard to research. Sexuality is as much a product from culture as it is of nature, and it refers to individual experience and shared ideas. It is to be studied as a relational concept defined in relation to axis of difference like, among many, gender, morality, age, socio-economic status, ethnicity, because this will create insight into the richness of different sexualities and its experiences. To further knowledge on sexuality in African societies, there is need for detailed ethnographic studies on sexual practices and ideology as a study on its own. These studies can vary from topics like sexual practices, debut of sexual experience, multi-partnered sexual relations, sexual pleasure, sexual violence, same sex sexuality, sexual abstinence, and much more. In this panel, different case studies are presented that seek to innovate the study of sexuality by providing ethnographic accounts of sexualities from various African societies.
Research in Kampala and Dar es Salaam indicates that poverty has increased antagonisms between husbands and wives, and households have become battlefields not only over money but also over sex. Men, however, are not able to live up to these expectations, and they are met with accusations from their wives. This has serious consequences for men’s social value, their self worth and identity.
Dominant discourses on virginity in Dakar (Senegal), a predominantly Muslim society, are restrictive with respect to the sexuality of unmarried girls. Their sexual agency and pleasure is being silenced, and seems non-existent. This paper explores how girls themselves relate to these norms. It will show how they simultaneously reproduce and rework these notions and how girls do express pleasure and sexual agency.
Until recently, studies of sexuality paid little attention to the contextual and socio-economic determinants of sexual behaviour. This paper documents the conditions of youth and shows how these impact on young men’s perceptions of sexual desire and sexual practices. In general, in townships with high unemployment, men are pressurized to engage in sex to demonstrate their masculinity.
How can we talk about sexuality in a time of AIDS without being subsumed by discourses surrounding the disease? Through an exploration of contemporary popular arts and culture, the author illustrates how people in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania communicate ideas about sexuality, pleasure and morality indirectly and suggests that perhaps we, as scholars, have something to learn from our interlocutors.
In Zimbabwean communities, the sexual lives of widows have been traditionally associated with either sexual abstinence or levirate relationships. The AIDS epidemic has brought a new dimension to the sexual lives of widows because the majority of the widows are within the most sexually active age group, 15 to 49 years, and they generally regard levirate relations as a practice of the past. Ethnographies of young AIDS widows in Zimbabwe tell challenging stories about widows' lived sexual realities in the face of traditional norms and discourses on female sexuality and widowhood. The paper focuses on the way widows seek sexual pleasure in a cultural environment that negates sexual desire, let alone pleasure, for widows.
In many studies on sexuality in African societies, sexuality tends to be used in an instrumental way and as a self-evident concept. Instead, we need to focus on complex dynamics of individual sexual behaviour in relation to social axis and ideologies. These dynamics between sex and sexuality, between broader societal processes and individual experiences, are the focus of this paper by looking at young professional women and men’s intimate lives in the context of modernity.