Gender, Sexuality and Migration in South Africa

Governing Morality

Ingrid Palmary

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319407333
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyzes the intersections of gender, sexuality and migration in the South African context. It takes the form of a series of empirically-informed reflections on the ways that these issues have come together, and analyses the place that South Africa holds in increasingly global, and globally constrained, discourses around migration. This means that it is not just about gendered movement, or abuses faced by sexual minorities; it is about the ways in which gendered notions, which may or may not map onto different bodies, function in conversations on migration. The author challenges assumptions about what and who migrants are and the nature of their genders and sexualities, which have circumscribed the fierce debates about migration that are currently raging in the country. This does not mean, however, that it this is simply a book about South Africa. Rather, the author argues that global and local imperatives are constantly being negotiated as South Africa goes through a periodof socio-political transition. This thought-provoking work will appeal to students and scholars of migration studies, gender studies and race studies, as well as disciplines such as sociology, psychology and political studies.

© The Author(s) 2016

Ingrid PalmaryGender, Sexuality and Migration in South AfricaMigration, Diasporas and Citizenship10.1007/978-3-319-40733-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Governing Morality: Placing Gender and Sexuality in Migration

Ingrid Palmary¹

(1)

African Centre for Migration & Society, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Abstract

In this chapter I reflect on the long history of the management of gender, sexuality and mobility in the making of the South African nation, tracing examples of how they intersect from early colonization through apartheid to the present day. Through revisiting this theoretical terrain I show how mobility, sexuality and gender are deeply intertwined and, moreover, the making of the state is closely connected to the management of the seemingly private sphere. To understand how the project of statecraft is accomplished, we have to unpack the ways in which intimate relationships are connected to broad political projects. Finally, I argue that the making of the nation in South Africa has always been a global process with strong investments from the global North.

Keywords

NationFeminismNationalismStatecraftGlobal NorthGenderSexualityColonization

End Abstract

This book considers the intersections of gender, sexuality and migration in the South African context. Migration in South Africa has become something to be studied, debated and contested by human rights activists, lawyers, humanitarian workers, government departments and international bodies and conventions. In many ways this is a new debate for South Africa but it is shaped by global concerns and re-enacted in localized ways that are embedded in South African histories of colonization and apartheid. Much of this debate has been prescribed by very particular, and often taken for granted, sets of assumptions about what and who migrants are, what gender is, what sexualities are and their interconnectedness. In this book, I want to take a reflexive step back to pay attention to these sets of assumptions and reflect on how it is that gender, sexuality and migration come together in the South African context and with what consequences.

Reflecting on South Africa does not mean that this is a book about South Africa. Indeed one of the most important topics elaborated in this book is the ways in which global and local imperatives are negotiated constantly as South Africa has re-entered the global economic and political sphere. Similarly, in talking of the West, the global North or of Africa, I do not suggest that this reflects a contained and conceptually meaningful geographical space but rather an idea. An idea imbued with notions of development, aid, humanitarianism and political interconnectedness and difference. To paraphrase Veena Das (1996), the nation exists at the level of icon and it is this iconic representation of a nation that is at once disconnected from place whilst simultaneously being saturated with interconnected symbolic meanings. As Mbembé (2001) notes:

Africa still constitutes one of the metaphors through which the West represents the origin of its own norms, develops a self-image, and integrates this image into the set of signifiers asserting what it supposes to be its identity. (p. 2)

Thus, this book engages centrally with the interconnected but unequal global relationships that constitute present day preoccupations with migration without imagining that one can ever speak about Africa or the West as a given. So whilst this book is a series of reflections on the ways that gender, sexuality and migration have intersected in South Africa since democracy in 1994, and the new social and moral orders that have been produced though this intersection, it is equally a book about the place that South Africa has taken up and continues to negotiate in an increasingly global, and globally constrained discourse around gender, sexuality and migration. This means that this is not a book about gendered movement or even about women’s movement. Nor is it about the abuses faced by sexual minorities (although no doubt these are reflected upon). It is a book about the ways in which gendered notions, which may or may not map onto different bodies function in conversations on migration and the global consequences thereof.

Migration in South Africa is often represented as something that began with the end of apartheid. However, many South African writers have reminded us that the figure of the migrant has been a significant one for the making of the South African nation (see Van Onselen 2001). For example, the early work of Bozzoli and Nkotsoe (1991) on women’s migration to the cities points to how South Africa has been founded on physical segregation and the regulation of the movement of “undesirable” groups particularly to and within urban areas (see also Van Onselen 2001). The regulation of mobility was equally central to the apartheid project where the rhetoric of two nations (black and white) was used to justify the restriction of black South Africans to the independent homelands and townships. The system of pass laws that regulated the movement of black South Africans was central to the apartheid project. It was also heavily gendered and differential laws were enacted for men (defined as labourers) and women (defined dependents). This has meant that, with the end of apartheid, South Africa was ripe for an approach to migration management that was focussed on the restriction of the movement of the poor. As Landau (2012) has noted, the democratic South Africa inherited a “deep suspicion of those that move – particularly to urban areas – [that] continues to infuse political and popular discourse” (p. 5). I would add that this suspicion of those who move was an approach to thinking about mobility that had already gained international credibility when South Africa achieved independence and found consensus within South African preoccupations with regulating the poor.

In addition, there has been useful history of attention to how gender, particularly in times of conflict has shaped nation building both in South Africa and internationally. Since the early 1980s feminist writers have considered how the nation is produced and invented in ways that are thoroughly gendered (see for example McClintock 2013; Yuval-Davis 1993). For example, Yuval-Davis et al. (1989) as early as 1989, articulated how the prevailing literature on the construction and formation of the nation had failed to account for how practices of nation building are rooted in representations of family, home, reproduction and the masculine protection of the “womenandchildren” (see also Burman 2008a). From this work stemmed an increasing attention to how nationalism functions as a system of cultural representation (see Dowler 1998) whereby people come to identify with an imagined community (Hobsbawm and Ranger 2012). The ways in which women have been forgotten, selectively remembered and represented within nationalist rhetoric became an important set of conceptual resources for unpacking and making visible the myth of the nation – one that has been developed in useful ways in the anti-colonial struggles that have characterized that past 50 years on the African continent by (Meintjes et al. 2001; Turshen et al. 1998). These literatures on gender and nation have provided one of the richest intellectual traditions precisely for the way in which they have been written by authors from postcolonial contexts and from the Empire and read together can help us to understand the ways in which global colonial relationships persist even as we see an increasing “methodological nationalism” that sees us confining our research to particular country contexts understanding anything that crosses a border as “comparative research” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). However, these interconnections remain underdeveloped and addressing this is a significant aim of this book.

For the purposes of this book, it is useful to extend one perhaps less clearly articulated aspect of this existing work to think about where we find ourselves today in contemporary South Africa. Within this area of work has been consideration of how bodies are appropriated in the imagining of a national project and how they become the objects on which the desire for nationalism is (often brutally and sometimes willingly) inscribed. For example, Ryan and Ward (2004) note the significance of forcibly cutting women’s hair in Northern Ireland as an act of humiliation. Also from Northern Ireland Smyth (1992) has documented the political tensions over the debate on abortion and the symbolism that abortion holds in the nationalist project. Equally, in South Africa we have seen differential approaches to abortion for black and white women with heavily criminalization of abortion for white women existing alongside the forced abortion and sterilization of many black women (Bradford 1991). Perhaps the most extreme manifestation of this would be the prevalence of rape in times of war as an act of violence that symbolically is not just perpetrated against individual women but against women as representatives of the boundary of a group and women’s sexuality a symbol of the group’s very existence. From this work we can consider that the violation of women’s bodies, creates what Das (1996) refers to as “a future memory…that the women as territory had already been claimed and occupied by other men” (p. 85).

Extending these debates we can see how the regulation of sex is central to the making of a nation. Whether it is through legislation like the Immorality Act (1957) in South Africa which criminalized sex between people classified as belonging to different race groups, or insisting on the patrilineal classification of mixed Hutu and Tutsi children in Rwanda (see Palmary 2006), the nation is made through the regulation of sex. From the regulation of sexual relationships, stems a broader set of gendered relationships and norms that frame and reinscribe national identity. What is perhaps more important for this book is the way that, through these sexual regulations, national identity becomes naturalized. It is the everyday acceptance of what are in fact a highly constrained set of practices around sex, childbirth and identity that make national identity appear timeless and natural. We only have to think of an example from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission where Victor Mthembu, in his defence against killing a 9-month old baby in the course of the Boibatong massacre, drew on a proverb which translates as “a snake gives birth to another snake” (see Palmary 2006 for more). Similarly, Coleman (2002) notes how the anti-Tutsi propaganda in Rwanda represented Tutsi women in sexual relationships with United Nations soldiers and declared Hutus who had sex with or married Tutsi’s to be traitors of the nation. For example, of the widely promoted Hutu Ten Commandments published in a December issue of the newspaper Kangura, (Coleman 2002) regulated marriage and sexual relationships across ethnic divisions. They stated that:

Every Hutu should know that a Tutsi woman, wherever she is, works for the interest of her Tutsi ethnic group. As a result, we shall consider a traitor any Hutu who: marries a Tutsi woman; befriends a Tutsi woman; employs a Tutsi woman as a secretary or concubine; Every Hutu should know that our Hutu daughters are more suitable and conscientious in their role as woman, wife and mother of the family. Are they not beautiful, good secretaries and more honest? Hutu woman, be vigilant and try to bring your husbands, brothers and sons back to reason; The Rwandese Armed Forces should be exclusively Hutu. The experience of the October [1990] war has taught us a lesson. No member of the military shall marry a Tutsi. (cited in Coleman 2002, pp. 748–9)

The interrelationship between violence, nation and family is stark in this example. So much so that Mamdani (2014), in his book on the Rwandan genocide, was able to declare that in Rwanda everyone is either Hutu or Tutsi there are no Hutsi’s. In these and other examples, the regulation of sexual relationships, marriage and birth function to reproduce the boundaries of a nation defined by race, space or ethnicity. It is the presumed naturalness of sexuality understood to be biological that allows it to render one’s nationality a “fact” that is uncontested. As Mtembu inferred in his testimony to the South African Truth and reconciliation Commission, a snake will, quite clearly, give birth to another snake thus drawing on and reproducing taken for granted notions of the transmission of values and beliefs through blood and family; biology and culture. This casting of birth as a biological fact is what draws the boundaries of, in this example, an ethic identity. In these examples we see at work Butlers claim at work when she says that race and sex are vectors of power that deploy each other for their own articulation (Butler 2011).

However, this is a narrative that goes beyond bodies as the property of individuals. Das (2007) reminds us of how the magnification of the image of the nation draws energy from the image of magnified sexuality to explain how these ideas of sexuality and nation function at the level of icon – irrespective of their material realities. To draw on a South African example, the centrality of the image of violated white women under apartheid had currency regardless of whether white women were indeed violated and with what frequency. Van Onselen (2001) notes in his work on the early formation of Johannesburg that there were frequent moral panics in this time over white women claiming sexual assault by black men. In this way, the discourse of violation allows us to recast the nation as a masculine project of protection. Critiquing a reference to womanhood as a sacred Victorian institution, Das claims that “when the massacre of women is reported as the destruction of an institution, we know that the sacred image of womanhood has outlived the story of women’s lives” (Das 2007, p. 83). Thus, for Grosz (1994 albeit writing in a very different context):

[F]ar from being an inert, passive, ...