Prof Susanne Klausen traces the apartheid state’s obsession with suppressing interracial sex between white men and black women, revealing how Afrikaner nationalism relied on a punitive, puritanical masculinity to preserve its imagined racial order. Drawing from her archival research and critical race theory, Klausen explores how laws such as the Immorality Act and its amendments were used to criminalise not only acts of intimacy but even the suggestion of desire. White men who transgressed were publicly shamed, flogged, imprisoned, and in many cases driven to suicide, punishments meant to reinforce racial loyalty and sexual discipline. The conversation facilitated by Dr Anell Daries explores the contradictions of white masculinity, shame, and the limits of state power in regulating intimacy.
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.