Desire at the End of the White Line: Notes on the Decolonisation of White Afrikaner Femininity, by Azille Coetzee

Azille Coetzee's Desire at the End of the White Line: Notes on the Decolonisation of White Afrikaner Femininity was published in 2025.In the book, Coetzee explores the historicity of sexual desire and its ongoing racialisation in the present.The introductory chapter is a breathtakingly extensive mapping of the history of sex and race.The book blends scholarly histories, contemporary theories of race and racism, analyses of novels and films, and semi-fictionalised autobiographical vignettes.In this, Desire at the End of the White Line takes shape as a vulnerable and deeply personal account of one woman's attempts to interrogate the cultural logics that shape her own practices of desire.She sets out the impetus for the book when she asks: "How is the kind of sex I want incited by regulatory discourses?How is my desire productive of white power?" (Coetzee 2025, 7).She argues further that: we renew apartheid identities and racial politics in the present by self-regulating our intimate lives in accordance with the rules and lines that colonialism and apartheid drilled into the psyches and bodies of our parents, grandparents and other ancestors; rules and lines that we inherit and, in turn, pass on.(Coetzee 2025, 24) At its strongest moments-and there are several-the book can be read as a methodologically innovative exploration of how race, gender, and sex are not only coarticulated but also deeply productive of one another.However, despite the author's good intentions, the book often veers uncomfortably close to the pathologisation of desire.Indeed, at its worst moments, the book is a dangerously prescriptive call about who and how we should desire-a call that has been