Voyeurisms and Destructions: Women’s Imagination of Gender and Sexuality in Pre-Democratic and Democratic South Africa

In this article, I argue that the sexualities of Black rural women in post-apartheid South Africa are shaped by the enduring legacies of colonialism and apartheid. Drawing on African feminist, Black feminist, and decolonial scholarship, I conceptualise sex and sexuality not only as a socio-cultural domain, but as a deeply contested terrain of power through which race, gender, and heteronormative citizenship are constituted, regulated, and lived. Focusing on women’s narratives from Mpumalanga and drawing on an intergenerational focus group discussion comprising 20 young and older women conducted within narrative inquiry, I illuminate how intimate life is forged through the intricate entanglements of desire, material exchange, respectability, coercion, dependency, and survival. I further contend that the post-apartheid order, despite its formal commitment to sexual and gender rights, has not dismantled the racialised, gendered and heteropatriarchal conditions that continue to restrict Black women’s bodily autonomy and intimate negotiations. My analysis also demonstrates that sexuality becomes most legible through dominant heterosexual and cisgender scripts, while queer and non-normative intimacies remain obscured by moral, linguistic, and social constraints. By centring a reflexive narrative methodology, I advance a decolonial feminist account of how coloniality continues to inhabit embodiment, desire, and the fragile, intimate textures of women’s everyday lives.