Abstract
Abstract:Over the past twenty years, South African civil society has engaged in an
extended debate over the appropriate role of “custom” in
public life, focusing on issues of gender and sexuality. The history of
virginity testing in the Eastern Cape region shows that the nostalgia for custom
points to the loss of sexual autonomy that accompanied colonialism. While the
rhetoric that justified virginity testing in the precolonial and early colonial
era was deeply patriarchal, the practice itself protected female sexual autonomy
and provided protections that were undermined by the colonial legal regime and
have yet to be effectively replaced.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Anthropology,Cultural Studies
Cited by
30 articles.
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