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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Sex in the ‘Space of the Dual’: Towards a theory of sex as culture
| Panel |
64. Sexualities in Africa
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| Paper ID | 538 |
| Author(s) |
Thornton, Robert James
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | The act of sex (coitus) is generally understood as ‘natural’, ‘secret’ and ‘repressed’, lying outside of culture, while its primary value is pleasure, the fulfilment of desire, and procreation. But these ways of understanding sex do not allow sufficient intellectual purchase to permit a fully anthropological theory of sex as social relation. When we see sex as a social relation—as it generally is seen in Africa—rather than as an individual behaviour—as it is generally viewed by social scientists, psychologists and the many agencies of social-sexual intervention—we are able to see sex as culture. Here we exclude what most would take to be the fundamental parameters of sex: desire, pleasure, procreation, sexuality and gender because they are psychological (desire), teleological (pleasure as goal), accidental/epiphenomenal (procreation), or simply categorical/classificatory (gender) rather than real social action. Sex takes place in what I call ‘the space of the dual’ and is normally (and normatively) an act involving two persons. This defines a distinctive type of social relation that is neither fully ‘sociological’ (many-to-many relations or many-to-one) nor ‘psychological’ (the person, the one), and is therefore not fully available to either sociological or psychological explanation. This distinction allows us to recast the question of how sex is ‘cultural’ and to explore its social value as experience, knowledge, and ‘escape’. Sex is held to constitute a relatively autonomous domain of social action that, in addition to its procreational and recreational aspects, generates some social meanings through its role-creational aspect. It is this that allows us to see sex as culture and therefore to understand its role in African ritual, social networks, economic transactions, identity formation and HIV transmission. [keywords: sex, culture, social roles, Africa] |
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