Disrupting the Colonial Gaze Towards Alternative Sexual Justice Engagements With Young People in South Africa

Abstract

This chapter unpacks the failures and embeddedness of much of the research on young sexualities in South Africa in an exploitative and epistemologically violent politics of knowledge. I argue that it is not only a lack of rigorous attention and reflexivity but also neglect of a political ethics of care (Tronto 1993, 2013) and relational ontology (Barad 2007) that undermines efforts to achieve an ethical, just, non-extractive, and non-representational transnational intersectional feminist research praxis. I find Haraway’s (2016) call to “stay with the trouble” and Sedgwick’s (2003) notion of “reparative reading” particularly helpful in highlighting how the problematic practices and political effects outlined here are embedded in a larger imperative to re-think how we make knowledge. This chapter concludes with some possibilities for a more hopeful transnational feminist engagement; one that engages a feminist ethics and politics of care and relationality, inspired by the “troubling” knowledges emerging from the fruitful entanglements of decolonial, feminist, and queer art, activism, and scholarship. Since the early 1990s, as South Africa emerged out of apartheid, HIV as a global and local challenges became a national imperative, alongside building a democratic state. Consequently, significant international focus and funds were directed at Southern Africa and other global Southern contexts. In South Africa, the wave of funding and invitations for collaborative research was welcome, especially in light of the apartheid era isolation. As a result, a wide range of research was initiated focusing on sexual practices in South Africa, primarily through the lens of HIV and GBV (Vetten 2018).