Sexuality, Africa, History

PRIOR TO THE 1980S, HISTORIANS OF AFRICA rarely paid explicit attention to sexuality, a topic generally presumed to belong more appropriately to anthropology or psychology. Moreover, when the topic did come up, authors across the disciplines commonly assumed or asserted an African ("native," customary, tribal, or premodern) sexuality, in the singular and in implicit timelessness. With the advent of HIV/AIDS, however, and following trends in international scholarship that saw a proliferation of close empirical case studies that employed (and extended) Foucauldian and postcolonial theory, this began to change dramatically. Much of the thinking about HIV/ AIDS since the 1990s, notably, has stressed the long-term impacts of colonialism, racism, and male migrant labor that underpin the pandemic and that help to explain striking regional disparities. Indeed, the new scholarship argues that ahistorical readings of scientific data, let alone of ethnography or the other social sciences, have actually contributed to the HIV/AIDS crisis by unwittingly promoting colonial-era stereotypes, simplifications, and calumnies against African cultures. Medical anthropologists thus now routinely acknowledge the importance of historical change, context, and specificity to their research on sexual health. 1 Several problems remain, however, that are quickly apparent both in studies about African sexualities and in the ways that Africa is represented or engaged (or not) in global sexuality studies. Comparative, and even national, histories of HIV/ AIDS remain rare. Same-sex sexuality is still largely overlooked in these, and even in texts aimed directly at sexual healthcare professionals. Attempts to counter that blind spot have tended to rely heavily on the exhumation of colonial ethnographies, forensic evidence, and missionary diatribes, with limited effectiveness. The evident fact that so many of the leading researchers in the field are non-African also introduces concerns, most obviously about language, epistemology, and culturalinsider secrets. In some cases, this has provoked sharply defensive reactions from African leaders and intellectuals. The latter have been particularly galled when

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.