The Making of ‘African Sexuality’: Early Sources, Current Debates
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The notion that Africans share a common sexual culture distinct from people elsewhere in the world has for many years been a staple of popular culture, health, academic, and political discourse in the West as well as in Africa. Sometimes overtly racist (Black Peril) but sometimes intended to combat patronizing or colonialist stereotypes, the idea of a singular African sexuality remains an obstacle to the development of sexual rights and effective sexual health interventions. Where did the idea come from, and how has it become so embedded in our imaginations right across the political spectrum? This article traces the idea back in time to its earliest articulations by explorers, ethnographers, and psychiatrists, as well as to contestations of the idea in scholarship, fiction, and film influenced by Africa’s emerging gay rights movement. It asks, what can we learn about the making of ‘African sexuality’ as an idea in the past that may suggest ways to challenge its enduring, harmful impacts in the present?
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it