The Entanglements of Race, Gender and Sexuality: South African Indian Contradictions – Contradiction Studies

RTG Contradiction Studies

The Entanglements of Race, Gender and Sexuality: South African Indian Contradictions

Braedon Steven (University of KwaZulu-Natal)

12/03/2024 3:00 pm –3:45 pm

U Bremen GRA 2 0030 & online

Durban South African Indian people exhibit heteronormative attitudes toward gender and sexuality. In this talk, Braedon Steven argues that the racialization of Durban South African Indians, shaped by British colonialism, is central to understanding these conservative views.

The migration of British colonial ideals enforced, precisely, Christian Victorian-era attitudes towards gender and sexuality from the former “Indian colonies” to the colonized South Africa in 1858, entangled with the racialization of South African Indians. The Christian-Victorian norms on gender and sexuality imposed by colonial powers were carried over, influencing the conservative attitudes that characterize Durban’s South African Indian identity.

The entanglement of racialization and its impact on gender and sexuality norms is imperative to explain the community’s conservatism and its effects on people, both those who conform and those who do not.

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DFG Research Training Group 2686: Contradiction Studies –

Constellations, Heuristics, and Concepts of the Contradictory

DFG Research Training Group 2686: Contradiction Studies –

Constellations, Heuristics, and Concepts of the Contradictory

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articulate

“Contradictions need to be articulated in order to exist.”
Martin Nonhoff

Afterlife of colonialism

“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)
Rozena Maart

earthing

“Geography as a discipline stands for a certain worlding, if not earthing, of contradiction, in both theoretical and pracitcal respect.”
Julia Lossau

diversity and plurality

“Join us to create more diversity and plurality in knowledge production.”
Gisela Febel

driver

“Contradictions are an important driver of scientific practice and knowledge.”
Norman Sieroka