Transparent Sexualities: Sexual Openness, HIV Disclosure, and the Governmentality of Sexuality in South Africa

Abstract

In South Africa, as elsewhere in the world, responses to HIV and AIDS have been accompanied by calls to ‘break the silence’ and to openly talk about aspects of intimate life, otherwise considered private. These calls have been followed by the production of new bodies of knowledge about sex, and projections of transparent sexualities. In this context, the concept of counselling has taken on particular significance in terms of re-conceptualising diverse institutional sites as places of education, advice giving and moral inculcation with a view toward behavioural change. In this paper, I trace a series of processes and practices of negotiation whereby in a big church in the city of Cape Town sexuality has been rendered an object of knowledgeability and inquiry. The same processes work as conditions of possibility for the emergence of counselling practices by facilitating the circulation of concepts such as ‘responsible relationships’, ‘responsible choices’ and so on through the sites of faith-based health activism. Adopted from public health discourse, but inflected by religious idioms, these concepts allowed for the dissemination of new vocabularies of sex in which counselling is construed as a key mechanism.

Biographical Note

Prof. Dr. Marian Burchard ( SFB 1199 & Leipzig University)

Marian Burchard is Professor of Sociology at Leipzig University. As a cultural sociologist, he is interested in how diversity shapes institutions and everyday life. His research engages with the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, urban sociology and theories of modernity, and draws on qualitative and ethnographic methods. He is especially interested in how notions of diversity influence social life and public space through nation state regulations, law and urban policy. He is the author of Regulatin Difference: Religious Diversity and Nationhood in theb Secular West (Rutgers UP, 2020) and Faith in the Time of AIDS: Religion, Biopolitics and Modernity in South Africa (Palgrave Macmillan 2015).