Gender, Degeneration and Sexual Danger: Imagining Race and Class in South Africa, ca.1912.

This paper deals with issues of sexual threat in South Africa before the First World War, particularly in the context of the perceived crumbling of racial boundaries which threatened racial dominance. Masculinity, inseparable from the exercise of racial power, was in a state of malaise; and anxieties about black sexual subversion and white women's secret sexuality fed into enraged campaigns against imagined black sexual aggressions, and indeed against those white men who dared impugn the honour of white women. The ideology of chivalry, it is argued, was a weapon of control against the agents of subversion, white women as well as black men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]