Publisher： Cambridge University Press
E-ISSN： 1555-2462|58|3|129-148
ISSN： 0002-0206
Source： African Studies Review, Vol.58, Iss.3, 2015-11, pp. : 129-148
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Abstract
Over the past twenty years, South African civil society has engaged in an extended debate over the appropriate role of “custom” in public life, focusing on issues of gender and sexuality. The history of virginity testing in the Eastern Cape region shows that the nostalgia for custom points to the loss of sexual autonomy that accompanied colonialism. While the rhetoric that justified virginity testing in the precolonial and early colonial era was deeply patriarchal, the practice itself protected female sexual autonomy and provided protections that were undermined by the colonial legal regime and have yet to be effectively replaced.
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