Condemned by desire: miscegenation, gender, and eroticism in South Africa’s Immorality Act

ABSTRACT The Mixed Marriage Act of 1949 is regarded as the first law of South Africa’s apartheid regime. This criminalised interracial marriages, regulating intimacy under the amended Immorality Act (1950) with the aim of organising the public sphere and preventing miscegenation. In the present article, I analyse two cases involving interracial couples and alleged lovers. I argue that this system of exclusion refounded the State, managing gender and sexuality through race and racism in order to avoid miscegenation. Although the apartheid system was internationally known, via its public face, as creating segregation between whites and blacks, I claim that vigilance and control of intimacy and domestic space, based on gender and sexuality, were part and parcel of the management of race and racism. Following Coetzee, I understand apartheid as a form of containment of interracial desire. In this analysis, Brazil appears as a counterpoint to this project: sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly. My objective here is to contribute to the understanding of processes of regulation of intimacy and public space in the Global South.