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 Fi rst World War, particularly in the context of the perceived crumbling of ra cial boundaries which threatened racial dominance. Masculinity, inseparable from the exercise of racial power, was in a state of malaise; and anxietie s about black sexual subversion and white women's secret sexuality fed into enraged campaigns against imagined black sexual aggressions, and indeed ag ainst those white men who dared impugn the honour of white women. The ideol ogy of chivalry, it is argued, was a weapon of control against the agents o f subversion, white women as well as black men.