Desire at the End of the White Line

After the democratic transition in the 1990s, many white South African scholars, writers, artists and thinkers were hopeful that the dismantling of the apartheid regime would create an opening for the reimagining or remaking of whiteness in the country. At the heart of Desire at the End of the White Line is the question that confronts white Afrikaans-speaking people some 30 years later: why haven’t we changed more yet? Why are our lives still so white and so separate? In this book, Azille Coetzee goes in search of answers in what is perhaps the last place we want to look: the realm of the sexual, the intimate, the erotic and the familial. Historians show how the patriarchal nuclear family form (and everything it implies historically: compulsory heterosexuality, reproductivity, monogamy, gender binary and hierarchy) provides the symbolic grammar through which the Afrikaner people have traditionally thought themselves white, framed their collective future and justified their claims to place. Through an exploration of a broad range of contemporary Afrikaans popular culture texts, Coetzee contends that most of the big stories that the white Afrikaner tells about herself today are still about the white family line and, more often than not, its future on the land. Using feminist and queer theory, she argues that apartheid is not simply a political history in our country’s past, but a way of being that is programmed into our bodies and our erotic imaginations – a set of gender norms and sexual rules that orient us in the world, pulling us towards some and away from others in ways that keep us white and apart. This book proposes that if we want to change how we are white, we have to change how we are men and women (rethinking these binaries), how we have sex, how we love and how we make our homes.