Search

The article discusses the book "Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine" and highlights two major contributions of the book. The first contribution is the examination of citational chains that reinforce problematic and unethical medical scholarship in intersex diagnosis and treatment. The author focuses on the influential but flawed work of HJ Grace, which perpetuated the myth of higher intersex conditions among Black South Africans. The second contribution is the connection between trans diagnostic protocol and racialized gender, exploring how scientific-sounding theories are used to discredit trans existence. The article also discusses the concept of social death and its relevance to intersex and minoritized trans experiences. [Extracted from the article]

This article is centered around three Africans who wrote on the themes of home and exile: Chinua Achebe, a celebrated Nigerian writer; Lewis Nkosi, an accomplished Black South African writer and journalist; and me, Robin Cohen, a White South African social scientist. Their views on home and exile are discussed in the form of a comparison and implicit conversation (a trialogue). The lives of these three protagonists barely touched, but there are some odd intersections that will serve to sharpen the differences between them. By shedding light on the ambiguities of what home and exile mean to different social actors, the virtuous and somewhat uniform assumptions that are frequently used to describe the exilic condition are questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among "imperial games" in colonial Zimbabwe, boxing was arguably the most popular and controversial. While colonial administrators tried to impose the orthodoxy of western style boxing, African boxers, through the use of Indigenous performance enhancing substances, redefined the boxing ring as a space in which they asserted their cultural practices, which were not always legible to colonial administrators. Performance enhancing substances such as mangoromera became key in making claims to power and masculinity among African boxers. African women and men of diverse ethnic backgrounds also reconfigured boxing spaces into important sites for socializing and entertainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]