Lifestyle
This Is Africa Presents: Flame, Fever and Fantasy – A collection of African desire and pleasure
Let’s Talk About Sex, Pleasure and Desire: In the series, This is Africa explores the expansive topics of sex, sexual pleasure, sexual satisfaction, and intimacy in the African context of cultural and religious conservatism, and gendered power inequality.
This is Africa presents to you a collection of essays, photographs and think pieces which bring together the different ways in which the pursuit and conceptualisation of the sensual, the sexual and the erotic climb into bed together to create something that could add to the often silenced conversation about African affections, needs, wants, secrets and indulgences.
From mental health, to threesomes, sex and voting to creating sexy artistic sculptures these notions are tackled from all sides and in different ways. We hope that it is something you can sink your teeth into and hopefully teach you a little something about what tapestry of desire that covers the continent.
The series explores a variety of topics which include: Can African Pleasure be “Queered”? The trouble with limiting African pleasures, Conversation on Queer Love, and Understanding attraction beyond cis-gendered among others.
We explore how men have always had a monopoly over pleasure, more so in many of the patriarchal African societies. We look at what was pleasurable, who could experience it, how others factored into the experience, and to what degree. However, the availability of more information in the public space on such issues as sexuality and gender fluidity, alongside feminist theory, has served to challenge the established rules.
Indeed, knowledge is power and it is empowering for people [particularly women] to know their own bodies and to be define pleasure for themselves and talk about these experiences freely and openly.
Sexuality and pleasure needs to be openly discussed. If sex and pleasure are not celebrated and discussed openly, how will we end some of the patriarchal and cultural norms which suggest that sexual pleasure is the preserve of, and should be controlled by men?
Certain sexual acts are still regarded as unacceptable and some relationships are still seen as wrong or “unAfrican”. The sexual acts are shunned despite the reality that many people take pleasure in them. How then can we overcome discrimination and homophobia, transphobia and biphobia?
We invite the reader to take a fresh and more imaginative look at sex, desire and pleasure on the continent, where sexual matters are normally hidden, stigmatised, and sensitive.
Watch where you read this, you never know who is looking over your shoulder.
Below is a series of articles under the collection titled, Flame, Fever and Fantasy – A collection of African desire and pleasure:
How kink is a whole new place of pleasure.
Learning To Be Free: Stacey Gillian Abe’s artistic exploration through vaginal sculptures
Ubungcwele be Hule: The sacredness of women who flourish in their sexuality
Trapped in a pigeon’s neck: Making up the myth of the hymen
We men are no longer the custodians of everyone’s pleasure
My Pleasure, As A Bottom, Matters
The limits of imagining pleasure: Writing the history of African sex
The sex lives of Northern Nigeria
Nationalising Sex, Dictating Sex: Womxn’s Pleasure (or not) in Kenya’s Public Imaginary
Learning to love without ownership: Journal of an African bisexual woman
They can’t stop the dance: The Trouble with Limiting African Pleasures
Black conservativism and the everyday pleasure aesthetic
