‘Rediscovering the Erotic as Ordinary’ in South African Women’s Short Fiction

In this article, I explore the possibilities of rediscovering the erotic as ordinary, as a strategy for writing queer, feminist erotica in a South African context that successfully negotiates heterosexist, patriarchal, racist and colonial discourses. I focus on two short stories from Open: An Erotic Anthology by South African Women Writers (2008), known as the first erotic anthology by women published in South Africa. South Africa does not have a large body of erotic writing, and the work that does exist is not widely written about. Both stories covered here, ‘Inside’ by Makhosazana Xaba and ‘Mrs Habib’s Hypothalamus’ by Suzy Bell, depict erotic tension between women but do not contain graphic sex scenes. They emphasise the ordinary place of sexual desire in the lives of women by detailing the interior life of a female character whose everyday life is limned by the erotic. The focus in these stories is not on the sex act but on the build-up of sexual desire. Furthermore, the erotic is not limited to sexual desire but runs through other aspects of the characters’ lives, including spiritual, intellectual and embodied experiences. It is through these various elements that the two authors imagine the erotic as ordinary. Thus these two stories contest the spectacularisation and abjection of Black female lesbian sexuality and open up interesting possibilities for the representation of the erotic in literature.