Paper short abstract:

The dominant focus on social problems and injustice in research on gender and sexuality has resulted in an epistemological loop where pleasure has become excluded. My proposition is that pleasure and pain are not mutually exclusive and that a focus on pleasure will cover both favourable and harmful aspects.

Paper long abstract:

The dominant focus on social problems and injustice in research on gender and sexuality has resulted in an epistemological loop where pleasure has become excluded, and where problems have dominated our way of understanding social life in African societies. It has resulted in a limited understanding of people's behaviours, experiences and motivations. Recent efforts by activists, self-help groups, and many more, as well as recent studies, to put pleasure on the agenda illustrates dissatisfaction with a paradigm grounded in problems, more specifically, with the hegemonic trend of simplifying sex in Africa, de-erotising it to an act devoid of meaning. There is a need for a more comprehensive conceptualization of sexuality that does not deny the problems of sexuality, but neither does not exclude the erotic pleasures of sex. Sex is a vehicle for the expression and pursuit of different needs and feelings that are acted upon in relation to contextual factors such as social inequality, cultural expectations and political constraints. I propose that pleasure and pain in sexuality often go hand on hand. Rather than seeing them as binary oppositions, I argue that we can benefit from a concept of sexuality grounded in pleasure and how it is bound to pain in different degrees. Focusing on people's lives in Kenya and Ghana, I will show how there is a thin line between pleasure and anxiety, between desire and hurt, between gratification and discomfort, and that these are not unconnected or mutually exclusive emotions and experiences.