Porn in/and Africa

This chapter provides a critical review of the literature on pornography in/and Africa. Through an examination of the existing literature, it argues that much of the popular and scholarly discourses on porn in Africa emphasize its harmful effects on African subjects, particularly women, teenage boys, and adolescent girls. Much of the discourse on porn is informed by moral panics and infantilizes Africans, reducing them to being susceptible and vulnerable to Western sexual cultures, which are often portrayed as being incompatible with African values. This chapter critiques the current state of “porn studies” in Africa for its limited social science and behavioral studies methodological approaches, which, unsurprisingly, conclude that exposure to porn at a young age negatively affects male adolescents’ sexual behavior and cognitive development. Furthermore, the emphasis on risk, behavior, and moral panics reiterates colonial imaginaries of African sexualities as deviant and dangerous, erasing the complex terrain of African sexual subjectivities, desires, and pleasures. By focusing solely on the “negative effects” of porn, researchers reinscribe dangerous “patriarchal and heterosexist policing of women’s freedom and rights.” Informed by African feminists’ calls to center pleasure and alternative frameworks, this chapter asks us to rethink the role of sexual pleasure in Africa to generate more productive ways to understand African sexual agency and erotic autonomy away from discourses of danger, contamination, and harm.