ABSTRACT
Since the 1940s when Sidney Kark (1949) wrote his famous article ‘The Social Pathology of Syphilis’ male migration has remained a prominent explanation for high rates of sexually transmitted infections in Southern Africa. Kark’s landmark piece outlined how rural-born ‘African’ men moved to the distant gold or diamonds mines for long periods, became infected with syphilis and then returned to infect their rural partner(s).1 As AIDS came to the fore in the 1980s, this model appealed to many constituents. Yet I outline here a number of relatively recent but vitally important trends that affect intimacy, namely rising unemployment and social inequalities, dramatically reduced marital rates, and the extensive geographical movement of women as well as men in contemporary South Africa. Methodologically, this approach combines political economy, geography, and ethnography and key institutions it addresses are the labour market and the household.2
