ABSTRACT
This chapter reads the body of research on sexual practices in the South African context over nearly 30 years since democracy was established, particularly as directed at young people, through a post/decolonial, transnational feminist lens. The author provides a critique of this body of work to argue that it has reflected, reiterated, and reinstated lines of power, authority, and privilege endemic in colonialist, patriarchal scholarly traditions, while bolstering the very racist, heteronormative, and other epistemological violences we had hoped to challenge. Through this, Shefer raises the difficulties of transnational research and collaborations, and the dangers in working across and through difference and inequality in global contexts. She attempts to draw out some avenues forward in thinking with each other, across geopolitical and other unequal contexts, in and through intersectional sexual and gender justice scholarship. It is argued that reimagining different ways of thinking, writing, and doing, to disrupt the larger habits of colonial, patriarchal scholarly practices in our research and pedagogies, is key to the project of critical, ethical transnational feminist scholarship.
