Professor awarded fellowship to South Africa to finish apartheid-themed book

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Susanne M. Klausen, Julia Gregg Brill Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, will spend the next several months in South Africa researching and writing about a particularly dark chapter of that country’s apartheid era.

Klausen was awarded a residential fellowship through the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, which was founded by South Africa’s Stellenbosch University in 1999. There, she’ll spend the spring semester working to complete her next book, “Criminal Desire: Race, Gender, and Illicit Interracial Sex in Apartheid South Africa.”

“I was absolutely thrilled to receive the fellowship,” Klausen said. “STIAS is a really prestigious, supportive space for scholars at every level; modeled on similar institutes internationally, it’s the first of its kind in Africa. I’ve been there for workshops before and loved it. While I’m there, I’ll get to write and share my work with the other residential fellows, some of whom are also experts on South African history and politics. We’ll get to ask each other questions about our research projects and challenge one another intellectually. It’ll be my first time finishing a book in a community of scholars, so I’m super excited.”

Set to be published by Oxford University Press in 2024, “Criminal Desire” is an examination of the effects of the apartheid government’s Immorality (Amendment) Act of 1950, which criminalized sexual relations between whites and Blacks in South Africa.

Klausen came up with the idea during her previous book project, 2015’s “Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa,” which was also published by Oxford Press. While conducting research for that book, she came across numerous newspaper accounts of white South African men committing suicide after being arrested for violating the Immorality Act.

“It’s an infamous law, and was widely derided during apartheid. But very little scholarship exists on it,” Klausen said. “I’m writing on the politics of its passage in 1950, the tactics police used to enforce it, and the punishment of couples convicted of violating it. Tens of thousands of South Africans were arrested for breaking this law, another example of the cruelty inflicted upon people during apartheid.”

The fellowship came along just at the right time, since Klausen is quickly approaching her manuscript deadline of September 2023.

“I have to finish it now,” she said. “As a scholar, you can never know enough about your subject — there’s always more digging to be done. Deadlines make you write what you know and send it off into the world. I’ve been inundated with sources; once I started to look, it was so easy to find them. There was endless amounts of coverage of the enforcement of the Immorality Act in national and international newspapers and debate about it in the South African parliament, so it was easy to trace the law’s impact. And because I’m the first one to analyze the passage and impact of the legislation in depth, there’s a great deal of evidence to draw upon.”

The topic fits perfectly with Klausen’s status as a social historian specializing in the lives of ordinary people. For her, it’s “a privilege to bring to life these histories that really need to be known.”

Klausen’s research interests can be traced to the late 1980s in her native Canada, where she joined others protesting the federal government’s attempt to recriminalize abortion. In 1988, the Canadian Supreme Court had overturned the country’s abortion ban and, like thousands of other Canadians, Klausen wanted to keep it out of the criminal code.

The protests succeeded and the proposed new law ultimately failed to pass. Today, Canada is the only country with no criminal restrictions on abortion — rather, it is considered a legitimate reproductive health care procedure and publicly funded.

Klausen was so inspired by the movement that she decided to make reproductive justice her scholarly focus.

“It completely radicalized me,” she said. “I was surrounded by great political mentors and leaders, and it was the type of social justice movement I just wanted to keep being a party to. There was so much to research and write about in relation to reproductive politics.”

During that same period, Klausen was a committed AIDS activist. That led to her attending an international conference on youth and AIDS in 1993 in Namibia, which had recently gained its independence from South Africa. There, she developed a love for southern Africa, and an abiding scholarly interest in the region’s politics of sexuality and fertility.

Through the years, she has made it a point to travel to South Africa as frequently as possible to present her work and “make myself accountable to the national academic community.”

“I love it there. The history and culture are so rich, and the natural beauty is wonderful,” she said. “I just went back in October, for first time since the pandemic. I was in Johannesburg for a book launch and it was fantastic to be back in that incredible metropolis and amongst friends. When I’m there I really feel affirmed in my decision to be a historian of South Africa, because it’s such a great place to spend time and do research.”

Klausen served for many years on the history faculty at Carleton University in Ottawa before joining Penn State in January 2021. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, her entire first semester was spent on Zoom.

Since her time in the United States was limited prior to her appointment, Klausen wasn’t sure what to expect at first. But she’s quickly come to embrace her new surroundings.

“I came here for the position of Brill Professor, and it’s a fantastic job,” she said. “I’m based in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and it’s a very collegial department; I love the fact that I have colleagues with similar values who are also committed to social justice. It’s great to have several other African feminists on the faculty, as well as colleagues who are from South Africa. It’s a thriving intellectual community, and I feel privileged to be a part of it.”