Stellenbosch University (South Africa)
Dr Chet Fransch is a lecturer in Stellenbosch University’s History Department and joins SHaME as an Associate Fellow. His area of research primarily focuses on the intersection of multiple and coexisting historical narratives on sex, sexuality and sexual violence in South Africa, 17th -21st centuries. This is foregrounded in legal pluralism – pre- and postcolonial legislative, traditional and religious laws – but further probes reaction and resistance to these inconsistencies. The lens of South Africa’s Western Cape Province, the epicentre of the Dutch East India Company (DEIC), imperial, settler and apartheid control; and also the site of a demographically anomalous majority population group in postcolonial Africa, allows one to probe the diverse ways in which sex – in its broadest sense – is regulated and negotiated over time. Furthermore, the significance of provincial microhistories to a transnational discussion, in contrast to nation-state universalism, forms the cornerstone of Chet’s research.