Power, Sex and Resistance in Gordimer’s Occasion for Loving

Abstract

This paper examines the theme of apartheid and its resistance in Nadine Gordimer’s novel Occasion for Loving. Through her fiction Gordimer has explored the possibility of resisting apartheid and envisioned a multiracial South Africa.  She has explored in her writings the social and psychological relationships and how they are governed by race and sex. The paper argues that Gordimer has provided through her work an alternative discourse to resist apartheid.  This essay discusses Occasion for Loving in the light of Michel Foucault. In his books, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality Foucault has given an account of the significant connections between power, knowledge, and the subject, which can be used to analyse the fiction of Gordimer. He argues that power is productive and that subjects are produced through cultural and institutional practices. He mainly focuses on practices of disciplinary power which lead to binary divisions such as sane/mad, and which can be used as a means of social control.  Such practices of disciplinary power are found in apartheid South Africa. Like Foucault, Gordimer seems to consider sexuality as a site of power relations governed by the dominant socio-cultural conventions. She has attempted to produce an alternative discourse about sexuality in Occasion for Loving and suggested a resistance to apartheid ideology of South Africa.