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Migration, Diasporas
and Citizenship
Series Editors
Robin Cohen
Department of International Development
University of Oxford
Oxford, United Kingdom
Zig Layton-Henry
Department of Politics and International Studies
University of Warwick
Kenilworth, United Kingdom
Editorial Board: Rainer Baubock, European University Institute, Italy;
James F. Hollifield, Southern Methodist University, USA; Daniele Joly,
University of Warwick, UK; Jan Rath, University of Amsterdam, The
Netherlands.
Gender, Sexuality
and Migration
in South Africa
Governing Morality
Ingrid Palmary
African Centre for Migration & Society
University of the Witwatersrand
Johannesburg, South Africa
Cover illustration: Pattern adapted from an Indian cotton print produced in the 19th century
This book has been a long time in the writing and even longer in the
making. Since it reflects on ten years’ worth of work there is a long list of
people to thank. In particular, the amazing people who make up the
African Centre for Migration & Society have stimulated this work. When
I first went to work at the Centre, Loren Landau made it the kind of place
to work that created intellectual curiosity and space to develop even the
most bizarre of ideas. Most of the work described in this volume has
involved a number of colleagues and graduate students in one way or
another and they have provided me with constant theoretical, political and
ethical challenges. The role that students are playing in transforming
South Africa has never been clearer than it is today. In particular, I
thank the following people: Julie Middleton, Thea De Gruchy, Duduzile
Ndlovu, Stanford Mahati, Ronica Zuzu, Tino Jeera Jo Vearey, Zaheera
Jinnah, Brandon Hamber, Monica Kiwanuka, Dostin Lakika and Thabani
Sibanda who have talked with me on so many topics for so many years.
Our conversations have generated most of what is in this book and they
have always been undertaken with generosity and genuine intellectual
curiosity. It has been a privilege to work in an environment that is
supportive, creative and more than a little unorthodox.
Jane Callaghan, Lindsay O’Dell and Erica Burman offered me the
opportunity to present this work in earlier forms at conferences and
other events and I am grateful for this and their ongoing interest in my
work.
Jenny van de Wet did a wonderful job of producing an index at the last
minute for which I am grateful.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Funding for this work has come from varied sources and I would like to
acknowledge the financial contributions of HIVOS, Atlantic
Philanthropies and the National Research Foundation and the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation.
An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared in the POWS-R as Palmary, I.
(2016). Global feminisms in a time of migration: Gender sexuality and
asylum in South Africa. Psychology of Women Section-Review, 18(1), 13–26.
It is reworked in this book with the kind permission of British
Psychological Society (Psychology of Women Section).
I would also like to thank the International Organization for Migration
and Times Media for allowing me to reproduce the images in Chapters 4
and 5.
Finally I would like to thank Brendon, Tyler and Connor whose endless
questions inspire my curiosity.
CONTENTS
2 Migration Journeys 19
References 119
Index 127
ix
CHAPTER 1
This book considers the intersections of gender, sexuality and migration in the
South African context. Migration in South Africa has become something to be
studied, debated and contested by human rights activists, lawyers, humanitar-
ian workers, government departments and international bodies and conven-
tions. In many ways this is a new debate for South Africa but it is shaped by
global concerns and re-enacted in localized ways that are embedded in South
African histories of colonization and apartheid. Much of this debate has been
prescribed by very particular, and often taken for granted, sets of assumptions
about what and who migrants are, what gender is, what sexualities are and
their interconnectedness. In this book, I want to take a reflexive step back to
pay attention to these sets of assumptions and reflect on how it is that gender,
sexuality and migration come together in the South African context and with
what consequences.
Reflecting on South Africa does not mean that this is a book about
South Africa. Indeed one of the most important topics elaborated in this
book is the ways in which global and local imperatives are negotiated
constantly as South Africa has re-entered the global economic and political
sphere. Similarly, in talking of the West, the global North or of Africa, I do
not suggest that this reflects a contained and conceptually meaningful
geographical space but rather an idea. An idea imbued with notions of
development, aid, humanitarianism and political interconnectedness and
difference. To paraphrase Veena Das (1996), the nation exists at the level
of icon and it is this iconic representation of a nation that is at once
disconnected from place whilst simultaneously being saturated with inter-
connected symbolic meanings. As Mbembé (2001) notes:
Africa still constitutes one of the metaphors through which the West represents
the origin of its own norms, develops a self-image, and integrates this image
into the set of signifiers asserting what it supposes to be its identity. (p. 2)
Thus, this book engages centrally with the interconnected but unequal
global relationships that constitute present day preoccupations with
migration without imagining that one can ever speak about Africa or the
West as a given. So whilst this book is a series of reflections on the ways
that gender, sexuality and migration have intersected in South Africa since
democracy in 1994, and the new social and moral orders that have been
produced though this intersection, it is equally a book about the place that
South Africa has taken up and continues to negotiate in an increasingly
global, and globally constrained discourse around gender, sexuality and
migration. This means that this is not a book about gendered movement
or even about women’s movement. Nor is it about the abuses faced by
sexual minorities (although no doubt these are reflected upon). It is a
book about the ways in which gendered notions, which may or may not
map onto different bodies function in conversations on migration and the
global consequences thereof.
1 GOVERNING MORALITY: PLACING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MIGRATION 3
of conceptual resources for unpacking and making visible the myth of the
nation – one that has been developed in useful ways in the anti-colonial
struggles that have characterized that past 50 years on the African con-
tinent by (Meintjes et al. 2001; Turshen et al. 1998). These literatures on
gender and nation have provided one of the richest intellectual traditions
precisely for the way in which they have been written by authors from
postcolonial contexts and from the Empire and read together can help us
to understand the ways in which global colonial relationships persist even
as we see an increasing “methodological nationalism” that sees us confin-
ing our research to particular country contexts understanding anything
that crosses a border as “comparative research” (Wimmer and Glick
Schiller 2002). However, these interconnections remain underdeveloped
and addressing this is a significant aim of this book.
For the purposes of this book, it is useful to extend one perhaps less clearly
articulated aspect of this existing work to think about where we find our-
selves today in contemporary South Africa. Within this area of work has been
consideration of how bodies are appropriated in the imagining of a national
project and how they become the objects on which the desire for nationalism
is (often brutally and sometimes willingly) inscribed. For example, Ryan and
Ward (2004) note the significance of forcibly cutting women’s hair in
Northern Ireland as an act of humiliation. Also from Northern Ireland
Smyth (1992) has documented the political tensions over the debate on
abortion and the symbolism that abortion holds in the nationalist project.
Equally, in South Africa we have seen differential approaches to abortion for
black and white women with heavily criminalization of abortion for white
women existing alongside the forced abortion and sterilization of many
black women (Bradford 1991). Perhaps the most extreme manifestation of
this would be the prevalence of rape in times of war as an act of violence that
symbolically is not just perpetrated against individual women but against
women as representatives of the boundary of a group and women’s sexuality
a symbol of the group’s very existence. From this work we can consider that
the violation of women’s bodies, creates what Das (1996) refers to as “a
future memory . . . that the women as territory had already been claimed and
occupied by other men” (p. 85).
Extending these debates we can see how the regulation of sex is central
to the making of a nation. Whether it is through legislation like the
Immorality Act (1957) in South Africa which criminalized sex between
people classified as belonging to different race groups, or insisting on the
patrilineal classification of mixed Hutu and Tutsi children in Rwanda (see
1 GOVERNING MORALITY: PLACING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MIGRATION 5
Palmary 2006), the nation is made through the regulation of sex. From
the regulation of sexual relationships, stems a broader set of gendered
relationships and norms that frame and reinscribe national identity. What
is perhaps more important for this book is the way that, through these
sexual regulations, national identity becomes naturalized. It is the every-
day acceptance of what are in fact a highly constrained set of practices
around sex, childbirth and identity that make national identity appear
timeless and natural. We only have to think of an example from the
South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission where Victor
Mthembu, in his defence against killing a 9-month old baby in the course
of the Boibatong massacre, drew on a proverb which translates as “a snake
gives birth to another snake” (see Palmary 2006 for more). Similarly,
Coleman (2002) notes how the anti-Tutsi propaganda in Rwanda repre-
sented Tutsi women in sexual relationships with United Nations soldiers
and declared Hutus who had sex with or married Tutsi’s to be traitors of the
nation. For example, of the widely promoted Hutu Ten Commandments
published in a December issue of the newspaper Kangura, (Coleman 2002)
regulated marriage and sexual relationships across ethnic divisions. They
stated that:
Every Hutu should know that a Tutsi woman, wherever she is, works for the
interest of her Tutsi ethnic group. As a result, we shall consider a traitor any
Hutu who: marries a Tutsi woman; befriends a Tutsi woman; employs a
Tutsi woman as a secretary or concubine; Every Hutu should know that our
Hutu daughters are more suitable and conscientious in their role as woman,
wife and mother of the family. Are they not beautiful, good secretaries and
more honest? Hutu woman, be vigilant and try to bring your husbands,
brothers and sons back to reason; The Rwandese Armed Forces should be
exclusively Hutu. The experience of the October [1990] war has taught us a
lesson. No member of the military shall marry a Tutsi. (cited in Coleman
2002, pp. 748–9)
[F]ar from being an inert, passive, noncultural and ahistorical term, the body
may be seen as the crucial term, the site of contestation, in a series of
economic, political, sexual, and intellectual struggles. (p. 19)
And so we can see then how the body and the violence against it speaks.
A far cry from the South African angst over so-called gratuitous violence
with its implication of meaningless violence without reason (a topic I return
to in the following chapters), I would argue that violence always has mean-
ing. Inflicting pain, how it is done and for what ends tells a story cast in the
history of the national project. But we should not think of this violence
only operating through war (or public violence as in the necklacing – see
1 GOVERNING MORALITY: PLACING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MIGRATION 7
Chapter 5). For example, Mehta (2000) shows how circumcision functions
to distinguish Muslims from Hindus in ways that equally reflects the history
of partition. For him:
seemingly natural categories such as the child the adult, men and women
and their mutual construction. In this sense home regulates – it shapes
and constrains sexual relationships, adult-child relationships and rela-
tionships between men and women. It equally creates normative expec-
tations of what the members of a home should and can do, foreclosing
alternatives.
But home and its associated spacial metaphors also connects these see-
mingly intimate spaces with broader political projects such as the invention
of the homeland (or perhaps even more insidiously the motherland). This is
equally a notion of home that regulates; in, for example, the ways in which
home country is used to deny movement of certain groups, to forcibly send
others home as well as to assign or revoke rights and entitlements. The idea
of home as a place of family life is complicit in the making of the nation even
as it is constantly represented as outside of the scope of state intervention.
Indeed the regulation of family relationships is central to the making of the
homeland and is violently regulated for its potential to disrupt the national
project. Thus for Said (1993) geography is the imperial methodology.
However this is not limited to periods of colonization and remains as true
now as when it was written, as evidenced by the current deaths of migrants
attempting to cross the Mediterranean and reach Europe. Clearly, the idea
of home is saturated with affect. Whether as a place of love, care and
nurturing or as a place of anger violence and oppression, home is a powerful
metaphor precisely because of its emotional pull. If to feel at home is to
belong then the idea of home is surely one rooted in protection and love.
Affect is perhaps the most artificially depoliticized of constructs (see Ahmed
2013). These themes and their connections to nation building emerge
centrally in the chapters to follow.
was granted powers of local government, one of the first responses was the
punishment of prostitution, something that was further attempted by the
British and the Afrikaner governments in successive periods of time. Van
Onselen thus refers to a “barrage of legislation over a ten year period” (2001,
p. 112) attempting to regulate the vices of the newly formed Johannesburg.
He notes that the Contagious Diseases Act passed in 1885 was modelled on
its British counterpart but implemented shortly before the British Act was
repealed, suggesting high levels of enthusiasm for this kind of regulation in
the colonies. In addition, his work documents an increasing movement of
women between Europe and Southern Africa that followed and was shaped
by economic developments in both countries. Amidst the periodic calls for
the abolishment of prostitution was debate, noted by Van Onselen (2001),
on whether and to what extent Johannesburg should follow the legal route
of Britain. This is a topic that will recur throughout this book. However,
what is significant for this work is how legislation in Johannesburg developed
through a complex engagement with colonial powers. The situation
described by Van Onselen (2001) is not unlike how, in Uganda, early
reproductive and parenting programmes functioned to create a sense of
national identification and pride rooted in the “strength” (defined once
more through a blurring of morality and health) of the Ugandan family
(Summers 1991). Early manifestations of this colonial preoccupation with
sexuality can be seen in Van Heyningen’s (1984) analysis of how South
Africa became a settler society at least in part because of a concern that white
sex workers were working in the Cape Colony and selling sex to black men.
The spacial separation of men and women was thought to produce promis-
cuity that could only be solved by a return to family values. Thus the decision
to bring families to the Cape Colony was one rooted in the concern that sex
across race groups would undermine the project of colonization and having
families would curtail men’s sexually inappropriate behaviour. Clearly as
Stoler (1995) shows in her critique and re-reading of Foucault’s History of
Sexuality “discourses on sexuality, like other cultural, political or economic
assertions, cannot be charted in Europe alone” (p. 7). Rather, the colonies
were a shadow against which the Empire could be built and Western
morality defined and it is precisely this interconnectedness that I am con-
cerned with in this book.
If we consider, as a second example, the way that apartheid was
implemented, it created as central pillars of its legal and moral frame-
work the Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Act. Significantly,
these Acts perpetuated the myth that South Africa is a country of two
1 GOVERNING MORALITY: PLACING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MIGRATION 11
Sexuality is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather
one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality: useful for the
greatest number of manoeuvres and capable of serving as a point of support,
as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies. (Foucault 1978, p. 103)
Several authors have noted how after war, there is a common call to return
to traditional values and imagined pre-war life (Meintjes et al. 2001). This
often takes as its focus the regulation of family life. Moments of social
anxiety are frequently characterized by preoccupation with sexuality and
gender relations. For Fahs et al. (2013) moral panics divert attention from
broader social problems. As she notes:
When the government bans images of coffins and body bags returning from
war and makes only half-hearted attempts at lessening poverty, blowjob
scandals and “slutty” teenagers become apt attention diverting replace-
ments. (pp. 4–5)
14 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND MIGRATION IN SOUTH AFRICA
SOME OCCLUSIONS
This book offers an inevitably partial view of a vast topic. My perspective on
the topic is centrally an urban one viewed from the symbolic position of the
city of Johannesburg. Johannesburg is the stuff of fantasy. As Mahati (2015)
notes, children from Zimbabwe refer to the whole of South Africa as Joni;
to be in South Africa is to be in Johannesburg. It is a place of notorious
brutality and violence but also a place of opportunity and possibility – a city
build on gold. In this vein Mpe (2001) refers to Hillbrow (an inner city
suburb of Johannesburg) as a place of “milk honey and bile”. It is a place
that travel guides warn visitors to avoid and yet it is a place to which
hundreds of people from all over the continent flock in order to “make it”.
Johannesburg is predictably a place where migration has a huge sym-
bolic meaning. From the early migrants who came to what was then a bare
patch of land and set up a tent town to mine gold to contemporary
movements of Zimbabweans, Congolese, Chinese, Bangladeshi’s and
Somalis, it remains a place of possibility (see also Palmary et al. 2015).
As Mbembe Nuttall et al. (2008) note:
Civil life appears as an inchoate mix of ruthlessness and kindness, cruelty and
tenderness, indifference and generosity. (pp. 6–7)
1 GOVERNING MORALITY: PLACING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MIGRATION 15
Its motto “a world class African city” shows its complex and contested
symbolism; at once making a claim to Africa and at the same reflecting
ambivalence as African – suggesting that being world class makes it unlike
other African cities. This is an identity that will be explored more deeply in
the pages to follow. Thus, the book, whilst making broader comments on
South African and global moral preoccupations with migration, necessarily
eclipse experiences that fall outside of the urban. At its most pragmatic,
this is justified because refugee reception centres and embassies in South
Africa are entirely located in urban areas (with the exception of the Musina
border post) making migration, through bureaucratic design an urban
concern. Nevertheless, the reflections in this book are coloured by my
position in Johannesburg. This is a problem in so far as rural life in South
Africa, is barely visible, seldom researched and often assumed to be known
and timeless.
The case studies included also represent three of an almost endless set
of possible illustrations. As such this work is necessarily a first step in
attending to gender, sexuality and migration from a context which is
seldom researched given the dominance of Northern Academia. No
doubt there are many other ways to weave meaning from the multitude
of places and contexts in which migration debates take place.
introductory chapter, I revisit new forms of nation building that take place
through the reworking of gender, sexuality and migration. I reconsider
the new ways that old intersections of nation, gender and sexual regulation
work to construct the nation state and I retrace the new moral orders that
have been produced through the focus on migration in post-apartheid
South Africa.
In particular, I consider the ways that notions of victims, and legitimate
violence shape the moral framing of migration and establish new forms of
inclusion and exclusion. This shapes the nature and historical forms that
humanitarian responses have (and can) take in South Africa.
In addition, global and local influences are an important theme in each
of the chapters. This takes us beyond a simple reflection on how the North
influences the South to consider how global politics has been reconfigured
after African independence. The empirical chapters trace just some of these
spheres of influence and force us to rethink a simple binary between the
“West and the rest”.
Finally I consider how ideas of democracy and human rights have been
reworked in the South African context to create the conditions for exclu-
sion based on national identity. The popular imagination of South Africa’s
struggle has indeed meant that political freedom has become a system of
regulation.
NOTE
1. See www.mrm.org.za
CHAPTER 2
Migration Journeys
Contributor: Horace
Language: French
A LA REYNE.
M. D C . XX II .
A LA REYNE.
adame,
MADAME,
Tres-humble & Tres-obeiſſante
ſeruante & ſubjecte.
Gournay.
EGALITÉ DES HOMMES ET
DES FEMMES.
Ont elles au ſurplus, (ce mot par occaſion) moins excellé de foy, qui comprend toutes
les vertus principales, que de ſuffiſance & de force magnanime & guerriere?
Paterculus nous apprend, qu’aux proſcriptions Romaines, la fidelité des enfãs fut
nulle, des affranchis legere, des femmes treſgrande. Que ſi Sainct Paul, ſuyuãt ma
route des teſmoignages ſaincts, leur deffend le miniſtere & leur commande le ſilence
en l’Egliſe: il eſt euident que ce n’eſt point par aucun meſpris: ouy bien ſeulement, de
crainte qu’elles n’eſmeuuent les tentations, par cette montre ſi claire & publique qu’il
faudroit faire en miniſtrant & preſchant, de ce qu’elles ont de grace & de beauté plus
que les hommes. Ie dis que l’exemption de meſpris eſt euidente, puiſque cet Apoſtre
parle de Theſbé comme de ſa coadiutrice en l’œuure de noſtre Seigneur, ſans toucher
le grand credit de Saincte Petronille vers ſainct Pierre: & puis auſſi que la Magdeleine
eſt nommée en l’Egliſe egale aux Apoſtres, par Apoſtolis. Voire Entre autres au
que l’Egliſe & eux-meſmes ont permis vne exception de ceſte Calendrier des Grecs,
reigle de ſilence pour elle, qui preſcha trente ans en la Baume de publié par Genebrard.
Marſeille au rapport de toute la Prouence. Et ſi quelqu’vn
impugne ce teſmoignage de predications, on luy demandera que faiſoient les Sibyles,
ſinon preſcher l’Vniuers par diuine inſpiration, ſur l’euenement futur de Ieſus-Chriſt?
Toutes les anciennes Nations cõcedoient la Preſtriſe aux fẽmes, indifferemment auec
les hommes. Et les Chreſtiens ſont au moins forcez de conſentir, qu’elles ſoyent
capables d’appliquer le Sacrement de Bapteſme: mais quelle faculté de diſtribuer les
autres, leur peut eſtre iuſtement deniée; ſi celle de diſtribuer ceſtuy-là, leur eſt iuſtement
accordé? De dire que la neceſſité des petits enfãs mourãs, ait forcé les Peres anciens
d’eſtablir cet vſage en deſpit d’eux: il eſt certain qu’ils n’auroient iamais creu que la
neceſſité les peuſt diſpenſer de mal faire, iuſques aux termes de permettre violer &
diffamer l’application d’vn Sacrement. Et partant concedans ceſte faculté de
diſtribution aux femmes, on void à clair qu’ils ne les ont interdites de diſtribuer les
autres Sacremẽs, que pour maintenir touſiours plus entiere l’auctorité des hommes;
ſoit pour eſtre de leur ſexe, ſoit afin qu’à droit ou à tort, la paix fuſt plus aſſeurée entre
Epiſt. les deux ſexes, par la foibleſſe & rauallement de l’vn. Certes ſainct Ieroſme eſcrit
ſagement à noſtre propos; qu’en matiere du ſeruice de Dieu, l’eſprit & la doctrine
doiuent eſtre conſiderez, non le ſexe. Sentence qu’on doit generaliſer, pour permettre
aux Dames à plus forte raiſon, toute action & ſciẽce honneſte: & cela ſuyuant auſſi les
intentions du meſme ſainct, qui de ſa part honnore & auctoriſe bien fort leur ſexe.
Dauantage ſainct Iean l’Aigle & le plus chery des Euangeliſtes, ne meſpriſoit pas les
fẽmes, non plus que ſainct Pierre, ſainct Paul & ces deux Peres, i’entends ſaint Baſile
& ſainct Ieroſme; puis qu’il leur addreſſe ſes Epiſtres particulieremẽt: ſans Electra.
parler d’infinis autres Ss: ou Peres, qui font pareille addreſſe de leurs Eſcrits.
Quand au faict de Iudith ie n’en daignerois faire mention s’il eſtoit particulier, cela
s’appelle dependant du mouuement & volonté de ſon auctrice: non plus que ie ne
parle des autres de ce qualibre; bien qu’ils ſoient immenſes en quantité, comme ils
ſont autant heroiques en qualité de toutes ſortes, que ceux qui couronnent les plus
illuſtres hommes. Ie n’enregiſtre point les faicts priuez, de crainte qu’ils ſemblent, non
aduantages & dons du ſexe, ains boüillons d’vne vigueur priuée & ſpecialle. Mais
celuy de Iudith merite place en ce lieu, parce qu’il eſt bien vray, que ſon deſſein
tombant au cœur d’vne ieune dame, entre tant d’hommes laſches & faillis de cœur, à
tel beſoing, en ſi haulte & ſi difficile entrepriſe, & pour tel fruict, que le ſalut d’vn Peuple
& d’vne Cité fidelle à Dieu: ſemble pluſtoſt eſtre vne inſpiration & prerogatiue diuine
vers les femmes, qu’vn traict purement voluntaire. Comme auſſi le ſemble eſtre celuy
de la Pucelle d’Orleans, accompagné de meſmes circonſtances enuiron, mais de plus
ample & large vtilité, s’eſtendant iuſques au ſalut d’vn grand Royaume & de ſon Prince.
Æneid. I.
alluſion. Cette illuſtre Amazone inſtruicte aux ſoins de Mars,
Fauche les eſcadrons & braue les hazars:
Veſtant le dur plaſtron ſur ſa ronde mammelle,
Dont le bouton pourpré de graces eſtincelle:
Pour couronner ſon chef de gloire & de lauriers,
Vierge elle oſe affronter les plus fameux guerriers.
Adjouſtons que la Magdelene eſt la ſeule ame, à qui le Redempteur ait iamais
prononcé ce mot, & promis cette auguſte grace: En tous lieux où ſe preſchera
l’Euangile il ſera parlé de toy. Ieſus-Chriſt d’autrepart, declara ſa tres heureuſe & tres
glorieuſe reſurrection aux dames les premieres, affin de les rẽdre, dit vn venerable
Pere ancien, Apoſtreſſes aux propres Apoſtres: cela, cõme lon ſçait, auec miſſion
expreſſe: Va, dit il, à cette cy meſme, & recite aux Apoſtres & à Pierre ce que tu as
veu. Surquoy il faut notter, qu’il manifeſta ſa nouuelle naiſſance eſgalement aux
femmes qu’aux hommes, en la perſonne d’Anne fille de Phannel, qui le recongneut en
meſme inſtant, que le bon vieillard Sainct Simeon. Laquelle naiſſance, d’abondant, les
Sybilles nommées, ont predite ſeules entre les Gentils, excellent priuilege du ſexe
feminin. Quel honneur faict aux femmes auſſi, ce ſonge ſuruenu chez Pilate;
s’addreſſant à l’vne d’elles priuatiuement à tous les hommes, & en telle & ſi haulte
occaſion. Et ſi les hommes ſe vantent, que Ieſus-Chriſt ſoit nay de leur ſexe, on reſpond,
qu’il le failloit par neceſſaire bien ſceance, ne ſe pouuant pas ſans ſcandale, meſler
ieune & à toutes les heures du iour & de la nuict parmy les preſſes, aux fins de
conuertir, ſecourir & ſauuer le genre humain, s’il euſt eſté du ſexe des femmes:
notamment en face de la malignité des Iuifs. Que ſi quelqu’vn au reſte eſt ſi fade;
d’imaginer maſculin ou feminin en Dieu, bien que ſon nom ſemble ſonner le maſculin,
ny conſequemment beſoin d’acception d’vn ſexe pluſtoſt que de l’autre, pour honnorer
l’incarnation de ſon fils; cettuy cy monſtre à plein iour, qu’il eſt auſſi mauuais Philoſophe
que Theologien. D’ailleurs, l’aduantage qu’ont les hommes par ſon incarnation en leur
ſexe; (s’ils en peuuent tirer vn aduantage, veu cette neceſſité remarquée) eſt cõpenſé
par ſa conception tres precieuſe au corps d’vne femme, par l’entiere perfection de
cette femme, vnique à porter nom de parfaicte entre toutes les creatures purement
humaines, depuis la cheute de nos premiers parens, & par ſon aſſumption vnique en
ſuiect humain auſſi.
Finalement ſi l’Eſcripture a declaré le mary, chef de la femme, la plus grande ſottiſe
que l’homme peuſt faire, c’eſt de prendre cela pour paſſedroict de dignité. Car veu les
exemples, aucthoritez & raiſons nottées en ce diſcours, par où l’egalité des graces &
faueurs de Dieu vers les deux eſpeces ou ſexes eſt prouuée, voire leur vnité meſme, &
veu que Dieu prononce: Les deux ne ſeront qu’vn: & prononce encores: L’hõme
quittera pere & mere pour ſuiure ſa femme; il paroiſt que cette declaration n’eſt faicte
que par le beſoin expres de nourrir paix en mariage. Lequel beſoin requeroit, ſans
doubte, qu’vne des parties cédaſt à l’autre, & la preſtance des forces du maſle ne
pouuoit pas ſouffrir que la ſoubmiſſiõ vĩt de ſa part. Et quand bien il ſeroit veritable,
ſelon que quelques vns maintiennent, que cette ſoubmiſſion fut imposée à la femme
pour chaſtiement du peché de la pomme: cela encores eſt bien eſloigné de conclure à
la pretendue preferance de dignité en l’homme. Si lon croioit que l’Eſcripture luy
commendaſt de ceder à l’homme, comme indigne de le contrecarrer, voyez l’abſurdité
qui ſuiuroit: la femme ſe treuueroit digne d’eſtre faicte à l’image du Createur, de iouyr
de la treſſaincte Eucariſtie, des myſteres de la Redemptiõ, du Paradis & de la viſion
voire poſſeſſion de Dieu, non pas des aduantages et priuileges de l’homme: ſeroit ce
pas declarer l’homme plus precieux & releué que telles choſes, & partant commettre
le plus grief des blaſphemes?
FIN.
L’ I M P R I M E V R A R A N G É
ces vers icy pour emplir le reſte
de la feuille.
AVTHEVR INCERTAIN.
VERSION.
AVTREMENT
Lyſe & ſon petit Lys außy beaux que les Dieux,
De deux coſtez diuers ont perdu l’vn des yeux.
Si Lys donne l’autre œil à ſa mere admirée;
Il eſt l’aueugle Amour, & Lyſe Cytherée.
EX HORATIO.
Dial.
VERSION