Imagi(ni)ng ‘alternativity’:

Loslyf, mainstream Afrikaans pornography and post-apartheid Afrikaner identity

Abstract

At the time of its launch in June 1995, Loslyf was the first and only Afrikaans pornographic magazine in South Africa. Editor Ryk Hattingh was the primary creative force behind the magazine for the first year of its publication. During this time, Loslyf contributed towards the broader project of democratic expression in an expanding South African visual economy, as a simultaneously well considered and underrated (at the time of its publication) cultural product. As a powerful contributor to an Afrikaans imaginary (and a representation of a new Afrikaner imaging) emerging at a time of political renewal, Loslyf provides a glimpse into the desires, tensions and tastes of and for an imagined community potentially still shaped by a past ruled by censorship. The magazine can be seen as an example of an attempt at reinvesting the prescriptive and seemingly generic genre of pornography with cultural specificity and political content, with a view to making this genre more interesting and relevant, alongside an attempt to imbue stifling visualisations of Afrikaner/Afrikaans identity with the same characteristics. Whilst Loslyf succeeded in fracturing the “simulacrum” of pornographic representation, it also demonstrated that an image of this kind of “alternativity” is difficult to sustain.