Book review: Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity and Interaction in Cape Town. By Andrew Tucker. Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley. 2009.  24.99 paper. ISBN: 9781405183024 (original) (raw)

Review of Graeme Reid's 'How to Be a Real Gay: Gay Identities in Small-town South Africa'. Scottsville: KwaZulu-Natal Press (Anthropology Southern Africa)

How to be a real gay: gay identities in small-town South Africa, by Graeme Reid, Scottsville, KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013, 320 pp., R 320 (paperback), Since the fall of apartheid and the promulgation of the new Constitution in 1996, gays and lesbians in South Africa have been encountering a range of new contradictions: between legal recognition and widespread moral denunciation, between cultural expectations of normative gender relations and activist notions of sexual identity. Faced with multiple, often conflicting, representations of queer identity, youths in small towns and rural areas are increasingly preoccupied with the question of "how to be a real gay." This question prompts gays to imagine and contest -in most creative ways and, sometimes, in most vulnerable circumstances -various forms of style and fashion, visibility and recognition. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Wesselton, a black neighbourhood of the town of Ermelo in the province of Mpumalanga, between 2003 and 2005, How to Be a Real Gay explores the complex ways in which gays craft identities in everyday life. Vivid descriptions of conversations and interactions in hair salons and homes, at weddings and funerals, at activist workshops and beauty pageants demonstrate how gay lives emerge in new ways at the intersection of global and local socio-historical dynamics.

Framing exclusion in Cape Town's gay village: the discursive and material perpetration of inequitable queer subjects 1

Area, 2009

Within and beyond geography, there has been a growing concern in understanding how and why exclusion can occur within 'gay spaces', with a specific focus on Western Europe and North America. Heidi Nast's (2002 Queer patriarchies, queer racisms, international Antipode 34 874-909) work on the 'white queer patriarch' has taken this work further by exploring the multiple, interrelated, historical and contemporary factors that can lead to exclusion and exploitation. Despite growing interest surrounding South Africa's new liberal queer agenda, issues of contemporary exclusion among queer groups as a direct result of race and racism have remained relatively unexplored. By incorporating elements of Nast's schema, this article will examine the power that exists in the creation and framing of essentialistic 'white' and 'coloured' queer male subjects in Cape Town's gay village. These subjects will be shown to simultaneously draw on historical inequalities while also re-imagining them in contemporary settings to re-inscribe perceptions of classed and gendered difference. The creation of such inequitable subjects helps us understand how exclusion can become real and normalised within a space such as Cape Town's gay village in a way that draws on a history of material inequalities and discursive perceptions of race.

Frontiers and pioneers in (the study of) queer experiences in Africa Introduction

Africa, 2021

This part issue of the journal Africa broadly explores the idea of frontiers and pioneers in the study of queer African lives. We envisage frontiers as exploring new openings in the study of sexuality by putting forward the practices and experiences of people across the African continent. We propose to study queerness as part of broader quotidian realities so as to further theorize the study of sexualities and queerness. We propose the term 'pioneer' for the interlocutors in our studies: (self-identifying) women, men and queerying persons who courageously explore contradictory paths in their various contexts. As such, we encourage an imaginative employment of queer as indicating a horizon of curiosity and imprecision. In making queerness not an object of study but rather a subject of its own theoriza-tion based on everyday experience, this special journal issue explicitly and deliberately asserts the vernacular and the mundane as a locus of knowledge. One implication is especially pertinent: knowledge on queerness cannot be prefabricated or preassembled in theoretical laboratories with the aim of merely applying it to an African context. By doing so, Africa functions-as it always has-only as a variable in the study of cultural difference, one that is different from, by implication , a Euro-American centre. 'Or, as is happening too often, queer African voices and experiences will be absorbed as "data" or "evidence," not as modes of theory or as challenges to the conceptual assumptions that drive queer studies' (Macharia 2016: 185). Foregrounding the mundane rather than the urbane (as in 'suave', for which queer theory has a strong penchant), we are not trying to 'define' African queer sexualities; rather, we seek to provoke conversations about the terms and agencies of their expansion through the prism of frontiers and pioneers. Inspired by Francis Nyamnjoh's and Stella Nyanzi's work, we argue that studying the quotidian is a critical first step. Even as we follow up on an existing body of literature on queer sexualities in African societies, this literature shows how the investigation of the everyday is easily subsumed by other concerns; our aim is thus to centre people's practices and experiences as a focal axis of theorizing. Rachel Spronk is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. In her work on gender, sexuality and the middle classes she combines the ethno-graphic study of practices and self-perceptions with the task of rethinking our theoretical repertoires. Email: R.Spronk@uva.nl S. N. Nyeck is a visiting scholar at the Vulnerability and Human Condition Initiative at Emory School of Law and a research associate with the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET), Mandela University.

From Homo to Pomo: 'gay identity' amongst young white men in contemporary South Africa

2012

This project argues that there is a 'lacuna' in the representation of the demographic understood as 'young, white, urban, gay men' in contemporary South Africa. Whilst mediated popular representations of this demographic exist, these representations perpetuate a transnationalised, commercialised sense of identity – which in turn masks authentically local experiences. There are no literary representations of this demographic which speak to local experiences of support structures, community, identity, and ethics in a post-apartheid context. By deconstructing the label of 'gay' this project maps the problems of interpreting this demographic under a marker of 'gayness'. Using Alex Sanchez's American Rainbow Boys, Rainbow High, and Rainbow Road it traces the history and meaning of 'gay'. It relates this meaning to a South African context by using André Carl van der Merwe's Moffie, Malan and Johaardien's Yes, I am! and mediated representations of the popular Mr Gay South Africa competition. These cultural sources point toward the need for a new framework of understanding in South Africa – one which shifts away from an overreliance on Western discourses. This framework is provided in relation to five local narratives gathered through ethnographic research, where the experiences of these five men are interpreted under a paradigm of 'pomosexuality' rather than 'gayness'. The project argues that pomosexuality, as a perspective, appreciates liminality but does not rely on it for identity. Rather, it focuses on the unrepresented shift from a Western ethic of the politicisation of identity to a local ethic of the politicisation of values. It ultimately argues that the lacuna of representation can be filled by adopting this pomosexual framework and breaking free of assumptions of homogeneity and assimilation.

Queering discourses of coming out in South Africa

2014

The performative act of "coming out" authenticates a homosexual identity and in the South African context the coming out narrative has gained such momentum that it is now regarded as an imperative for closeted homosexuals by the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project (LGEP). However, coming out has been critiqued by queer theorists who argue that it is problematic because it forces a person into an already established identity category, strengthens the regulation of sexual categories and is complicit in the reconstitution of these categories. In this paper, these queer critiques of coming out will be employed in order to explore the question of why a person is compelled to confess to the 'truth' about their homosexuality in South Africa. . The data was analysed using content analysis and the findings show how homosexuality is extricated from negative discourses of abnormality, promiscuity and fraudulence and reformulated into positive discourses associated with identity politics, normality and progress. In such positive discourses, a person is compelled into disclosure because it is viewed as a necessary step to combat homophobia and conservative family and social norms. This paper argues that as long as the coming out narrative is embedded in the positive discourses of progress, health and enlightenment, it will remain immune to critique of the role that it plays in strengthening heterosexuality as unitary and normative. Finally, this paper suggests that refusing to succumb to the pressure of categorisation could potentially undermine the constraints of the homosexual/heterosexual binary on which the categories of male and female are contingent.

Navigating Urban Spaces as Queer Women in South Africa

Urban Forum

Occupying urban spaces for queer women, often shaped by implicit and explicit forms of regressive heteropatriarchy, has been understood as a challenge for queer women. As a result, queer women struggle to inhabit, live and feel safe in urban spaces. However, further scholarship is needed to consider how queer women may also find strategies to overcome such challenges. Such work can then add productively to, and right an imbalance within, existing scholarship on sexuality and urban space by exploring, acknowledging and giving voice to the lived experiences of queer women especially in urban Africa. Drawing on a PhD study that deployed in-depth interviews with 23 queer women, this intervention looks specifically at how black queer women have found creative ways to create communities with each other in challenging contexts, in the city of Johannesburg. This intervention shows how black queer women resist various forms of oppression by creating safe spaces for themselves (and others) wi...

Queer Africanness/African Queerness

Centre for Gender Studies Biennial Gender Research Conference, 2016

The fragile 'Rainbow Nation' myth shapes senses of life in South Africa. However, lived experiences are often violently at odds with legislature that enshrines equality. In this context, xenophobia and homophobia are prolific realities. Located at the junction of these prejudices, this presentation focuses on the liminal lives of 'queer African migrant men', where hopes for belonging transform into multifaceted unbelongings. Employing an intersectional necropolitical lens, the presentation explores fractured senses of community amongst workshop participants in South Africa, engaging with anxieties around the perceived 'unAfricanness of homosexuality'. Emphasising the failure of post-apartheid inclusivity, it argues that queer African migrants engage in processes of imagining themselves as members of transcontinental communities, resisting the death-infused bounds of the nation and 'home'. It shifts queerness away from familiar understandings and offers futures for connection, balancing shared experiences with a consideration of Africa as a site of border-fluid potentiality. Contrasting prejudice with everyday resistance, the presentation suggests an engagement with the challenges and promises of energized belonging forged through unbelonging.