Queer Visibilities

Space, Identity and Interaction in Cape Town

Andrew Tucker

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405183024, 9781405183031
• eBook ISBN: 9781444399776
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Combining current theory and original fieldwork, Queer Visibilities explores the gap between liberal South African law and the reality for groups of queer men living in Cape Town.

• Explores the interface between queer sexuality, race, and urban space to show links between groups of queer men
• Focuses on three main 'population groups' in Cape Town—white, coloured, and black Africans
• Discusses how HIV remains a key issue for queer men in South Africa
• Utilizes new research data—the first comprehensive cross-community study of queer identities in South Africa

Chapter One

Queer Visibilities in Cape Town

Introduction

At the end of 2006 South Africa joined a very small, yet very special club. Indeed, this club was so special that, since its creation at the beginning of the new millennium, it had lead to incessant discussion among many other nations. While very few other countries seemed particularly enthusiastic about joining its membership, several spent a remarkably large amount of time explaining why those who had joined were mistaken in doing so. Commentators in nations stretching from the Middle East to Eastern Europe to Africa all appeared to believe that membership must never be sanctioned and, if possible, should be actively legislated against.¹ The President of the United States even went so far as to suggest subscribing to the club’s ideas might imperil the ‘most fundamental institution of civilisation’.² This was therefore, in some ways, not only a special, but also apparently a rather dangerous club.

South Africa had decided to grant same-sex couples the right to marry. It joined the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Canada. The legalisation of same-sex marriage has helped position South Africa as the most progressive country on the entire continent. Nationally, same-sex marriage has been held up as one of the strongest examples of the country’s move away from an intolerant past – a past now more associated with the opponents of same-sex marriage than with the current South African government. Some might fairly argue that such achievements have been well worth the hyperbole from ‘less progressive’ countries.

And indeed, the achievement of South Africa in this regard should not be underestimated. In just one and a half decades the country has gone from persecuting and arresting individuals with same-sex desire, to allowing them to adopt children and marry. No other country has so radically changed its position towards queer individuals or the world’s perception of itself in such a short period of time.

Yet while such achievements have indeed been admirable, the legal rights attained do not necessarily equate to daily improvements in the lives of many queer South Africans. While, de jure, queer citizens in South Africa now have the ability to marry, de facto, many still cannot. And while cities such as Cape Town are able to boast about their liberal and accepting stance towards queer individuals, the reality on the ground for many, even in Cape Town, may be considerably different. This book explores this gap between liberal law and the more dangerous reality for groups of queer men in Cape Town.

To understand this gap requires first an acknowledgement of the diversity of queer experiences in the country and, as this book will show, the diversity across urban space in one particular city.³ As researchers in other locations have shown, the variety of community experiences that make up queer existence across the globe is truly staggering (Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan 2002; Hayes 2000; Jackson and Sullivan 1999; Parker 1999; Patton and Sánchez-Eppler 2000; Reid-Pharr 2002). An attempt to understand any local queer community therefore requires a detailed exploration of the many issues that have affected, and continue to affect, it. Yet in a country such as South Africa, queer experiences are further complicated by the extraordinary way in which communities have historically been spatially regulated by the state. The use of ‘race’ as the basis of a system of discrimination has left the country with deep social, economic and political scars. Queer communities today have therefore also remained strongly influenced by the way colonial and later apartheid mechanisms compartmentalised, regulated and manipulated groups.

Indeed, while the regulation of difference based on ‘race’ has been well documented in South Africa, the direct effect it had on different queer communities has yet to be systematically explored. In large part this stems from barriers in gaining access to different communities. The legacy of apartheid makes it difficult to gain entrance and acceptance within communities historically segregated in the urban environment. Yet the lack of detailed crosscommunity research also perhaps signifies a greater problem, namely that of being able to explore the numerous nuanced ways different communities dealt with ideas of same-sex desire. By taking a geographical approach, this book will show how individuals from the three main historically and racially defined population groups in the city of Cape Town have come to understand and represent queer sexuality in remarkably different yet also related ways. It will be shown that in large part this is due to the different ways the apartheid state attempted to categorise and spatially contain them.

Only once this is achieved will it be possible to begin to understand why changes in South African law, while clearly laudable, remain marginal to the vast majority of queer individuals in the country. As many commentators have noted, the ending of apartheid in South Africa has not meant an ending to inequality or discrimination (Bollens 1998a; Lodge 2002; Saff 1994; Turok 2001). To truly begin to explore different queer communities in South Africa today is therefore also to set out on a journey that examines the social and political interactions of these groups. So much of South Africa’s past is based on different communities’ perceptions of themselves in relation to other, often neighbouring communities. The same is true for queer communities.

This is therefore a book that will examine the way different, specifically male, queer communities have been able to lead open and free lives, the problems and possibilities of cross-community interaction and the way these subjects and events have been shaped by the unique history of the country. The remainder of this chapter reviews a number of studies of queer groups and argues that a different approach is needed for Cape Town queer communities if their lives are ever to be adequately understood.

A Question of Visibility

The approach used by this book can be summed up by the notion of queer visibility. At its core, this is a geographical concept that examines how queer groups are able to overcome the heteronormativity of particular urban spaces; the options that are available for them to do so; the perception of the decision to undertake certain visibilities by different members of their own community and those of others; and the problems and possibilities of groups interacting based in large part on these very divergent visibilities. It is therefore more than simply an exploration of queer public performances. Neither is it a study which presupposes that visibility by itself is a positive outcome.⁴ Rather, it is a study of how groups perceive themselves and each other in relation to their own community structures, the structures of others and the problems of social and political exchange.

In a city such as Cape Town, such visibilities will also be directly tied to the way communities were defined by artificial and arbitrary classifications of ‘race’. As will be explored below, apartheid was at its core a spatial strategy, and as such, resulted in different ‘racially-defined’ communities being located at different points within the urban environment. If heteronormativity is viewed not as a monolithic entity, but as a type of regulative power dependent on other structures in society, then the options to overcome it must also depend on the factors that initially affect it. In Cape Town this means that queer visibilities will be strongly affected by the way apartheid’s racial classifications impacted on different communities in different ways. What can be made visible to the wider community, and why it can, depends in large part on the racial history of the country and of this one city. Equally, to understand how groups are able to interact with each other requires understanding how they view each other and how they view each other’s interactions with heteronormativity. These interactions will also be directly affected by the very factors that led to the development of different visibilities in the first place. In this way, the successes different queer communities have in becoming visible within their own communities can also be tempered by their ability or inability to stay visible when interacting with other communities. As this book will show, the problems faced by some queer communities in Cape Town mean it becomes very easy for them to remain invisible when attempting group interaction. Such invisibility can have dire consequences.

An approach such as this one will hopefully also help move scholars beyond an impasse of either looking at ‘global’/’Western’ forms of queer expression or looking at ‘local homosexualities’. As William Spurlin (2001) correctly argues, there is as much danger for scholars from the West in inadvertently homogenising sexualities elsewhere within an almost imperialist Western framework as there is for European or North American cultural modes of production to usurp those found elsewhere. A process whereby the global is understood through the local, where agency remains central, and where difference is seen to be relational will help limit the dangers correctly highlighted by scholars such as Spurlin.

It will also help limit the problems encountered by scholars such as Natalie Oswin (2005) who argue that it remains difficult and dubious to analytically prise apart ‘Western’ identities and identities found in Africa. While Oswin is correct to highlight the fallacy of assuming a monolithic ‘Western’ gay identity or a wholly knowable and separate ‘African homosexual culture’, it becomes decidedly problematic to argue, as she does, that there is no imposing Western queerness or resistant African homosexual culture in the construction of the very successful international marketing initiative of ‘gay Cape Town’.⁵ As will be explored in more detail in the following sections, Oswin perhaps arrives at her conclusion as a result of the way she attempts to explore what exactly might be included within a category such as ‘African homosexuality’ or ‘gay Cape Town’. A study of visibility initially shifts the focus of debate away from broader concerns over subjectivity or catch-all identity labels and their relationship to at times equally nebulous ‘global flows’, and instead first moves back to the core concern as to how groups have over time been able to position themselves in relation to their local heteronormative communities in particular locations in the urban environment. An attempt to find a direct comparison between Western queerness and African specificity amongst even a particular elite subset of a wider dynamic community without first excavating such histories runs the conceptual risk of sidelining the multifaceted, contradictory and at times exploitative interactions queer groups can subsequently have with other queers in the city. This in turn runs the risk of marginalising the dramatically divergent effects that the representation of ‘gay Cape Town’ has had on diverse groups of queers and the way such a representation is worked with, contested or confronted. Overlooking such complexity therefore also runs the risk of being unable to see where exactly each community may find repeated tension (or solidarity) with any other.

As the following sections will discuss, queer visibility is therefore an attempt to explore why difference may or may not exist within and between communities and how visibility and appreciation of difference depends on the way groups have developed elsewhere. It therefore also initially shifts the argument away from ‘the global’ or ‘the local’ and instead focuses on how difference becomes possible when communities interact internally. It then becomes possible to see how within different areas of a city like Cape Town difference is represented by the communities themselves through an appreciation of their own history – linked to apartheid and their own understanding of communities elsewhere. There is, therefore, an ‘imposing Western queerness’, but one that is filtered through a local lens. There is also without any doubt whatsoever a ‘resistant homosexual culture’, but one defined by a centuries-old history, that was shaped by pre-colonial, colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid ideologies. Today, as this study will show, it represents itself as a set of distinct visibilities precisely because it sees what is made visible in different spaces in the city (for example, among those who frequent the city’s gay village). There are no simple binaries of ‘the West and the rest’ but instead communities with remarkably different histories that partly depend on each other today to exist at all. These groups can draw inspiration from ‘the West’ and from communities in Africa (or South East Asia). They are, however, to follow the schema taken up by Natalie Oswin, resistant to each other precisely because of their histories and the at times antagonistic relationships due to those histories. To argue otherwise would be to ignore not only the history of these communities but also the importance of acknowledging and safeguarding the needs of diverse queer individuals in Cape Town.

Yet a book that sets itself on such a trajectory immediately runs into some serious epistemological, methodological and ethical dilemmas. One of the most pressing is the issue of definition. Who, in other words, is this book meant to be exploring? And closely tied to that, how is the choice of subject justified? To put it another way, who is queer and how are they made visible? How can such terms be used for divergent groups in the urban environment? And how is a ‘group’ defined? To explore these issues, the next four sections will question and examine both the pertinent developments in queer studies and the formation of race-based discrimination in South Africa. The next section will briefly examine the trajectory of queer geography over the past thirty years. This discussion will lead directly into some questions in the next two sections concerning what we actually mean when we talk about sexual identities, ideas of ‘the closet’ and the relevance of ‘queer’ in post-colonial environments when seen in relation to visibility. The last two sections will examine how issues of race and questions of visibility remain tied to each other in Cape Town and wider South Africa.

Questioning the Sites and Categories of Study

For much of the past two to three decades, sexuality studies, queer studies and particularly queer geography have been concerned with understanding and explaining the lives of individuals with same-sex desire in ways that illuminate both the reasons for particular types of classification, regulation and discrimination and the strategies to end concealment of particular desires due to such discrimination (Brown et al. 2007). As one of the founders of what came to be known as queer theory, Michel Foucault, famously explained, the development of nineteenth-century Western discursive power, tied intrinsically to regulative techniques, brought into being ‘the homosexual’ and along with it its medicalisation and methods of control.⁶ From this standpoint, scholars have been interested in unpacking how such control has evolved and how to confront or manipulate it. Historical studies such as Chauncey (1994), Houlbrook (2005) and Peniston (2004) on same-sex communities in major urban environments and more recent work on the evolution of Western forms of gay identity and rightsbased political action tied to critiques of its essentialism (strategic, for example Armstrong (2002), Seidman (1993) and Wilchins (2004) or otherwise Nast (2002) and Schulmann (1998)) have all greatly enhanced our understanding.

Specifically from within geography, interest in ‘gay spaces’ has focused on a nexus of territory, transgression and identity (Binnie and Valentine 1999). In other words, what geographers have brought to the party is a foregrounding of the very spatiality of sexuality, its (re)production and regulation. For example, geographers have researched the politicisation, representation and contestation of sexual identity across different urban spaces and the transgression of nominally heterosexualised public and private spaces at a variety of scales (Aldrich 2004; Bell et al. 1994; Bell and Valentine 1995a; Phillips 2004). Manuel Castells was one of the first to bring together some of these ideas through his work on San Francisco (1983), where he explored the links between residential districts, voting patterns and social movements. By so doing, he created an early blueprint for examining the spatial and political dynamics of sexuality that has remained important (see for example Ingram et al. 1997). Geographers have therefore also gone on to explore how gay men have been viewed as an important element in urban regeneration, the gentrification of the city and as an element that could recreate parts of the city as new spaces of consumption and liberation (Bell and Binnie 2004; Binnie 1995; Chisholm 2005; Forest 1995; Knopp 1992 and 1998; Quilley 1997). In political terms, geographers have studied urban responses to AIDS (Brown 1997) and political transgressions ‘outside’ gay spaces, such as Pride marches and other interventions (Bell 1994; Brickell 2000; Davis 1995; Luongo 2002; Pourtavaf 2004). On a wider scale, sexual citizenship has been developed as a dynamic arena for relating issues of sexuality to the nation, state and globe (Altman 2001; Bell and Binnie 2000 and 2004; Waitt 2005). For Mitchell (2000) a central issue in this work concerns the sort of spaces where different sexual identities can develop and negotiate with others. Drawing here on Chauncey (1994), Mitchell explains a central theme running through much work on queer geography: ‘like any social relationship, sexuality is inherently spatial – it depends on particular spaces for its construction and in turn produces and reproduces the spaces in which sexuality can be, and was, forged’ (Mitchell 2000: 175).

But such studies have also been cast into relief by a growing body of work that examines the problems of relying on ‘Westernised’ gay communities and spaces as sites of study. While the importance of urban territories for gay-identified men has proven an important area of work, it does tend to ignore other groups who have not located themselves in such spaces (Brown and Staeheli 2003). Some of the earliest work in this field dealt with lesbian spaces through the city (Adler and Brenner 1992; Rothenberg 1995; Valentine 1993 and 1995). Other work has focused on individuals who live away from major urban areas, where attention has been paid to issues of rural lives and sexual identity (Bell and Valentine 1995b; Kramer 1995; Phillips et al. 2000; White 1980) and how the mythic space of the city acts as an important draw for individuals wanting to ‘come out’ (Brown 2000; Weston 1995).

Taking this a step further, increasing numbers of researchers are now exploring entirely non-Western and non-urban spaces in relation to samesex desire. For example Byrne (2005), Hoad (2000), Moodie (1988 and 2001), Murray (2000), Spurlin (2001) and Patton and Sánchez-Eppler (2000) have helped destabilise many of the norms upon which ‘traditional’ gay and lesbian studies have been posited, shifting the focus away from ‘metropolitan’ environments towards the ‘periphery’ (Sinfield 1998). In these locations different configurations of sexuality and space start to materialise. Such configurations therefore also call into question the very way in which commentators have tried to categorise and rationalise the communities they study and the power that enacts on them. While the studies outlined earlier in this section have helped develop an important roadmap for understanding sexualities of difference, they can also be seen to be guided by certain assumptions that may not be applicable elsewhere. Consequently, for a study such as this one that includes numerous communities who understand sexuality in divergent ways, it becomes imperative to see how they may wish to subscribe to beliefs in ways both familiar and different to those traditionally found in queer studies and queer geographies. By remaining focused on a geographical approach to sexuality, it therefore becomes vital to unpack quite what we mean when we talk about identities and the limits and opportunities of expression associated with them in different spaces. Specifically, we need to be acutely aware of the histories behind ideas such as ‘the closet’, ‘heteronormativity’ and ‘the queer’ and how they relate to different spaces in very different yet compelling ways.

Questioning ‘the Closet’

The more recent studies outlined above in new locations have allowed a re-evaluation of some of the fundamental tenets of the queer academy. Specifically, commentators have had to re-evaluate how ‘the closet’ has been viewed as the defining structure of gay oppression during the twentieth century (Sedgwick 1990). For a series of queer scholars schooled in post-structural thought in the 1990s, ‘the closet’ became an exemplary way of understanding how power/knowledge operates in society to regulate sexuality (Latimer 2004). As many of the works cited above acknowledge, an exploration of ‘the closet’ allows for a discussion of how the concealment and denial of homosexuality as a discrete sexual identity in society works to reinforce the heterosexual/homosexual binary and hence (following Derrida’s (1982) concerns as to the unequal power relationships between different parts of the binary) the dominance of heterosexuality in society. For example, ‘the closet’ itself is continually maintained, since being ‘out’ of ‘the closet’ also requires the pre-existence of somewhere and somehow being ‘in’ ‘the closet’ too. Hence, the binary and the mechanism around which the binary functions are seen to be mutually reinforced. This powerful critique of the way modern society is able to regulate the hetero/homo divide also goes to strengthen queer political projects. Specifically, ‘the closet’ and ‘coming out’ have remained powerful mechanisms through which to engage political rights-based movements, both in the West and elsewhere (Hoad 2000; Human Rights Campaign 2004; Weeks 1990).

Geographically as well, ‘the closet’ has proved a powerful conceptual tool. While not necessarily always explicitly mentioned, it still forms the basis of much work on ‘gay space’. After all, the regulation of space generally as heteronormative allows for a study of spaces which are not. The most prominent study of this type is Michael Brown’s (2000) Closet Space. The aim of this study was to explore how power/knowledge signified by ‘the closet’ must actually occur in particular places at particular scales. For Brown, it was therefore crucial to see how ‘the closet’ works as more than just a linguistic metaphor, but rather to examine how it has a geography. As Brown explains:

By its spatiality the closet is a material strategy and tactic: one that conceals, erases and makes gay people invisible and unknown. Because it is such a common, central term in gay and lesbian life, it implies a ubiquity and multidimensionality that suggests an exploration across a wide variety of spatial scales and locations... It simultaneously presented itself at several spatial scales from the body, to the city, to the nation, and finally to the globe. (p. 141)

‘The closet’ therefore has helped frame an understanding of how queer sexuality has been oppressed by examining the way the heterosexual/ homosexual binary has been operationalised. From within geography, a primary concern has been exploring exactly where this oppression occurs and to see how the spatiality of power/knowledge itself goes to bring ‘the closet’ into existence in the first place (see also Knopp 1994). These are clearly powerful and relevant pursuits. Indeed, the continued framing of ‘the closet’ in personal ‘coming out’ narratives and more broad-based queer political projects points to the centrality of the term in the lives of many queer individuals. Yet as other commentators have explored, ‘the closet’ may not necessarily be relevant to a great many other queer groups.

As Seidman (1998) explains, one of the central beliefs on which much early work on ‘the closet’ was based, when seen in relation to its interface with issues of identity and community action, argued that there must already exist a formed sexual self. ‘The closet’ in much contemporary literature has therefore come to represent a barrier that needs to be broken through. Despite queer theory’s warnings concerning unitary and fixed identity categories, the subjec...

Table of contents

• cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Figures and Tables
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One: Queer Visibilities in Cape Town
• Part I: Visibilities
• Part II: Interactions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index