Queer Word- and World-Making in South Africa

Dignified Sounds

Taylor Riley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367764456
• eBook ISBN: 9781000379433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Sexuality & Gender in Religion

Focusing on everyday experiences of sexuality in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, this book considers personal narratives and other queer artefacts to shed light on linguistic and performative strategies of resistance, referred to as queer word- and world-making.

Questions of non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality in South Africa refer to the politics of words, and to their contested meanings and valuations reflected in the way that they roll off tongues. If sexualities are not merely acts, feelings, or identities, but embodiments of desires which invoke and influence social contexts, assumptions about sexuality as a realm of situated knowledge cannot be trusted at face-value. Taylor Riley considers the meanings coded in words used to depict same-sexualities and the productive silences which surround them, and how those meanings are embraced, altered, and resisted through labors of everyday existence.

The volume sheds new light on and personalizes the highly contested meanings which surround queer life and LGBTI rights in South Africa. It will be of interest to scholars and upper-level students of anthropology, queer studies and African studies.

1 Theorizing un/dignified sounds in the postapartheid landscape

The politics and perceptions of words referring to same-sexualities in the postcolony of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) shape knowledge and public opinion, along with practices and people themselves. As Leko and others emphasized, the word ‘stabane’ can be wielded as a weapon of accusation; and, as such, it not only sounds unpleasant and hurtful, but it actively sounds an alarm of disgust and danger. Leko explained:

Stabane! Stabane! I didn’t even know what that is […] I’d heard the word before. I heard it, I mean, growing up. “So-and-so is a stabane. So-and-so is stabane.” And you would think, oh, stabane, no […] But I don’t know what stabane means! […] [They’re] telling me this word now, I’m a stabane […] I didn’t ask – I didn’t ask what a stabane is. But it just – the way they said it.¹

In what follows, I discuss how the negativity of stabane in Leko’s account both reflects and contrasts colonial, apartheid, and postapartheid histories of sexuality.

Complex attitudes toward same-sexualities are easily glossed over by affirmations of South Africa’s constitutional recognition of same-sex rights. Within a false binary of rights versus tradition, traditional leaders hesitant about cultural and political change might easily be misunderstood. At the same time, figures of importance in KZN like Jacob Zuma and the Zulu king foster nostalgia for an imagined past where sexual and gender variance was suppressed and invisible. These feelings and realities have been shaped by the colonization of South Africa, apartheid, and by Christian missionarism and British imperial control of what is now KwaZulu-Natal. In addition to enabling silences and anxieties around female sexualities, these trends have contributed to homophobic and gender-based violence, and to a resulting discursive production of ‘corrective rape’ as a Black South African problem. These historical moments inform the analysis of dignified and undignified sounds and ideas to come.

In an interview in his office at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Pietermaritzburg campus, author and isiZulu professor Nakanjani Sibiya spoke with me about an old word: ungqingili.² As he uttered it, he gestured to his ear with a wince. It’s a hard word, he said. Though scholars and activists have emphasized it as derogatory (Francis and Msibi 2011: 163; Mbali 2013: 55; Zabus 2013: 2; McLean et al. 2016: 79), where, when, and how ungqingili gets a wince-inducing bite is difficult to trace, and scholars note that ingqingili men are part of a thriving and dignified working-class subculture (Edwards and Epprecht 2020). On the one hand, the sexual and gender non-conforming people the word is attached to in KZN societies – even though they experience sites and moments of indifference, acceptance, and even celebration – have faced significant stigma and oppression. On the other hand, LGBTI people in KZN at times seem to be reviled less than the labels they could be associated with, which emphasizes that attitudes toward persons cannot be easily summed up by attitudes toward the words that describe or evade them. Measuring stigma is thus a complex task. When Jacob Zuma boastfully claimed to have a desire to ‘knock out’ an ungqingili in a given circumstance, how much he engendered the actual person who would receive his punch as worthy of violence versus how much he reinscribed ungqingili as undignified is a lingering question.

As I unpack the signification of certain words and the ideas they invoked in Leko and others throughout the book, it is crucial for me to note here that while the history of KwaZulu-Natal, of South Africa, and of apartheid cannot be detailed in justice in such a short space, the events I discuss are of critical relevance to understanding the status quo. As morally and politically weighted concepts, stabane, lesbian, and words in between attach to certain people as they evade others, and are considered and debated by female-bodied people who engage in same-sex relationships in KZN in and outside of NGO workshop settings. This chapter also discusses those tensions and musings, Spectrum LGBTI Forum (SF) and other voices of authority that attempt to curate them, and the contradictions and empowerment of the refusal of sexual identifications. The concept of refused identifications points to relational constructions that serve as dignified descriptors of relationships, practices, and identities in coexistence with and in place of words like ‘gay,’ ‘lesbian,’ ‘bisexual,’ and, to an extent, ‘transgender.’ As a result, this chapter finishes with a discussion of gendered embodiment and queer relationalities in and outside of Black lesbian relationships in contemporary KZN.

During my first visit in 2014 to the Constitutional Court of South Africa, an impressive modern building on Johannesburg’s Constitution Hill, a guide stood before the framed photos of the country’s esteemed justices. He pointed out former Justice Edwin Cameron, a White, gay, HIV-positive man whose status as a court justice, the guide said, proved South Africa’s tolerance and openness as a country – a country which, therefore, is not homophobic. Also supposedly proven by symbolic moments such as Cameron’s appointment and the country’s progressive Constitution is a notion of South African exceptionalism, which, aside from failing to acknowledge serious shortcomings, also fails to remember that Lesotho and Ethiopia were the first African countries to explicitly support gay and lesbian rights (Epprecht 2013: 15).

However, South Africa has been a global exception when it comes to the legal proliferation of same-sex rights on paper, especially marriage rights. It is also an exception when it comes to the positive recognition of homosexuality within a nationalist project, a result historically observed by scholars as incompatible (Binnie 2004: 22). Even so, crossing issues such as gender and sexual minority rights off a laundry list of legal developments is easier said than done, and can rely discursively on a linear notion of progress that posits rights themselves as freedom. Religious studies scholar Lindiwe Mkasi for example, stressed to me that she has approached rights, ideologically, with caution.³

As we sat in a Durban café on a cool August evening in 2015, Mkasi expressed that she saw two worlds in KZN: a world which is in favor of the new (1996) Constitution and views the rights of equality enshrined therein as inherently progressive; and another world led by communitarian ancestors, elders, and healers who are disenfranchised by, and thus skeptical and even afraid of, that same celebrated document. In no uncertain terms, Mkasi said this latter world in particular was against the Constitution as a result. She claimed that members of these rural communities in KZN – though feeling excluded from the democratic processes that have taken place post-1994, and thus also ignored and disrespected – also fear reprisal for speaking up about those feelings. They worry, for example, that for vocalizing their disapproval of same-sex marriage they could be thrown in prison, like so many who defied the government during apartheid. The ‘free’ postapartheid state can thus instill a fear of persecution similar to its predecessor.

As much as debates and discussions around the linear narrative of progress marked only by rights can seem like theoretical and abstract musing, the KZN print news media has helped craft this story and lay it bare. Take the example of a 2012 cartoon by Anthony Stidolph in The Witness that accompanied an article on the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa’s proposal to the Constitutional Review Committee to remove the freedom of sexual orientation clause from the Constitution. In the cartoon, the hand of a clock is unsuccessfully hammered into ‘the past’ by a figure personifying Black African traditional leaders. The image implies a linearity that begins with the repressive past and ends with the progressive present or future, which is marked by same-sex rights. Though perhaps lacking context, the article cannot be faulted for calling the Congress’s actions a clear stance against gay and lesbian rights. It is the image rather that brings up questions about the character of past and present.

Invoking the past is powerful, even if only because of the connotation of apartheid. Because ‘tradition’ and ‘rights’ are pitted against one another, invoking traditionalism – or, as in the cartoon, traditional leaders – as a harbinger of the past triggers reminders of segregation, violence, repression, and injustice. This reminder is a common one in the ‘new’ South Africa, even if the groups and individuals being reminded, which include Black African traditional leaders for example, were on the receiving end of the injustices of apartheid. To go back is dangerous. In this limited narrative, anything before the ushering in of ‘freedom’ in 1994 can easily become seen as its antithesis. Invoking the less recent past, whether pre-colonial or pre-apartheid, thus serves as a similar tool because of the inherent ‘good’ of legal infrastructure like the 1996 Constitution. Histories of competing sexual moralities in KZN complicate these valuations further.

National and provincial (hi)stories of sexuality

The colonization of South Africa by the Portuguese, British, and Dutch from the 15th to the 20th century remains both visible and very real. The exercise of colonial authority in South Africa, as elsewhere, relied on the production and poetics of contrast (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009: 26). In terms of race, gender, and sexuality, which intersect therein, colonization also functioned through the binary construction of the other (Gunkel 2010: 34–35). This binary construction not only helped produce ‘Blackness’ and ‘Whiteness’, sexual normalcy and deviance, but also the ‘lowly,’ ‘feminine’ African and the ‘virulent,’ ‘masculine’ Dutch Afrikaner (Graham 2012: 37). Colonization is characterized in a more material sense by slavery and segregation under rule by the Afrikaners, where ownership and separation were maintained through violence (Thompson 2001: 42).

However, as multiracial communities developed and citizens of European descent became ‘Africanized,’ the seeds of apartheid – the system named after the Afrikaans word for ‘apartness’ – were sown. A social engineering was put in place to differentiate racial groups: separate and unequal education; and jobs created for White people to keep them economically above Black people. Once the White-led National Party came to power in 1948 as a result of an election that only allowed White people to vote, segregation measures increased to control the ‘native problem’ of Black people moving into cities (Durrheim et al. 2011: 2–3). This is also how my older White landlord described the same process in 2015 while we were discussing traffic in central Pietermaritzburg as he, in an image queerly reminiscent of Stidolph’s cartoon, hammered away at the leg of my bed frame.

Though many townships have seen growth and revival, and there are wealthy residents who choose to remain in townships (for example in parts of Soweto just outside Johannesburg), the legacy of residential segregation remains. The separation of ‘White,’ ‘African,’ ‘Indian,’ and ‘Coloured’ people resulted in the displacement of 3.5 million people between 1960 and 1983 (Durrheim et al. 2011: 4).⁴ The urban Black population in particular who were forced into the overcrowded township housing isolated from the metropolitan centers often remain in poor living conditions, in many cases poorer than when they arrived, with high rates of unemployment and violence. Even in the postapartheid era, the “restrictive macroeconomic conditions and neoliberal microeconomic policies” that led to these trends meant that, in the early 2000s, South Africa saw more protests in one year than any other country in the world (Bond 2008: 407). Alongside this tension, the violence that characterized apartheid, both civilian and state-perpetuated, had not been radically reduced once democracy was ushered in, and race became the “social and psychological reality through which repression and violence functioned” (Harris et al. 2004: 3).

Colonialism, domination, and racial segregation all cause reimaginings and reconfigurations of power (Kim-Puri 2005: 153). When Nelson Mandela came to power in the 1990s, the new South Africa was one where discrimination would be illegal, but policy could not erase the history of apartheid or remedy the subjectivities it produced. The idea that race continues to “shape identity and interactions – violent or not – within the present” was not openly and collectively recognized (Harris et al. 2004: 3). All of this has led to the state of modern-day South Africa, where an “intimate relationship between violence, identity and social control” has been created (2004: 63). Violence is not only commonplace, as it is in many other societies; it is also often seen by communities as a necessary form of enforcement of a moral social code. There is mass public support for vigilante justice and, though the new democratic government has outlawed it, corporal punishment (2004: 63). It is an undeniable reality that apartheid legitimized and encouraged violence that became embedded in South African society. The deep-rooted acceptance of the reality of violence and its function as a tool to shape society has many manifestations, and arguably one of the most pressing is the homophobic and gender-based sexual violence described by the term ‘corrective rape.’

Corrective rape is both implicitly and explicitly constituted by the facet of ‘correction’: the idea that the rape of lesbians in particular – but also of gay men, trans women and men, and those who do not conform to norms of gender and sexuality more broadly – is a violent tactic intended to ‘cure’ them of their ‘homosexuality’ and non-conformity. While there is certainly a link...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Theorizing un/dignified sounds in the postapartheid landscape
• 2. Performance, everyday labors, and world-making
• 3. Acting straight and acting straight: (De)queering performativity
• 4. Language, subversion, and dignified sounds: The making and unmaking of wor(l)ds
• 5. Sex after discourse, life after queer
• Index