AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	31. Sexuality and Politics in Africa
Paper ID	424
Author(s)	Gunkel, Henriette
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	Southern Africa has recently witnessed an emerging visibility in the discussion and proclamation of sexual identities which has brought not only the subject of rights but also the question of cultural authenticity and questions of gender equality to the fore in local attempts to define the post-colonial nation state. While post-apartheid South Africa became the first country in the world, that prohibited, amongst other things, discrimination on the grounds of sex, gender and sexual orientation the surrounding countries deliberately directed their policy into the other direction by excluding lesbian and gay people from citizenship rights. Despite the contradictory approaches both positions, nevertheless, recognize new identities on the basis of sexuality and in fact produce power/knowledge of sexual subjectivities as fixed categories between which one cannot slide and thus along a homosexual/heterosexual divide that serves as a regulatory function of identity. By taking into account the fact that the interpretation of rights in relation to sexuality very often focuses on or converge in gay identities, as visible for example in post-apartheid South Africa, this paper reflects on the effects of these identitarian discourses on non-normative modes of sexuality and intimacy. More specifically the paper focuses on the interviews that I have conducted in Johannesburg on ‘mummy-baby’ relationships. By focussing on ‘mummy-baby’ relationships as particular institutions of female same-sex intimacy and by contextualizing these relationships in the historical and cultural framework of sexual cultures and cultures of intimacy the paper argues that the South African history and cultures provided/provide a space which accommodates forms of female same-sex intimacy. In fact ‘mummy-baby’ relationships provide a homosocial space in which same-sex intimacy is not necessarily associated with homosexuality – and hence not penetrated by homophobia. The paper discusses the tensions between non-lesbian same-sex intimacy and metropolitan lesbianism and elaborates to what extent these forms of intimacy are in fact further marginalized by a post-apartheid constitution that seem to reinforce a homosexual/heterosexual binarized identity that every person becomes assignable to in one way or the other. In fact the paper questions the regulatory functions of identity and (western) notions of sexual subjectivities and linked to that the practice of ‘coming out’ as always a liberating moment. The paper hence pays attention to cultural and historical categories of sexualities, to normative and/or subversive forms of masculinities and femininities, and to social inclusion and exclusion on the basis of gender, sexuality and race. By doing so the paper explores the suitability of queer theory in the South African context.

Re-thinking queer theory - the politics of sexual cultures in post-apartheid South Africa