South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom

374 Pages·2012·4.942 MB·English

by  Brenna M. Munro

SOUTH AFRICA AND
THE DREAM OF LOVE TO COME
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South Africa and
the Dream of Love to Come
. . . .
Queer Sexuality and
the Struggle for Freedom
Brenna M. Munro
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Portions of the Introduction were published as “Caster Semenya: Gods and Monsters,” Safundi:
The Journal of South African and American Studies 11, no. 4 (2010): 383–96. Portions of the
Introduction and chapter 6 were published as “Queer Democracy: J. M. Coetzee and the Racial
Politics of Gay Identity in the New South Africa,” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial
Studies 10, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 209–25. Portions of chapter 6 were published as “Queer Family
Romance: Writing the ‘New’ South Africa in the 1990s,” GLQ 15, no. 3 (2009): 397–439. Portions
of chapter 7 were published as “Queer Futures: The Coming-Out Novel in South Africa,” African
Literature: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson
(Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 753–64.
Passages from Dennis Brutus, Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison
copyright Dennis Brutus. Originally published by Heinemann Educational Books in 1969.
Excerpts from Breyten Breytenbach, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist are reprinted
with permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Originally published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
in 1984.
Quotations from James Matthews, Poems from a Prison Cell were published by Realities in 2001.
Originally published in 1976.
Johann de Lange, “Soldier” (1993) is reprinted in chapter 3.
Photographs by Zanele Muholi courtesy of the artist and Michael Stevenson, Cape Town and
Johannesburg.
Copyright 2012 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Munro, Brenna M.
South Africa and the dream of love to come : queer sexuality and the struggle
for freedom.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-7768-9 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8166-7769-6 (pb)
1. South African literature (English)—20th century—History and criticism.
2. Homosexuality in literature. 3. Literature and society—South Africa—History—
20th century. 4. South Africa—Intellectual life—20th century. I. Title.
PR9359.6.M86 2012
820.9'968—dc23
2012002773
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction: The Politics of Stigma and the Making of Democracy vii
I. Fraternity and Its Anxieties
1. Perverse Institutions, Heroic Genres: Antiapartheid
Prison Writing 3
2. Gay Prison Revisions: Dramas of Conversion 47
3. Border Writing: Queering the Fraternity of Whiteness 81
II. Gender, Apartheid, and Imagined Spaces of Nation
4. City Sexualities: Richard Rive’s Queer Nostalgia 105
5. Outside the Nation: Bessie Head’s Disorientations 144
III. Writing the RainbowNation
6. Queer Family Romance: J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer 173
7. Queer Citizenship, Queer Exile: K. Sello Duiker and
Zanele Muholi 198
Conclusion: Unrequited Utopia 234
Acknowledgments 243
Notes 245
Bibliography 303
Index 329
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· INTRODUCTION ·
The Politics of Stigma and
the Making of Democracy
On Friday May 8 we adopted a constitution which forbids discrimi-
nation on the basis of sexual preference. Perhaps now loving will
be easier.
— Clive van den Berg, Men Loving (1996)
A
fter apartheid, South Africa established a celebrated new politi-
cal order that imagined the postcolonial nation as belonging equally
to the descendants of indigenous peoples, colonizing settlers, transported
slaves, indentured laborers, and immigrants — a nd it also specifically
included gays and lesbians as citizens. Its 1996 constitution was the first in
the world to ban discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation:
The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against
anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, preg-
nancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orienta-
tion, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language,
and birth.1
The question of gay rights was an element in many narratives in the
“transitional” public culture from which this constitution was forged and
with which it engaged, and thus played an integral yet often overlooked
role in producing the new imaginary of the “rainbow nation” — a phrase
that encodes the intersection of multiracialism and gay rights.2 In his
much commented-on speech at an African National Congress (ANC)
seminar in 1989, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,” Albie Sachs, the for-
mer political prisoner who was to become a Constitutional Court judge,
asked, “What are we fighting for, if not the right to express our humanity
in all of its forms?” (21).3 Gay identity was cast, in at least some quarters,
as an exemplary form that freedom might take. In the following year, in a
· vii ·
viii INTRODUCTION
speech he gave as a “straight ally” and prominent ANC figure at the first
gay rights march in Cape Town, Sachs emphasized the importance of ac-
commodating and cultivating modes of difference within a framework of
legal equality, thus using the logic of multiracialism to defend gay rights:
The question of human rights for homosexual men and women
is not just one of eliminating injustices against a section of the
community, of acknowledging fundamental human rights. It is also
about the nature of the country we are all going to live in. Until
now, people have always been told how to behave, what their rights
and duties were. Everything was prescribed. Behavior was forced,
hypocrisy was rampant, and oppression abounded. What we want
is a country where we can all live in equality as we are, with our lan-
guages, histories, tastes, beliefs, and orientations. We are entitled to
enjoy the right to be different, as far as our lifestyles and personal
choices are concerned, and to exercise our right to be the same, with
respect to our dignity and citizenship. (214–15)4
Gay rights are presented here as a key sign of the democratic values of
the “new” nation— “the nature of the country we are all going to live
in.”5 The deployment of the figure of the gay person as a symbol of South
Africa’s democratic modernity is, of course, a radical departure from the
traditional, heteronormative familial iconography of nationhood— and it
emerges from a history in which homosexuality has long been a deeply
contested idea, bound up with the reimagining of race, gender, and nation
in the context of settler colonialism.6
In order to understand how gay people became imaginable as fellow
citizens in South Africa, I begin this book by examining some key rep-
resentations of same-sex sexuality in writing from the years of escalated
struggle against apartheid, from the 1960s to the 1990s. Male homo-
sexuality began to take shape as a legible concept in South African writ-
ing in this period, often standing for the perversity of apartheid— but also
sometimes fashioned as a sign of resistance to the mores of an authoritar-
ian regime that attempted to regulate everyone’s sexuality in the name of
racial purity. Notions of female same-sex sexuality were not as caught up
in discourses of colonialism and anticolonialism— or indeed with nation-
alisms imagined through male fraternal bonds, whether white, black, or
multiracial— so that, for better or worse, female same-sex intimacies have
INTRODUCTION ix
been largely invisible in this context. However, the concepts of the “les-
bian” and the “bisexual” woman came into wider circulation in the 1980s
as those concepts circulated globally and came into complex contact with
local ideas about female same-sex sexualities. This book traces how the gay,
lesbian, or bisexual person then became a kind of stock minor character in
the pageant of nationhood in the 1990s, embodying the arrival of a radi-
cally new social order and symbolically mediating conflicts over race and
class.7 The idea of embracing gay rights made people feel modern, mag-
nanimous, and uniquely South African— at least for a while. Although I
suggest that this trope thus performed particular ideological work, I do
not mean to imply that it was always central to nation-building discourses.
Rather, it flickered on and off in public consciousness— as indeed it does
in critical commentary on South African life and letters— registering
sometimes as an urgent issue and sometimes as a ubiquitous mundanity.
Gay identity is, however, an inherently ambivalent symbol for national-
ism, because it is so deeply associated with cosmopolitan modernity, or,
to borrow Bruce Robbins’s phrase, “feeling global.”8 While “being gay” or
“being lesbian” was reimagined in the 1990s as distinctly South African,
the very “newness” that made these sexualities apt symbols for a trans-
formed nation is also easily understood as “foreign”— and, in this context,
as “un-African.” Indeed, a Western-style gay identity is often understood in
the global South through the formula “gay equals modernity equals capi-
talism,” and as South Africa’s reentrance into the global economy has not
brought about prosperity for the majority of the nation’s citizens, homo-
phobic violence has been on the rise. This book concludes, then, by mov-
ing toward the present, and I analyze how queer artists, as well as activists,
have been using their fragile new legitimacy to “speak back,” refusing to
remain mere ambassadors for the “rainbow nation,” or, conversely, to be-
come scapegoats for the perceived failures of liberation. As homosexuality
in Africa as a whole becomes increasingly caught up in the politics of glo-
balization and the AIDS epidemic, it is important that the field of African
studies attends to the vexed question of sexuality and what I call the post-
colonial politics of stigma. At the same time, the South African history I
unpack has salience for an audience beyond Africa, as we too continue to
struggle for radical democracy on queer terms in the global North.
For readers unfamiliar with modern South African history, a brief over-
view follows. Apartheid built on a colonial history of white settlement
and expansion that involved genocide, land seizure, labor exploitation,