Institutionalised homosexuality in South Africa: queering same-sex desire

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation looks at South African literary and cultural representations of male homosexual desire from 1948 to 2013. It employs Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics/biopower and Judith Butler's heterosexual matrix amongst others to engage with South African literary and cultural representations of male homosexuality. The country is seen to associate homosexuality with a similar sense of pathology as was the trend in the colonial centre. Later, as the continent comes to rely less on Western frameworks of self-definition there is an indigenisation of these Western identities as they rub up against conservative patriarchy and homophobia. I analyse texts set in the various institutions that form/ed the foundation of the modern capitalist state that is South Africa. They reflect my argument that in a society geared at institutionalising (white) heteronormativity there was/is still space for a queering of self and other which in turn allows moments of intimacy and transgressive dissidence. The homosexual man and his interplay with the heteronormative family, army, schools and prisons reflect the racist and gendered nature of South African society and the problematic way in which femininity has become conflated with a state of subjection. Similarly, homosexuality is seen to become a generative site where performances of masculinity and gender can be queered.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University