THE NORMAL HOMOSEXUAL IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA: NEW QUEER GEOGRAPHIES by NATALIE OSWIN B.A., The University of Toronto, 1997 M.A., Dalhousie University, 1999 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Geography) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA April 2005 © Natalie Oswin, 2005 11 ABSTRACT In the United States, from whence much of Euroamerican queer theorizing stems, the radical heritage of the gay and lesbian movement has been dealt a serious blow by the emergence of a "new gay politics" that aims simply to secure a place at the table for the "good gay" citizen. Thus a line between the normal and the queer has been conceptually entrenched. The maintenance of such a binary is problematic because it betrays the underpinnings of queer theory. It also limits the ways in which we understand queer normalizations as they have taken place in various contexts around the globe over the last decade. There is a worldwide (though sporadic and diffuse) trend towards greater recognition of human rights for sexual minorities at the national scale. Further, the purported economic benefits of gay-friendliness have given rise to official pink tourism marketing strategies. This thesis examines the validity of the queer-normal divide outside the heated context of the United States by considering the cultural politics of homosexuality in South Africa. In 1996, South Africa became the first country in the world to constitutionally affirm homosexuals' rights. Since then, the state has made gay-friendliness a central facet of tourism marketing strategies at both the local and national scales. It is thus officially normal to be queer in post-apartheid South Africa. Utilizing archival and qualitative methods, I have examined expressions of gay and lesbian culture and politics in the country and found neither the straightforward appropriation of queerness by the state or market nor a resistant queer politics outside their purview. Queer theorists within and beyond geography are used to theorizing from a position of exclusion just as scholars engaged in feminist and anti-racist studies are. But since the queer and the normal coexist in South Africa, I conclude that the tendency to dismiss spaces of inclusion as inconsequential sites of study renders our analyses of the nature and extent of space available to identity politics struggles partial. As such, I suggest that those working on geographies of sexualities might usefully explore the notion of a queer geopolitics. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Table of Contents iii List of Figures v Preface vi Acknowledgements ix CHAPTER I Whither Queerness? 1 Occupying excluded space 2 The "good gay" citizen and the demise of a movement 6 "Bad queers" stake their claim 14 The new queer geopolitics 18 Taking the normal-queer elsewhere 27 Conclusion 33 CHAPTER II Normalization and anxious queer knowledge production 35 Queer value vs. Queer values 38 Homomasculinity as stereotype and scapegoat 46 The postcolonial alibi 54 Beyond the coalition 67 Sexual identities and actually existing queer globalizations 69 CHAPTER III Exclusion in "gay Cape Town" 75 Optical Exclusions 78 "Gay Cape Town" 80 Resistance and African homosexualities 93 Re-site-ing African queerness, or, the modern queer in a neoliberal age 97 A queer commodity 106 CHAPTER IV Being normal in a queer globalized nation-state: Homosexuality and the re-constitution of post-apartheid South Africa 108 The queer threat and the demise of the (heteronormative) nation-state 109 Sexual orientation and South Africa's Equality Clause 112 Performing a strange new South Africa 116 Queer theory and the new Queer Nation 130 Globalization goes queer 132 Re-constituted South Africa as a queer globalization 137 From appropriation to the queer globalized nation-state 143 CHAPTER V Imagining a gay and lesbian movement: Class, community and the spaces of politics 149 A note on narrative method 151 Three introductions to the story of the NCGLE 152 Identity as "merely cultural"?: A tale of two theorists 160 Making rights matter 164 History and the space between apartheid and its post 170 Envisioning Pride and the "poor, black gay or lesbian" 171 Disciplining radical democracy 187 Beyond the sanctity of culture 193 Post-colonizing the "merely cultural" 196 CHAPTER VIA conclusion and a coda 200 1. Conclusion: Towards an understanding of the complicit queer 200 Against the disciplining of radicality 201 Lifting the strictures on queer space 205 2. Coda: Other everyday queer geographies 209 Works Cited 217 V LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1 Volvo ad 9 Figure 1.2 Coors ad 9 Figure 3.1 Cartoon by Chip Snaddon. Cape Argus, December 2001 .87 Figure 4.1 ANC campaign poster, 1994 117 Figure 4.2 Democratic Party campaign poster, 1994 118 Figure 4.3 Cartoon by Dov Fedler. The Star (Johannesburg), 29 August 1995 128 Figure 4.4 Cartoon by Jonathan Shapiro. The Sowetan (Johannesburg), 30 August 1995 130 Figure 5.1 Cartoon by Jonathan Shapiro. The Sowetan (Johannesburg), 06 February 1998 154 vi PREFACE The personal lives of researchers often play a serendipitous role in their choice of research topics. My selection of an object of study for my doctoral wOrk is a case in point! As a young, queer-identified undergraduate, I participated in a study abroad course in Zimbabwe in 1995. It so happened that my tenure there coincided with the first forays into the public realm of the country's only gay and lesbian organization (Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe, or GALZ) and, in response, the beginnings of what has become a long-standing anti-gay campaign by the still-reigning Zimbabwean head of state Robert Mugabe. At the same time, I learned of a very different situation unfolding next door in South Africa as that nation was then debating the inclusion of "sexual orientation" in its new constitution's Equality Clause. Thus my interest in gay and lesbian politics in southern Africa was born. And it was an interest that stayed with me until it came time to decide on a research project as a postgraduate several years later. At that point, I had also become intrigued by queer theory's recent preoccupation with the apparent normalization and mainstreaming of homosexuality in the United States. Thus an interest in exploring the way in which queer normalization played out in a "non-western" context was born. When formulating the shape that this project would take, I engaged in close readings of the literature on both queer normalization and queer globalization and these explorations led me to set out on a search for findings along particular lines. In relation to the former literature, it seemed to me that the firm binary being drawn between the normal and the queer precluded the likelihood of re-appropriation. And the latter literature's emphasis on the resilience of "traditional" and/ or "hybridized" same-sex expressions of identity beyond the west led me to hope that I might find a subversive Vll South African cultural politics even though homosexuality is officially normal there. So I set out with the intention of conducting in-depth ethnographic studies of some normalized post-apartheid queer spaces to look for evidence of a still subversive queer politics under the sheen of normalcy. But the results of such studies are not what the chapters that follow convey. Rather, what they illuminate are the reasons why I now know that my original research plan was a crucially flawed one and what this means for queer studies in the face of homosexuality's normalization. Having struck out from Vancouver to South Africa looking to uncover another reality of a gay and lesbian politics gone mainstream, another reality that might resurrect . our faith in the subversive power of queering, I have not returned with lessons about this "other" place. Instead, what I offer in this work is a view from South Africa. And less obviously, though equally directly, I offer a view from Singapore, a place to which I first went on my way to Cape Town, returned to between trips to South Africa and in which I currently reside. My initial travels between South Africa and Singapore made me aware that there is a new geopolitics of homosexuality. This statement is elaborated at length in chapter 1. But suffice to say here that while queer studies has been primarily concerned with the US context, a context in which claims to normalcy emanating within gay and lesbian circles have largely fallen on deaf ears within the political sphere, many other nation-states around the globe have officially embraced homosexuals through various modes of political and economic enfranchisement. It may seem strange that I came upon this insight only after I left Canada as it is indeed one of these officially tolerant nation-states. But while living in Canada, though I had frequently come across its citation along with Vlll European states such as the Netherlands and Belgium as gay-friendly, I had not realized the scope of change globally. In tacking back and forth between Singapore, South Africa and occasionally Canada, it became clear that the dynamics of official tolerance towards homosexuals was being played out in very different ways in each of these states. It also became clear that reliance upon the terms of the normalization debates raging within Anglo-American queer theory did not adequately equip me to study these developments. Whereas a line between appropriation and resistance is commonly drawn within literature addressing the normalization of homosexuality, it began to seem to me that this divide did not fit. In the chapters that follow, my aim therefore is to queer queer theory.