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Locating Sexual Rights in the Anti-apartheid Movement: Simon Nkoli and the Making of Post-apartheid Protest Theatre
Abstract
While the anti-apartheid movement was in many ways one of the moral flagbearers of the global human rights project of the 1980s, its initial heteronormative impulses point to gaps in its conceptualisation of rights. This article offers a close reading of Robert Colman's Your Loving Simon (2003), a stage drama that examines the contested place of sexuality within discourses of the liberation movement. The play focuses on the imprisonment of Simon Nkoli, a leading gay rights and anti-apartheid activist. Through an analysis of Colman's drama, this article reflects on the anti-apartheid movement's shift towards a more inclusive understanding of human rights that recognises the overlaps between racism and heteronormativity. Throughout the study, however, the analysis returns to the politics of representation, problematising Colman's use of an apartheid-era protest theatre aesthetic in a post-apartheid context. The article argues that the play appears to be simultaneously progressive and regressive: while its content reintroduces into circulation a largely forgotten history, its literary aesthetic harks back to a strategic essentialism that seems out of place in post-apartheid literature.
... There also existed significant overlap between the state's fixation on white homosexuality, their denial of queer African identity, and the perception held in, for example, certain quarters of African nationalist and anti-apartheid movements that homosexuality was 'un-African' -a pernicious but erroneous notion introduced to the continent via colonial expansion and that still holds sway and informs discriminatory social attitudes and legislation (and exacerbated violence against queer Africans) in some nation-states on the continent (Carolin, 2018;Epprecht, 2004;Wahab, 2016). The circumstances leading up to and surrounding the treason trial of the anti-apartheid and AIDS activist Simon Nkoli, an African gay man, are exemplary in this regard. ...
Representations of black-white homoeroticism and sensuality between men of colour in apartheid-era male nude photography aimed at white gay men, which, in South Africa, were exclusive to selected titles published by Alternative Books (AB) (1981-1991), are remarkable yet neglected in queer African studies. In this article, I explore how sexual apartheid was respectively maintained and transgressed in the historical reception of such photographs by two radically different readerships: that is, by censors involved in pro-scribing homoerotic commodities, and by AB's intended audiences. Drawing from historical censorship reports on AB's titles, I propose that the inconsistent treatment of photographs from these publications according to the racial categories of the men depicted is a particularly revealing iteration of selective homophobia and 'offi-cial' perceptions of homosexuality during apartheid. Considering, then, that AB's titles anticipated a historical minority readership comprised of queer insiders rather than homophobic outsiders, I make the case for a corrective by 'outing' the queer and anti-racist potential of such diverse homoerotic images, which rendered intelligible possibilities for intimacy repressed elsewhere in consumer markets that catered to predominantly white gay audiences and that were, in a sense, complicit with the state's whitewashing of male homosexual identity and desire. ARTICLE HISTORY
Was geschieht, wenn das binäre Geschlechtermodell irritiert wird, also die gesellschaftlich etablierte Unterscheidung zwischen Mann und Frau nicht greift? Wird geschlechtliche Ambiguität toleriert oder werden die Unterscheidung und die Unterscheidbarkeit erzwungen? Die Beiträger*innen besprechen dazu Fallanalysen aus dem Zeitraum vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Aus unterschiedlichen Fachperspektiven zeigen sie auf, wie Ambiguität eine epistemische Offenheit generiert, deren Auflösung sich kulturabhängig und epochenübergreifend verschieden gestaltet - von einer Bereicherung und Etablierung neuer Werte bis zu Zurückweisung und Widerstand.
Was geschieht, wenn das binäre Geschlechtermodell irritiert wird, also die gesellschaftlich etablierte Unterscheidung zwischen Mann und Frau nicht greift? Wird geschlechtliche Ambiguität toleriert oder werden die Unterscheidung und die Unterscheidbarkeit erzwungen? Die Beiträger*innen besprechen dazu Fallanalysen aus dem Zeitraum vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Aus unterschiedlichen Fachperspektiven zeigen sie auf, wie Ambiguität eine epistemische Offenheit generiert, deren Auflösung sich kulturabhängig und epochenübergreifend verschieden gestaltet - von einer Bereicherung und Etablierung neuer Werte bis zu Zurückweisung und Widerstand.
This article explores the concept of queer utopia, drawing from Muñoz’s writings on queer futurity, from Simon Nkoli’s embodiment of the struggle for queer utopia through organising with GLOW and in spaces of militant joy like Pride marches, and from modern queer Black feminist interpretations of nightlife spaces in Johannesburg. Through a close reading of a queer Black nightlife event in 2021 called Queertopia, this article argues that queer Black feminists are embodying queer utopia through nightlife, even in the midst of the manifold crises of COVID-19 and late-stage racial capitalism and cisheterophobia. By linking practices of healing and nightlife in these events to resistance to racial capitalism and cisheterophobia, and particularly lifting up queer Black people involved in activism and social movement and cultural organising work, these parties continue the lineage of Simon Nkoli’s work towards dignity and joy. They exist as experiments in queer Black feminist practice, particularly through growing bonds and emphasising relationality between organisers and attendees of these parties, and focusing on healing, dancing, and dreaming in collective space. This article ultimately argues that these nightlife spaces are practices, in the legacy of Nkoli’s activism and analysis, of embodying resistance and queer Black visibility, and ultimately of imagining utopias where queer Black people can fully thrive.
Simon Nkoli’s life history shows the many issues he championed, including tenants’ rights, anti-apartheid, HIV/Aids activism, and gay and lesbian rights. The Simon Nkoli archival collection housed at the Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action (GALA) includes records of this important historical figure shown during public moments of queer activism and in some private settings. In the observed public moments, Nkoli is seen wearing clothes marked by clear messaging of queer visibility. The private moments show Nkoli using clothes to break socially constructed gender categories laid upon items of dress. This article marries style narratives, gender and queer theories to argue that Nkoli’s clothed and styled body is his visual methodology to support his queer visibility project, expressed through other modes, namely social movements, writings, speeches, and interviews. Through the gender- and queer-infused style narratives in my analysis, I find that Nkoli’s use of t-shirts and sleeveless t-shirts align with the global queer sloganeering of the 1980s. His use of what I call friskoto (pinafore in Sesotho) functions as a visual mode to disrupt gender binaries. Nkoli’s use of clothing and styling shows how he evolves the style narrative concept by infusing queerness as an additional element to the autobiography of the self. However, beyond his inscription of queerness through clothing and styling, Nkoli also demonstrates the potential of the clothed and styled body as a form of queer activism.
Tracing the figure of the archive, this article examines the ways in which official sites of memorialisation either erase or radically desexualise the histories of sexual minorities. Furthermore, the article examines the epistemological status of fiction as an alternative archive of marginalised voices and experiences. I focus particularly on Gerald Kraak's novel Ice in the Lungs (2006) to reveal the importance of literature in reinscribing a gay cultural history into discourses of the apartheid era. The text does this in a way that celebrates eroticism and resists desexualising or sanitising representational impulses. The novel speaks to the silences in official sites of history-making in South Africa and reveals the complex intersections of sex and struggle in the antiapartheid movement. The article also considers how Kraak's novel interro-gates the current idealisation of the liberation movement by exposing the homo-prejudice that characterised large parts of it. While the centrality of race in the ideological machinations of the apartheid regime is widely acknowledged, Kraak's novel attests to the need to explore the palimpsest of oppressive mechanisms exercised not only by the state but by those within the liberation movement itself.
There is a strong feminist scholarship that examines the fraught relationship between feminism and nationalism. The African National Congress (ANC) stands out as a nationalist movement that has gone further than most in transcending the tendency of nationalist organisations to reinforce women's status as secondary political subjects. Yet there has been little analytical attention to how the ANC operates as a political organisation. This article addresses this issue from the perspective of the ANC in exile and women active within it. Drawing on archival research and interviews, the article pays close attention to the workings of the ANC as a political organisation. It excavates the debates on feminism and autonomy within the ANC, and seeks to understand how feminist demands impacted on processes of organisational democratisation. The article identifies three categories of influence on the increasing assertion of women's interests within the ANC. The first relates to internal organisational experiences, and the second to the theoretical debates that flowed from attempts to find a role for women in national liberation. The third influence was ANC women's exposure to, and interaction with, international feminist debates and with women's organisations in post-independence African countries. These influences not only helped re-shape the ANC as a political organisation but also the nature of democracy instituted after the collapse of the apartheid system.
In this condensed version of her book, Sedgwick reflects about the "closet" as a regime of regulation of gay and lesbian lives that is also important to heterosexuals since it guarantees their privileges. Sedgwick affirms the "closet", or the "open secret", has been basic to lesbian/gay life for the last century even after Stonewall (1969). She also states that this regime - with its contradictory and constraining rules and limits about privacy and disclosure, public and private, knowledge and ignorance has served to shape the way in which many questions about values and epistemology were comprehended in the Western Society as a whole.
Following the socio-political change in South Africa after the democratic elections of 1994 the relationship between the state and the arts changed markedly. Whereas, under apartheid, the white population groups benefited greatly from government support for the primarily Eurocentric cultural heritage and the arts, the new South Africa recognised a multi-cultural and multi-lingual population whose every human right was protected under the new Constitution. Under the new government priorities shifted and this resulted in a transformation of the state-subsidised Performing Arts Councils and generally in the financial dynamics of the arts and culture sector. During the first decade of democracy an arts festival circuit emerged which provided opportunities for specific population groups to celebrate their cultural heritage and also for new independent theatre-makers to enter the industry. After the demise of apartheid there was no longer a market for the protest theatre that had become a hallmark of much South African performing arts in the 1970s and 80s and the creative artists had to discover new areas of focus and find alternative creative stimuli. This dissertation identifies and examines a number of major trends that emerged in the professional theatre in post-apartheid South Africa during the first decade of its new democracy. Thesis (DPhil (Dept. of Drama.Centre for Theatre Research))--University of Stellenbosch, 2008.
âCompelling, timely, and provocative. The writing is sleek and exhilarating. It doesnât waste time telling us what it will do or what it has just doneâit just does it.â âDon Kulick, Professor of Anthropology, New York University How we can talk about sex and risk in the age of barebackingâor condomless sexâwithout invoking the usual bogus and punitive clichés about gay menâs alleged low self-esteem, lack of self-control, and other psychological âdeficitsâ? Are there queer alternatives to psychology for thinking about the inner life of homosexuality? What Do Gay Men Want? explores some of the possibilities. Unlike most writers on the topic of gay men and risky sex, David Halperin liberates gay male subjectivity from psychology, demonstrating the insidious ways in which psychologyâs defining opposition between the normal and the pathological subjects homosexuality to medical reasoning and revives a whole set of unexamined moral assumptions about âgoodâ sex and âbadâ sex. In particular, Halperin champions neglected traditions of queer thought, including both literary and popular discourses, by drawing on the work of well-known figures like Jean Genet and neglected ones like Marcel Jouhandeau. He shows how the long history of of gay menâs uses of âabjectionâ can offer an alternative, nonmoralistic model for thinking about gay male subjectivity, something which is urgently needed in the age of barebacking. Anyone searching for nondisciplinary ways to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS among gay menâor interested in new modes of thinking about gay male subjectivityâshould read this book. David M. Halperin is W. H. Auden Collegiate Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality, Professor of English, Professor of Womenâs Studies, Professor of Comparative Literature, and Adjunct Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan.
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