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The initial popular reception of Damon Galgut's The Promise (2021) has overlooked issues of gender in the text, favouring instead the more narrow allegorical readings of race. In response to this, this article emphasises the novel's... more
The initial popular reception of Damon Galgut's The Promise (2021) has overlooked issues of gender in the text, favouring instead the more narrow allegorical readings of race. In response to this, this article emphasises the novel's engagement with the distinctly gendered nature of the transition from apartheid, focusing on the representation of white masculinities in the text. This article raises concerns about how these masculinities are depicted. Through close engagement with the text's systematic introduction and disavowal of the constitutive forces of apartheid's patriarchies-including fatherhood, Christianity, and the security state-this article argues that the novel's engagement with white masculinities is one of negation; it offers a narrative mode in which white masculinities are rendered sterile, rewritten in the wellworn register of an anti-apartheid moral certitude that depends on tired tropes. While the novel attempts an important decentring of white masculinities, its outlook is ultimately bleak as white masculinities are shown to lack depth, resulting in their power in the present being curiously absented in an act of textual erasure.
This article traces both the centrality and fragility of the figure of the heterosexual white male to the moral and ideological core of the apartheid regime. Through a comparative reading of Zakes Mda's The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) and... more
This article traces both the centrality and fragility of the figure of the heterosexual white male to the moral and ideological core of the apartheid regime. Through a comparative reading of Zakes Mda's The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) and Gerald Kraak's Ice in the Lungs (2006), the article examines how apartheid's Immorality Act functioned as the legislative mechanism to produce and police heteronormative whiteness. The randomness and unpredictability of sexual desire in both historical novels expose the tenuousness of this idealised heteronormative whiteness that lay at the centre of the apartheid project. Situated within the moral panic and political turmoil of the 1970s, the novels identify sex as a powerful lens through which to read the history of apartheid. While Mda's satirical novel focuses on transgressive interracial sexual desire, Kraak's realist text explores same-sex desire and intimacy. My reading of the two novels engages with the political history of apartheid's sexual policing and insists on the inextricable entanglement of its heteronormative and racial supremacist provisions. The traditional ideological centrality of the vulnerable white woman is displaced in the novels by white men whose transgressive sexual desires for black women (in Mda's novel) and other white men (in Kraak's) refuse the certainty and naturalness of heteronormative whiteness.
In this article, I use 'Gay Pages' as a local archive of cultural meaning to think about the relationship between race, sexuality, and identity in a post-apartheid context. Through an analysis of the quarterly magazine series, I focus on... more
In this article, I use 'Gay Pages' as a local archive of cultural meaning to think about the relationship between race, sexuality, and identity in a post-apartheid context. Through an analysis of the quarterly magazine series, I focus on how an invisible and unacknowledged whiteness marks privileged ways of both speaking and being heard. I argue that whiteness continues to function as the custodian of the normative in much of South Africa’s public discourse – a post-apartheid racial politics with implications that exceed this particular cultural text. I focus on editions of the magazine published between 2012 and 2016 in order to identify the continuities in normative racial and gendered power. The analysis extends beyond a consideration of the magazine’s erasure of non-white bodies and takes the form of a close reading of the assumptions and racial histories that underpin a number of articles and editorials. My analysis of the magazine centres on several key themes including the interplay between local ideas and transnational cultural flows; the production and circulation of an assimilationist aesthetic; revisionist histories of the past; and representations of pride marches.
[Click link for free download]: This article focuses on a transition-era short story by Achmat Dangor, “Mama & Kid Freedom” (1995), which has thus far been wholly overlooked by literary scholars. The story depicts a political dystopia... more
[Click link for free download]: This article focuses on a transition-era short story by Achmat Dangor, “Mama & Kid Freedom” (1995), which has thus far been wholly overlooked by literary scholars. The story depicts a political dystopia that is characterised by assassinations, arbitrary violence, and the mass incarceration of those deemed to be homosexual. There are clear overlaps between the eponymous character Mama and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. The story reproduces the binary tropes that surround Madikizela-Mandela and her then estranged husband, Nelson Mandela: whereas he is cast as the hero of the narrative of nation-building, she is cast as its villain. In this article, I argue that Dangor weaves a story that pulls together two particularly salient transition-era political discourses: Madikizela-Mandela as a homophobic and violent woman, and sexual rights as a bellwether of the country’s project of democratic modernity. The story evidences a homonationalist logic in which the recognition or non-recognition of sexual rights comes to be read as the axis on which postapartheid democracy and human rights depend.
In this article, we trace the transnational cultural flows that shaped the recognition of sexual rights as human rights during the transition to democracy in South Africa. Through a close reading of Beverley Ditsie and Nicky Newman’s... more
In this article, we trace the transnational cultural flows that shaped the recognition of sexual rights as human rights during the transition to democracy in South Africa. Through a close reading of Beverley Ditsie and Nicky Newman’s documentary film, Simon & I (2002), we investigate the contested history of postapartheid sexual rights in which local cultural politics overlap and intersect with transnational agents, ideologies, and affect. Ditsie and Newman’s documentary centres on the figure of Simon Nkoli, a prominent gay rights and anti-apartheid activist. The film traces the complexities, contradictions and transnational connections that produce an expanded understanding of rights as indivisible and universal. Focusing on the contesting local and transnational imaginaries in which the sexual rights regime was constituted, we resist discourses suggesting that the constitutional codification of sexual rights in South Africa was inevitable. Far from being inevitable, we argue, the recognition of gay and lesbian rights as human rights was located within the crosshairs of an uncertain and volatile historical moment.

Keyword: Simon Nkoli, Simon & I, transnational, South Africa, sexual rights, transition to democracy, gay and lesbian, gay pride, AIDS
[See website link for free download]: 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... more
[See website link for free download]: 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.
This article focuses on two recent short stories that appropriate features of the literary works of Herman Charles Bosman, one of South Africa’s most prolific short story writers. The two stories that I examine appear in different texts,... more
This article focuses on two recent short stories that appropriate features of the literary works of Herman Charles Bosman, one of South Africa’s most prolific short story writers. The two stories that I examine appear in different texts, neither of which has received sustained critical attention. Whereas Emil Rorke’s “Poisoned Grief” was published in an anthology of short stories titled Queer Africa (2013), Richard de Nooy’s untitled short story forms part of his second novel, The Big Stick (2011). The article focuses on how each story represents same-sex desire while offering different intertextual appropriations or reworkings of Bosman’s style. Though this article engages with selected scholarship on Bosman’s work, it is not a study of whether the two stories successfully mimic their literary antecedent. Rather, this article brings Rorke’s and De Nooy’s stories into dialogue, not only with one another but also with the characters, spaces, and style of Bosman’s stories. I argue that though De Nooy’s provocative and humorous story contrasts Rorke’s subtle and poignant depiction of same-sex love and intimacy, both stories privilege desire over sexual identity, and offer us different ways of thinking about same-sex sexualities.
Link to article: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1013929X.2016.1170500 It is widely accepted that South African literature has undergone considerable thematic and stylistic shifts since the transitional decade of the 1990s.... more
Link to article: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1013929X.2016.1170500

It is widely accepted that South African literature has undergone considerable thematic and stylistic shifts since the transitional decade of the 1990s. However, literary scholarship is divided not only as to the extent of these shifts but also as to what should be emphasised when mapping their contours. In this article, I focus on two of Imraan Coovadia’s recent novels that point to a post-transitional literary landscape in South Africa. Focusing particularly on The Institute for Taxi Poetry (2012) and Tales of the Metric System (2014), I use the concept of the palimpsest to think through the internal logic of these two novels and their locatedness within the post-transitional present. In these texts, Coovadia inscribes imaginative possibilities over the histories of apartheid and the transition in a way that renders multiple narrative temporalities and discourses legible simultaneously. In particular, I focus on the way in which this post-transitional palimpsest defamiliarises apartheid and transition-era understandings of history and nation.
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... more
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.
Given the high levels of homophobia that exist in South Africa, including in its schools and universities, it is imperative that university lecturers develop integrated and transdisciplinary curriculums to educate pre-service teachers... more
Given the high levels of homophobia that exist in South Africa, including in its schools and universities, it is imperative that university lecturers develop integrated and transdisciplinary curriculums to educate pre-service teachers about sexuality and to empower them to incorporate lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI)-inclusive resources into their own classrooms. This study aimed to contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning by reflecting on how English literary studies can contribute to sexuality education. The context for this study is a specific undergraduate English module that forms part of the foundation phase and intermediate phase teacher education curriculums at the University of Johannesburg. This study is a self-reflective analysis of how the methodology of close reading, which is central to English literary studies, can be used to support sexuality education. Despite the prevalence of homophobia in South African society, when undergraduate
students in this English module (n = 356) were asked to write an essay about the representation of same-sex sexuality in a short animated film, none of them made homophobic comments. Paying particular attention to the analytical methodology of close reading, the author argues that a narrow focus on the storytelling techniques used within a narrative text –
in a way that deliberately excludes students’ personal opinions about same-sex sexualities – offers a powerful way of facilitating a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of homophobia and heteronormativity.
In this article we investigate how same-sex intimacies are represented in K. Sello Duiker’s second novel, The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001). We engage with the limitations of existing scholarship around Duiker’s work, much of which... more
In this article we investigate how same-sex intimacies are represented in K. Sello
Duiker’s second novel, The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001). We engage with the
limitations of existing scholarship around Duiker’s work, much of which tends to
exaggerate the relevance of identity politics and allegory in the novel, or which
sidelines the representations of same-sex intimacies altogether. We argue that
the novel marks an important intervention in discourses on non-heteronormative
sexualities in South African fiction as Duiker disarticulates polarized taxonomies
of sexual identities, thereby problematizing the frame of identity politics and
categories such as heterosexual and homosexual. In addition to recognizing
the fluidity of sexual desire and identity in the novel, the article also examines
how Duiker interrogates conceptual configurations of what constitutes sex and
shows how his text is critical of the way in which certain forms of intimacy have
greater discursive and symbolic currency than others. We argue further that The
Quiet Violence of Dreams is a significant novel because of the way in which it
challenges the cultural invisibility of black practitioners of same-sex intimacies
in South Africa. Finally, we examine the way in which Duiker constructs and
legitimizes public spaces of eroticized masculinity in the novel in a manner that contests the imperatives of political mobilization.
Research Interests:
Link to article: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/18125441.2013.803725 In this article, my intention is to explore the radically different ways in which same-sex sexualities are being discursively constructed in two different... more
Link to article: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/18125441.2013.803725

In this article, my intention is to explore the radically different ways in which same-sex sexualities are being discursively constructed in two different parts of Africa. The texts’ different socio-political and geographic contexts serve to complicate singular understandings of how sexuality operates and is performed on the continent. The focus is on how different narrative modes – in particular, a memoir and a novel – construct and shift particular discursive practices and signifying systems regarding same-sex sexualities. It is the distinct genres and different geographic locations of Stone's and Duiker's texts that add depth and complexity to the study, which seeks to refute claims of an essentialist African sexuality.
In this article we provide a close reading of selected poems written during creative writing workshops at a drug rehabilitation centre. We argue that these poems expose some of the uncertainties and complexities that characterise the... more
In this article we provide a close reading of selected poems written during creative writing workshops at a drug rehabilitation centre. We argue that these poems expose some of the uncertainties and complexities that characterise the representation of identity in experiences of addiction and recovery. We show that the speakers in these poems attempt to imagine and represent their experiences in language through a number of structuring binaries. These binaries include those between the speaker’s experiences of active addiction and recovery, and the speaker’s personal experience versus societal expectations and perceptions. Our reading of these poems is informed by the clinical context in which they were written, and our analysis reflects the bifurcation that governs this liminal space. Individual agency in these different spheres is approached in a very tentative way, and the speakers in these poems are shown to have trouble envisioning the future at the same time as their pasts appear unsettled. We argue
finally that while current discourses and vocabularies surrounding addiction seem incomplete and inadequate for the expression of some complex experiences, poetry provides a platform that accommodates ambivalence and a multiplicity of meanings.
Research Interests: