scholarly journals Expanding African Queer Visual Activism Within and Beyond the Continent

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jazmin Maco
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Distinct Difference ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Same Sex Marriage ◽  
National Policies ◽  
Sociopolitical Context

This article examines the origin of the term “visual activism” in the context of post-independence South Africa, and further reflects on its development in response to anti-gay legislation in contemporary Nigeria and Uganda. The emergence of an explicitly queer strain of visual activism on the continent was sanctioned by South Africa’s pro-gay Constitution and propagated by the works of photographer Zanele Muholi. Whereas South Africa’s sociopolitical context has permitted the expression of queer visual activism through forms of photography and documentary media in Nigeria and Uganda, this expression has been routinely monitored and suppressed by such policies as the Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Bill (SSMPA) and the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, respectively. This study specifically references the works of South African Muholi in conversation with those of Nigerian-American Adejoke Tugbiyele and Ugandan native Leilah Babirye as a means to articulate how these punitive national policies have forced contemporary queer visual activists to adopt expressive rather than representational forms of visual protest. This paper identifies a distinct difference in epistemological origin, aesthetic composition, and formal materiality across the practices of Muholi, Tugbiyele, and Babirye in order to explore the multiplicity of the genre as well as broaden conventional conceptions of African queer visual activism.

scholarly journals Something old, something new: Historicizing same-sex marriage within ongoing struggles over African marriage in South Africa

Sexualities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 1092-1108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W Yarbrough
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Same Sex Marriage ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
Depth Interviews

This article examines contemporary struggles over same-sex marriage in the daily lives of black lesbian- and gay-identified South Africans. Based primarily on 21 in-depth interviews with such South Africans drawn from a larger project on post-apartheid South African marriage, the author argues that their current struggles for relationship recognition share much in common with contemporaneous struggles of their heterosexual counterparts, and that these commonalities reflect ongoing tensions between more extended-family and more dyadic understandings of African marriage. The increasing influence of dyadic understandings of marriage, and of associated ideals of romantic love, has helped inspire same-sex marriage claims and, in many cases, facilitate their acceptance. At the same time, continuing contestation over such understandings helps drive instances of opposition.

scholarly journals Something Old, Something New: Historicizing Same-Sex Marriage within Ongoing Struggles over African Marriage in South Africa

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. Yarbrough
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Same Sex Marriage ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
Depth Interviews

This paper examines contemporary struggles over same-sex marriage in the daily lives of black lesbian- and gay-identified South Africans. Based primarily on 21 in-depth interviews with such South Africans drawn from a larger project on post-apartheid South African marriage, I argue that their current struggles for relationship recognition share much in common with contemporaneous struggles of their heterosexual counterparts, and that these commonalities reflect ongoing tensions between more extended-family and more dyadic understandings of African marriage. The increasing influence of dyadic understandings of marriage, and of associated ideals of romantic love, has helped inspire same-sex marriage claims and, in many cases, facilitate their acceptance. At the same time, continuing contestation over such understandings helps drive instances of opposition.

Attitudes and beliefs about homosexuality and same-sex marriage among a sample of South African students

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 801-804 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelvin Mwaba
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Legal Protection ◽  
Attitudes And Beliefs ◽  
Western Cape ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
African Students ◽  
Same Sex Marriage ◽  
The Right

With the enactment of the Civil Unions Bill in 2006, South Africa became the fifth country in the world, and the first in Africa, to legalize same-sex marriage. While supporters of the bill hailed the decision as signaling the end of discrimination against homosexual couples, critics slammed it as undermining traditional marriage between a man and woman. The attitudes and beliefs of a sample of South African students regarding homosexuality and same-sex marriage were investigated. A survey was conducted among a sample of 150 undergraduate students at a predominantly black university in the Western Cape. Results showed that 71% viewed same-sex marriages as strange and supported religious groups opposed to such marriages. Close to 40% supported discrimination against homosexuals with 46% indicating that they should be denied the right to adopt children. It is concluded that, despite having legal protection, public acceptance of homosexuals and same-sex marriage may be quite limited in South Africa.

Opera and the South African Political

2019 ◽  
pp. 289-311
Author(s):  
Christopher Ballantine
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Singing Voice ◽  
The South ◽  
Sociopolitical Context ◽  
Creating Meaning ◽  
Empirical Means

Christopher Ballantine’s focus is on timbre, in particular the timbre of the singing voice, and how this combines with the imagination to create meaning. His investigation is largely philosophical; but the growth in popularity of opera in post-apartheid South Africa provides empirical means for Ballantine to indicate this powerful but analytically neglected way of creating meaning in the performance of music. His case study shows how timbre can produce musical experiences that have a particular, and often surprising, resonance. Through interviews with leading figures in South African opera, Ballantine demonstrates that timbre is a vital wellspring of imagined meaning; it should especially be seen thus if we seek to understand the singing voice in a sociopolitical context such as that of South Africa during and after apartheid.

“Freedom through this strange kind of love”: Impersonal be(com)ing and Barbara Adair’s In Tangier We Killed the Blue Parrot

2019 ◽  
pp. 002198941986942
Author(s):  
Yuan-Chih Yen
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Same Sex

Barbara Adair’s first novel In Tangier We Killed the Blue Parrot, published in South Africa in 2004, draws on the American writers Paul and Jane Bowles’s time in Tangier, Morocco, and fictionalizes their struggles to write as well as their efforts to love, not only each other but also their same-sex Moroccan lovers. In this article, I take seriously the notion of impersonal intimacy as articulated by Leo Bersani to explore the potentialities of realizing and sustaining an indeterminate in-between space of be(com)ing that In Tangier articulates. I further suggest in this article that the impersonal be(com)ing opened by In Tangier offers a response to the obsession with known and knowable categories of identification that Ashraf Jamal provocatively diagnosed over a decade ago as the predicament in South African cultural production and reception as well as his insistence on “rethink[ing] the human in South Africa and how, as a constitutive part of the process, [to] restore the capacity for love” (2005: 20).

scholarly journals Making Marital Status in South Africa, Past and Present

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. Yarbrough
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Marital Status ◽  
General Public ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Same Sex Marriage

This essay written for the general public uses my ethnographic research on customary African marriage and same-sex marriage in South Africa to argue that marital status is best understood not as a static category but as the ongoing production of layered social processes.

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