“Our Queer Mandela:” Simon Nkoli, the Archive, and the Uses of an African Queer Icon

• In Event: The Global South is Already Queer: Transnational Queer Dialogues

Abstract

In this presentation, I explore the making and uses of the late Simon Nkoli, the renowned anti-apartheid, queer rights, and AIDS activist, as a uniquely South African and transnational queer paragon. I analyze how as a symbol, Nkoli functions both as exception to, and figure of, homophobic erasures of African queer histories, performances, bodies, and subjectivities in South Africa and beyond. I examine how in traveling within a matrix of hyper-visibility and invisibility, the iconography of Simon Nkoli moves with and against normative representations of African masculinist resistance popularly constructed in the public imagination of South African nation and the West.

Presenter

• Z’étoile Imma, University of Notre Dame