A New Twist on the “Un-African” Script: Representing Gay/Lesbian African Weddings in Democratic South Africa

• In Event: 4446 - Sexualities III: Sexual Culture and Performance

Abstract

This essay explores the evolving cultural politics of Black queerness in South Africa, using media representations of “traditional” African weddings celebrated by lesbian and gay couples two decades after the formal end of apartheid. I argue that these representations contain an emerging script that narrates the incorporation of LGBTQI people as, in effect, new arrivals into African communities. Alongside its world-leading legal framework for LGBTQI inclusion, for many years South Africa’s dominant script about Black queerness has framed it as historically and culturally “un-African.” Black LGBTQI South Africans have challenged this script in myriad ways, one of which has been to celebrate weddings that include elements understood as “traditionally” African. In this essay I explore how the broadly sympathetic coverage of two such weddings accepted the possibility that “African culture” could accommodate LGBTQI identification, but only as something “new” and “challenging” arriving to it from the outside rather than emerging from within. I argue that these stories reproduce the “un-African” script in a new, liberal democratic guise, offering inclusion to Black LGBTQI South Africans but only on fragile terms that continue to obscure their embeddedness within African histories and communities.

Author

• Michael W. Yarbrough, John Jay College (CUNY)