Grounding and sounding a descriptive queer ethnographic critique
Boundaries in contemporary South Africa - from those of invented categories of race and ethnicity to the borders of the country and its postcolonial provinces, cities, towns, townships, and villages - are highly contested. Looking out onto a hillside of Imbali, 1 would often try to find the thin line of a dirt road or a landmark that signaled the end of the vast township and the start of somewhere else. The boundaries of Imbali and neighboring Edendale were difficult for me to grasp,24 as were the borders of the individual numbered and lettered neighborhoods, or units which comprised them. Markers were easier: taverns, tuck shops, the Duzi River, and railroad tracks; but from a distance these were obscured. Friendly debates would ensue between people on steep roads, though many boundaries remained unresolved.
The boundaries of ethnography and ongoing debates of good anthropological practice remain in a similar state of unrest. In the contemporary, social and cultural anthropology25 sits uncomfortably between its violent colonial roots and its imperative of reflexive, ever-evolving critique. Whether anthropology is broken, repaired, or on the verge of being swept under the rug because its frequent problems of history, method, and voice present an irreconcilable scholarly impasse, I find Esther Newton's characterization of anthropology as a kind of permanent critique (2000: 1) to hold water, despite the discipline’s flaws. In a move toward such critique, which is descriptive, queer, and importantly ethnographic, 1 attempt to hold contemporary anthropology, and within it, myself, accountable to the problems that define it. In the remainder of this Introduction, 1 will discuss how this book theorizes ethnography and queer anthropology, followed by a discussion of methods and language, before providing a roadmap of the chapters to come.
In the context of the anthropology of sexuality, problematic historical roots reveal a violent colonial fascination with “sex and savages” (Kulick and Wilson, 1995: 3). ‘Sexuality’ has since maintained a fraught and shifting presence in anthropology since the time of Mead and Malinowski. Alongside these colonial entanglements, the study of sexuality, and in particular of same-sexualities and other forms of sexual variance, has conflicted with certain imperatives. As its own anthropological field, warranting the recognition of not only its own rich theoretical canon but also its own seat at the table in the world of rigorous research, studies of (non-normative) sexual identities and practices have been subject to the bias of their assumed depravity or unimportance (see for example Vance 1991).26 This reflects broader trends in academia, not limited to monodisciplinarity, and the differential valuation of supposed ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences, but also trends in wider culture of seeing non-heteronormative lives as less worthy of attention, respect, and protection.
Despite this difficulty in dealing with non-normative sexuality, the anthropology of the latter half of the 20th century onward has attempted to move away from the power imbalance entrenched in early ethnographic work on sex more broadly. While the wealth of important and emerging work on sexuality that is occurring in anthropology is ground-breaking, diverse, and ever-changing, do those earlier ethnographies entangled in the colonial fixation on sex have anything thematically in common with the queer anthropology of today? If what was meant by ‘sexuality’ then is both limited and incorrect, is sexuality now an all-encompassing term for anything to do with gender, the sexed body, or sexual taboo? These questions come to mind when diverse works on ’sexuality’ are lumped together, while there are striking differences between those works the term can mask. For instance, there is work broadly on sexuality in medical anthropology, in kinship studies, and in studies of sexual and gender non-conformity, all of which can overlap but sometimes may not.
An ethnographic approach to gender and sexuality requires that theorymaking is rooted in everyday lived realities.27 Giving sexuality an analytical plurality in this context, sexualit/c.v, as embodiments of desires which invoke and influence social contexts, are precarious. Looking at Black South African, female-bodied same-sexualities specifically, it is clear that ‘female’ bodies face danger in patriarchal societies uniquely (as in Vance 1984), and are unique instruments of danger to patriarchal social orders (as in Jolly et al. 2013). However, those sexualities are also precarious because bodies are discursively produced through the concept of biological sex and encoded with femaleness in different, and arguably problematic and violent, ways.
As such, rather than use precariousness to primarily imply risk, fear, delicacy, or doubt - all of which can and do emerge in different tellings elaborated on in this ethnography - I utilize a concept of precarious sexualities to emphasize an analytical and grounded concept of instability. Beyond the contestations of ideas about same-sexualities, and ‘female’ ones in particular, these embodiments of desires are themselves precarious in the sense that they are unstable: the matter of sexuality does not necessarily take form outside of desires and practices. Thus, the ability to capture or quantify sexualities is limited not only to tools of analysis but also to the tools and reception of language, articulations, and other artifacts of potential recognition.
Theorizing ethnography - what it is, is not, should be, should not be, and so on - allows for not only an embrace of precariousness but also ambiguity. In this case, that includes grounding ethnography in the theory-making that is existing, negotiating one’s existence, and narrating it as a valuable historical text. My focus on speech and language here acknowledges the limitations of and builds on post-modern theories of knowledge: while knowledge is discursive, and intricately tied to language and power, so too can meaning be understood through what is not, by definition, discursive - absence, silence, and the non-verbal. Knowledge about sexuality is not produced only by ‘text’ and ‘talk.’ Knowledge can also be ‘unspoken’ - what 1 refer to as tacit - and embodied.
In tuning into interlocutors’ alternative visions of desire, embodiment, and relatedness 1 acknowledge that “genuflection to the celebrity of Western queer theorists” (Nyeck and Epprecht 2013: 6-7) like Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, both of whom have influenced this text, verges on colonial. As Valentin-Yves Mudimbe notes in The Invention of Africa, “until now, Western interpreters as well as African analysts have been using categories and conceptual systems which depend on a Western epistemological order” (1988: x). Hence, 1 use Butler, and in particular Jack Halberstam, in a critical register, posing the conceptual formations of interlocutors as relevant queer African theory. Recognizing my own shortcomings and questions left unanswered. much like those which are part of the yay-or-nay question that plagues North-South anthropology, 1 return to Matebeni’s (2011) critique of pathological sexualities, emphasizing that my own use of sexualities as an analytical category is, while critical, also imperfect. My goal, as Matebeni and Thabo Msibi do, is to highlight the immeasurable importance of “African epistemologies and paradigms in relation to theorizing about non-normative sexual desire and gender diversities in Africa” (2015: 4).
In examinations of female same-sex practices in Africa, tacit knowledge (Dankwa 2009), like types of silences (Arnfred 2004), is a powerful analytical tool because such practices have often, though not always, been shrouded in silence. However, tacit knowledge as a category does not necessarily illicit a distinction between that which cannot be put into words and that which can but is not (see e.g. Gascoigne and Thornton 2014: 3—4). Both potential examples of tacit knowledge are useful to this book. Because of the contestations, contradictions, and creative negotiations of meanings discussed in its chapters, this book cannot rely on prescriptive categories of sexuality, for example, which would dictate not only how things on the ground are perceived but also what is perceivable. While those categories can be relevant, so too are the subjectivities and other subtleties which escape, avoid, or simply have little or tenuous connection to them. ’Queer’ as an identity was not embraced by the majority of the people 1 worked with to write this book. Queer subjects are thus not as relevant to this work as queerer/ subjects, and those who queer themselves and the world around them.
Understanding queer as a transitive verb (Hall 2003: 14), queering is an intellectual labor of deconstructive practice (Sullivan 2003: 50), “not done out of idle curiosity but with the intent of exposing power’s production of knowledge, generating new investigative directions, and presenting alternative ways of knowing” (Geller 2016: 68). Queering is also tied to advocacy because, though academics and activists might practice their work differently, queering “disrupts the day to day ... voices discontent with regulatory mechanisms and disciplinary norms,” and queering is “nothing if not praxis, or theoretically informed action that aims to rectify violence in its myriad forms - physical, structural, and symbolic” (Geller 2016: 68). As Halberstam asserted in Female Masculinity: “A queer methodology ... is a scavenger methodology ... [it] attempts to combine methods that are often cast as being at odds with each other, and it refuses the academic compulsion toward disciplinary coherence” (1998: 13). This standpoint of queer anthropology further challenges the hierarchies in the discipline that dictate what is most interesting, vital, and rigorous to study, and reminds us that “anthropology has always been a bit queer, and queer studies has always betrayed an anthropological sensibility” (Boellstorff 2007: 2).
That sensibility centralizes the descriptive and the erotic. In rethinking the notion of sexuality as tantamount to identity, I have not sought, nor would it be accurate, to discredit that very idea, but to reveal the political and analytical potential of practices of sex, love, and desire that the lens of identity can unintentionally hide. To understand sexuality through practices which in character are gendered and everyday, but also erotic, is to shed light on that potential. As Rachel Spronk argues, “subjective erotic experience ... [and] the sensorial and emotional qualities of sex and sexuality” can be overshadowed if reading sexuality as political above all else (2011: 146-147). This endeavor emphasizes the overlap between sensory and queer ethnography.
With that in mind, a descriptive queer ethnographic critique allows for deconstructions of hybridities - in this case of those emerging from sexual and gender-variant life, practices, sensibilities - and the contexts and actors that produce them. In performing this, I remain critical of the norms of gender and sexuality which have altered social life from the colonial era up to the present, while embracing the hybridity that has emerged as a result. New ways of knowing have coincided with the erasure of others. The task of decolonizing knowledge in the (post)colonial present from the position of the European academy may always be tied up in what Spivak referred to as how “the so-called native informant is always already inscribed in the academy as evidence in the production of disciplinary knowledge on the culture of others” (Spurlin 2006: 16, citing Spivak, 1999: 66-67). By destabilizing this inscription, queer ethnography contributes to a broader theorizing of anthropology in an unequal world.
In work on and in South Africa in particular, queer scholarship has an imperative of self-reflexivity and acknowledging positionality, a task “analogous to the one faced by apartheid ... the redistribution of resources and power necessary to realize an international postapartheid future.” In this way, it may “articulate differences as it rehearses communal liberation” (Jolly 1995: 26, 25). This is the work of activists on the ground, but also of critical and theoretical deconstruction. These mutually beneficial tasks may take different forms; but, like intersecting subject positions, they too are irrevocably intertwined, reminiscent of a statement from Soweto-born activist Beverley Ditsie: “not only am 1 black and gay but I am also a woman, and they are all one struggle for my freedom” (Ditsie and Newman 2002).
That queer critique can challenge power structures, even those embedded in its own naming, is an analytical strength, as is the idea that queer work is “irreducible to a coherent singular project” (Harper 2005: 110). However, as Black queer theorist Phillip Brian Harper elaborates, “while that indeterminacy ... is frequently cited as a positive attribute of queer analysis, it is much more rarely manifested in the actual critical work that aspires to the rubric,” meaning “that significance extends far beyond the objection ... that what is currently recognized as queer studies is ... unacceptably Euro-American in orientation, its purview effectively determined by the practically invisible ... bounds of racial whiteness” (2005: 110). He explains this by saying:
It encompasses as well ... the abiding failure of most supposed queer critique to subject whiteness itself to sustained interrogation and thus to delineate its import in sexual terms, whether conceived in normative or nonnormative modes ... to address the effect of racial whiteness on the very manifestations of those phenomena and on their understanding of them.
(Harper 2005: 110-111)
What sex and sexuality are, for Harper, is inseparable from the cultural hegemony of White supremacism. Thus, queer theorists doing ethnographic work have a responsibility to interrogate the matter of sex, and of race, which discursively constitutes sexuality, without imposing the colonial language of sex embedded in its investigation. There is also a responsibility to push the boundaries of ‘queer,’ if not only because “black queer world-making ... expands the historical category of queer to not only include racialized subjects, but also speaks to multiple sexualities outside of what previous studies have ... suggested] ‘queer’ contains” (McCune 2014: 105).
Queer African studies as a growing discipline is already entrenched in the work of not only queering African studies but also, importantly, decolonizing queer studies. As South African queer scholar Zethu Matebeni poignantly emphasizes, the queer turn must also turn south (2017: 27). Nigerian LGBT1 activist Sokari Ekine's Queer African Manifesto/Declaration, first drafted by Ekine and fellow activists in Nairobi (Fahamu 2010) and later published in Ekine and Hakima Abbas’s Queer African Reader (2013), calls for a holistic approach to the queer African revolution:
We need economic justice; we need to claim and redistribute power; we need to eradicate violence; we need to redistribute land; we need gender justice; we need environmental justice; we need erotic justice; we need racial and ethnic justice; we need rightful access to affirming and responsive institutions, services and spaces; overall we need total liberation.
(Fahamu 2010: para. 2)
The intimate overlap between these realms of injustice, often thought of as separate, “portrays queer African struggles as the open-ended work of imagination and memory aimed at creation and reclamation of identities and lives” (Sika and Okech 2019: 15). Following from these scholars and the interlocutors-as-theorists who allowed me to consider how their lives and experiences represent and also problematize the notion of queer (South) Africa, the queer African perspective is one of plurality, reclamation, and possibility.
From a perspective which is bent toward justice, I am compelled to consider what theorizing leads to more clarity of method, more salient and meaningful work, and more equitable outcomes for the people whose life stories are the bread and butter of ethnographers. These questions are troubled by issues which have plagued ethnographic writing since its inception: how do researchers balance observation and raw testimonial data with the aesthetics of story, the drive for legible results, and the imperative of (though perhaps relative and perpetually flawed) ethnographic truth-telling?
My focus on interlocutors-as-theorists, on the concept of human dignity, and on queering as not only a form of subversion but a form of ever-evolving cultural production comprises one answer to these questions. Coming from an approach of queer anthropology rooted in feminist research, engaging with life story narratives serves to question positivist epistemology while emphasizing the poignancy, uniqueness, and temporality of the personal archive. This trajectory is rooted not in the idea that there is always clear and consistent causality between the social realm and individual life-worlds, but that the proximity the two share is telling and not coincidental.
Honoring my responsibility to do no harm, including but not limited to ensuring anonymity through the use of pseudonyms,28 1 have also considered the ethical issues my work specifically brings up - those relating to sensitive topics and my own positioning. In doing so, the notion of word- and worldmaking central to this book figures in my positionality. 1 have considered the ways in which I might commit epistemic violence in speaking for or over others, and ‘Others.’ The need to re-write other stories which bell hooks (1990) vehemently cautioned against feels inescapable at times, even as I try to speak as a collaborator and a learner, to decenter my voice, and to be an advocate rather than an authority. 1 realize that while 1 cannot, nor do I seek to, guarantee an objective, authoritative ‘truth,’ I can listen intently in an attempt to come as close as possible to interlocutors’ truths - their intended meanings and authentic visions. This has been my goal.
My positionality as a researcher is troubled by both the ethical questions surrounding the study of individuals where one risks essentialism and othering and issues of studying sexuality specifically. Discussing intimate aspects of individual lives, 1 have been prompted to reflect on my role as an anthropologist, and as one who is White, English-speaking, female, cisgender, identifying as a lesbian, middle-class, and from the United States. Though 1 shared a degree of commonality with my participants - defined in terms of my sex assignment, sexual practices, often my gender expression, and often my sexual identity - 1 was not and am not an insider. Rather, I became a ‘trusted outsider,’ or an outsider trusted with inside knowledge (Bucerius 2013). This means my research played out differently than if 1 had been an insider.
Whether or not the role of the body is acknowledged by an ethnographic researcher, it forms a distinct theoretical contribution - that of positionality, because subject positions are themselves embodied. My Whiteness and my performance of feminine gender, for instance, are visible. Fundi, a Spectrum LGBTI Forum fieldworker, once suggested to me that even though 1 am an outsider, people may also assume a sense of national or regional insiderhood, seeing as, before 1 open my mouth, they could think 1 am South African, albeit an umlungu (White person). These embodiments of what 1 was assumed to be at first glance thus practically intertwined with the research process. Though any true commonality I shared with participants is either at best very small and relative to context or at worst irrelevant, I experienced what 1 view as embodied empathy and what that allowed and constrained in terms of interviewing, ethnographic storytelling, and weaving autoethno-graphic moments into those accounts. Through this collaboration and intellectual labor, 1 have sought to do justice to the words of my interlocutors in the spirit of an ethical dialogue between researchers-as-theorists and participants-as-theorists. That task will always be unfinished.
Theorizing queer ethnography, and through it research which is political, sensorial, erotic, temporal, and, as a result, messy and complex, allows speculation on the speculative. 1 spent time with my interlocutors collecting musings and anecdotes, alongside long, disjointed, and in-depth life stories. By this point, I have spent longer with these stories than 1 have physically with the people who narrated them to me in the fleeting space of real time. My many interpretations are further from the warmth of bodies that housed the original arrangement of words behind them, breathing and singing them out between sips of coffee and sweet red wine what feels like five years ago and like yesterday at the same time. When 1 tell parts of Leko’s life story, 1
see Leko on the spare mattress in my first room in Pietermaritzburg. 1 see her rolling a cigarette in the early hours of the morning in the flat she moved to on Durban's lively Florida Road.
Invoking those images, important ones to this work, might at times be misrepresentative. 1 recognize my own role in architecting the constructions of events and lives I can never know fully, and cannot expect to know more over time while at such a geographical distance, the wonder of WhatsApp aside. While 1 originally wrote this manuscript referring to interlocutors in the present tense, rethinking and rewriting it has revealed the use of the past tense to be more accurate. While their stories remain true, some people have left Pietermaritzburg; some couples have split up; and, despite maintaining contact with a majority of the participants in my research, some 1 have lost touch with. As interlocutors speculated about the meaning of their own word- and world-making in the field, or rather, in their everyday lives, 1 continue to speculate on those speculations from beyond it and from outside of them, and the speculative work of queer ethnography opens itself up to the same kind of unending critique it is built upon.
