Productive absences and architecting knowledge
The labor of queer performance art and of the insistence of everyday existence in an unequal world reveals how sense of love, sex, and relatedness is made through queer constructions, and through ambiguities that are misrepresented or escape scrutiny. Through productive ambiguity, absence, and vagueness, LGBT1 performers and everyday people in KZN express and reveal same-sex love, pleasure, joy, and embodiment. For example, subverting knowledge of the sexual through the use of story was a key theme in the Spectrum Theatre Troupe’s performance at Durban Pride in 2015. Certain moments of the performance highlighted quiet, ambiguous statements of female same-sex desire, and took the opportunity in turn to dispel that vagueness, loudly. STT's creation of a queer counterpublic through this event and through its wider work “contests] the hegemonic supremacy of the majoritarian public sphere” (Munoz 1999: 1). Such invention, the claiming of space it involves and the reclaiming of knowledge it allows, occurs in the everyday through musings and stories, and through performance.
During this specific performance on the Durban Pride stage, set up facing the Indian Ocean, several of the female-bodied performers sensuously described sexual experiences. For example, Sindi began, "There’s this chick, neh [see]? The thing is, 1 haven't done anything to her.”16 In response, the other performers exclaimed and shouted, put their hands up in the form of a question: why? "Well, there’s a reason why,” Sindi continued, “I'm just too scared.” She paused after walking over to Thabisile, then continued, “that I might be stuck in between her legs.” She touched the seated Thabisile along her inner thigh and moved up to her breast. Thabisile arched up toward Sindi as she said, "And she’ll be stuck in my heart.” Sindi's explanation of why she had not had sex with the woman she was speaking about - “I’m just too scared” - is a moment of ambiguity. The observer could assume she might be afraid because she is not sure of her own desire, or of its repercussions. However, the reason is then made clear, and it is far from that assumption.
Thabisile in particular gave an animated performance, her speech drawn out and intonation melodic. She said: “I'm sitting here and I'm listening. I’m listening to what you guys are saying, and your main problem is that you guys are talking about girls.” She paused before saying:
And what you need to be getting with is a real woman [...] a real, older, mature woman [...] ’cause there’s something about an older woman. It’s not the clothes that she wears. [Zandile asked: What is it?] Or the lotion she puts on her skin. But there’s something about an older woman, when she has her breast in your face.
At this point, she walked over to another of the seated female-bodied performers, who put her arms around Thabisile. Thabisile straddled her as she continued: “And when she gets on top of you [the seated woman held Thabisile as she moved] an older woman will ride you and fuck you.” Zandile, who was also seated, added: “Wait, wait, if you keep doing that, you’re gonna make me wanna bang my mother’s friends.” Thabisile responded, now standing next to her: “It's not about banging your mother’s friends, sweetie.” She put a hand on Zandile’s knee and said, “It’s about getting an older woman to open her legs,” which Zandile did. Thabisile moved her hand along Zandile’s inner thigh and said, “And you go in her,” lifting her hand to her face, “And when you’re done you can taste her, on you.” As with Sindi’s monologue, Thabisile’s prompted the listener to question why she might say the problem of these stories is that the speakers are “talking about girls.” She could have elaborated on that ambiguity by negating or demeaning same-sex desire; however, she explained it with an affirmative redirection: “What you need to be getting with is a real woman.”
This seized opportunity for elaboration on same-sex practices, producing an ambiguity that is then enthusiastically clarified, is its own form of queering. Rather than simply normalizing the non-normativity of same-sex intimacy, and existence, this specific telling also allows for an affective corporal queerness (Puar 2005: 131) by positioning female sexuality and female bodies as sites of pleasure rather than sites of violence. In this revealing of the body, which is not hindered but led by a certain vagueness - in Sindi’s “I'm just too scared” and Thabisile’s “Your main problem is that you guys are talking about girls” - intimate practices are negotiated within, alongside, and against different narratives of what they are meant to be and not to be, and forms of normativity.
Even more so than silence, linguistic references to sexual practices through the use of vague signifiers like ‘this’ and ‘that’ thing reveal embodied knowledge that flourishes tacitly. Sex acts themselves are caught up in ambiguity stemming only in part from an immediate taboo. The incompleteness of them, via the difficulties and failures of language, should not be underestimated. However, creative ways to refer to the intimate, indirectly and through metaphor, are brought up and negotiated in conversation. The queering of sexual life-worlds emerges from this, and from the expression of same-sex desire through talk: in stories and performances like the STT’s. Though these expressions can be explicit and literal, understanding ideas about sexualities through ethnographic research must consider knowledge which is nuanced, fluid in form, and not always public or stated.
The politicizing of the intimate - whether ethnographers link sexualities to the politics of gender, sexual rights struggles, or globalizing notions of sexual sameness or difference - attempts to reveal, clarify, and quantify sexuality and sexual knowledge. This can also leave out a key facet of sexuality: sexual relationships and sexual practices themselves. When acknowledged, the ambiguities of those practices need not be reconciled. STT performers and other interlocutors reveal how ambiguities are forms of cultural production. Work around female same-sexualities in Africa has embraced silence, both out of practicality and out of the need to challenge how assumptions about sex and talk have influenced the study of sexualities. There are subtle differences between what is tacit (unspoken but not necessarily secret) and what is withheld (unspoken and perhaps also kept secret). As Halberstam asserts, there are “different silences and different forms of invisibility in relation to different ... bodies, and whereas some lesbians feel shrouded in silence, others feel overexposed and hyper-visible” (1998: 115).
Within the LGBT! community, there is also inside knowledge that operates tacitly. Relationships are one example. The existence of a relationship may only be the subject of speculation, particularly if there are mitigating delicate circumstances, for example if someone is not ‘out,’ and particularly when a relationship is carried out along the lines of infidelity. Many individuals within LGBTI social circles may know that two people are romantically seeing one another, but there may also be an understanding that it cannot be mentioned. 1 learned this as I came to know the existence of a few relationships which were not always obvious, even in LGBTl-only settings. 1 noticed how butch lesbian friends Tshaba and Senzi, both in their 20s, dated more than one woman at a time; and, while Tshaba was happy to discuss it, Senzi was less so. Silence can also coincide with deception to protect the secrecy of a relationship from unknowing family members. Once while we were hanging out at my apartment, Tshaba and Senzi concocted a story to tell the mother of Tshaba’s girlfriend, who lived far away. Tshaba wrote a message to the mother, saying that she worked for an educational program and that her daughter would need to be away for a few days. The ruse gave Tshaba and her girlfriend a clandestine weekend.
Same-sex relationships and sexual practices alike are also disguised by either their lack of articulation or the vagueness through which they are articulated. 1 noticed that some interlocutors described their same-sex relationships vaguely, as ’this type of relationship’ and ‘a relationship like that.’ Sexual practices, like sexual organs, were also described through vague sig-nifiers, as ‘this’ or ‘that,’ or a ‘thing.’ As such, not only does an inquiry into those intimate aspects of an already sensitive subject require sensitivity, it
Performance, everyday labors, world-making 89 also presents a challenge of recognition. In the process of learning knowledge which is at times secret, coping with ambiguity must often mean embracing suggestion; but there is a difficulty that comes with entertaining speculative guesses. This is something I faced in Thandazo’s vague references to early sexual encounters with other girls in her family home, and in Ayanda’s initial descriptions of sex as ‘the actual thing’ and ‘being with' women. Because female sexuality more broadly is subject to silences, a degree of speculation is thus useful, even required. Of course, entertaining speculation in understanding sex between women is only a means to any surprising revelation when failing to recognize the vagueness that same-sex practices exist in, for example via their linguistic separation from the heteronorm.
Because sex is often defined through the heterosexual, and further the (heterosexual) male experience, sex between women is not afforded linguistic space. This is something I spoke with Leko and others about, and which rings true in many other linguistic contexts. It was often noted how words such as or similar to touching, rubbing, licking, and fucking mean different things in different contexts, the first two in particular seeming ambiguous, odd, or benign as sexual descriptors, when for female-bodied individuals in same-sex relationships they can be of great importance and potential. The operationalizing of these words results in a queering of ordinary language, affirming their meanings for same-sex intimacies. Sis Fundi, for example, talked about how people who are opposed to same-sex sexualities often have little grasp of queer intimate practices and, as such, little relative perception of their own bodies as they would be read and made love to in queer ways. Fundi viewed this as resulting in the imaginations of many being closed off to erotic possibilities because society dictates such rigid roles and ideas about what sexual intimacy is and, importantly, cannot be.
Ayanda is someone who spoke to me at length about her thoughts on love and sex, including what she saw as a difference between having sex and making love;
You know when you're a couple, there is this time that comes when you make love and there is this time that comes when you [have] sex. Sex, throughout, like hard [...] [laughing]. Making love is where you become too emotional to your partner, not [...] doing the actual thing, the actual thing like roughly. And doing sex is like making a day out of your everyday plan and everything and getting to, not actually planning, but feelings makes you do that thing. But making love is when someone caught you off guard, maybe you doing something and that - becomes too emotional.
Ayanda complements the spontaneity and inevitability of making love here with the queer intentionality of what she referred to as ‘doing sex,’ and both relate to the erotic constellation of Ayanda and her partner Lihle’s sexual practices. While Ayanda was the first female lover Lihle had, Ayanda hadonly been with women. Though Lihle saw Ayanda as an exceptional case, Ayanda said she has seen a change in her. Lihle would make comments about their sex life, such as she no longer knew why she spent so long ‘dicking.’ Ayanda remarked that Lihle was ‘becoming like her.’ To explain how, she gestured to her own boxer shorts, saying, “She loves this!” The reference to ‘this’ is at once ambiguous and literal, referring to the vulva, with it the clitoris, and also, internally, the vagina - and at the same time more broadly to the sexual life of those organs: wetness, friction, touch, taste, and the physicality of pleasure.
Ayanda’s gesturing to her unspoken body renders ‘this’ as a signifier for the erotic dimension of female same-sexualities, and something subtler in the context of understanding gender, sexuality, and relatedness. Ayanda’s statement of “She loves this” also implies she felt that were Lihle truly not interested in women, she would only be on the ‘receiving’ end when it came to sex; she would not ‘love’ (used here as an active verb) ‘this.’ But in her love for Ayanda’s female body, in taking part in the giving of pleasure to her partner through her own touch, Lihle disrupted a certain assumed narrative of female same-sex practice where butch/masculine partners ‘give’ and femme/ feminine partners ‘receive.’
Ayanda explained, “I’ve noticed a lot ‘my kind,’ that mannish type, butch lesbian ... they hate this 50/50 thing.” 50/50, or a sexual encounter where both female partners pleasure one another specifically through touch and/or other methods such as oral sex and penetration, is discussed both positively and negatively. Matebeni describes it as “a language of mutual (sexual) pleasure, sharing and how sex is organized” (2011: 271). As much as some people told me that butches do not like 50/50 because their role is only to pleasure their partners and not to be touched themselves, of the butch-identified people 1 asked, none happened to express that they themselves do not or would not practice 50/50. Some see butches who do not practice 50/50 as female men or, by extension, transmen, where transgender subjectivity is meant to explain why they do not wish to receive certain forms of sexual touch. Here, there is a subtle distinction between female men, or lesbian men. and transmen, in that transgender subjectivity replaces female masculinity in affirmation of maleness. But this is not straightforward in practice, as individuals define their masculinity in various ways, with various implications for their understandings of gender and sexual practices. Either way, Ayanda believed that, for butches specifically, it is both pleasurable and important to engage in 50/50:
There’s this thing when you are mannish like me [...] if you’re having a sexual intercourse, you’re not take off the jeans, you take off and like have a sport bra, that’s all - men do not take off everything. And, mina [me], I believe that if you’re making love, you must connect. Mina, 1 connect with my girlfriend through my - [gesturing to her vagina, laughing].
Ayanda saw the lack of reciprocity in a sexual relationship which is not 50/50 as problematic in more ways than one, saying:
They do not understand, they take [...] this thing as like - “no, 1 am a man, 1 have to show them that I can [...] keep a girl mesmerized,” and they have this attitude like “no, I have had sex with you,” yebo [yeah]? In clubs, they have had sex with you, so you’re a whore.
She viewed the display of untouchability as much a facade as lesbians who sleep with men, “not wanting to be exposed.” She realized the statements were harsh, but explained: “They do not understand who they are, why are they here, they are here to love and ... we have problems as were lesbians because we’re humans - but it must, must not be as violent as the straight people.” While Ayanda was essentializing here, she asserted a notion of difference in referring to equitable same-sex intimacies, stating that sexual inequality can be violent and that same-sex practices, just like opposite-sex relationships and encounters, can either reproduce or undermine that violence.
While, as a butch woman, Ayanda enjoyed being touched and engaging in a 50/50 relationship, her opinion on penetration not stated, other women 1 met implied casually that women in same-sex relationships who enjoy penetration are bisexual if not straight, as any men who enjoy anal penetration must be bisexual or gay. While the focus on penetration as a signifier of sexual orientation or preference is limiting in terms of how desire can be understood, it also seems to pose little or no problem to understanding sex between female individuals as real, even when one partner is considered ’the' lesbian who might ■penetrate’17 and the other is considered ‘not’ a lesbian, or not in the same way.
The question of heteronormativity and sexual practice also came up with reference to safe sex. In KZN, most talk of safe sex implicitly revolved around the male, though female-bodied people, including lesbians, were also referred to in discussions, advertising, and education. Female condoms, dental dams, and finger cots were popular among health organizations (including SF), but the proliferation of their use among female-bodied individuals is unclear. Some 1 spoke to said they would use protection while having sex with another female-bodied person, while others preferred to take different precautionary measures that mostly came down to open communication. When asking Nolwazi about the use of female condoms as opposed to gloves, she expressed that the condom is sexier because of its sexual universality. It is synonymous with sex, while the glove is clinical. Here, the phallic condomed dildo or condomed hand can be seen as a heteronormative representation of safe sex, where alternatives must often exist outside of the discourse of not only what is sexy but also what is safe and healthy. However, this view also presupposes that penetration with the phallic object or organ is monopolized by maleness or its lesser imitation. Queering sexual practices with and against both homo- and heteronorms is as such a kind of worldmaking through love-making.
