Language, subversion, and dignified sounds: The making and unmaking of wor(l)ds
Stabane, it doesn’t even sound like anything! It doesn't sound - what language this is? [...] It's a word that just came up [...] I don't know what it is.1
Leko relayed her frustration as we talked about the word ‘stabane.’ Those I spoke to argued that the most commonly used terms for LGBTI people in isiZulu vernacular are derogatory, with izitahane being the most widespread of them. These assertions that stabane and other words sound undignified are not easily generalizable but echo the findings of Francis and Msibi (2011) and the non-profit organization Networking HIV & Aids Community of Southern Africa (NACOSA) (McLean et al. 2016). Accounts of isiZulu concepts referring to same-sexualities are diverse, vary by geographical location and time period, and refer to male- and female-bodied persons differently (Cage 2003; Reddy 2005; Msibi and Rudwick 2015; Edwards and Epprecht 2020). The words this chapter contends with only comprise a select few, and isiZulu is full of other queer possibilities that have eluded my analysis.
In this chapter, 1 continue discussing how interlocutors curated and created English-language concepts of queer life-worlds, including humorous metaphors and expressions. This queer word-making is work which coincides with the negotiation of the isiZulu terms that did not always resonate for them. To be called stabane, outside of friendly jest, is to be accused and mislabeled, just as it is to be called uncukumbili (‘two-sexed’). The word inkonkoni, which some, like Nkabinde (2008), see potential in, does not seem to be on track to be a dignified descriptor of LGBTI people, and femalebodied people who engage in same-sex relationships in urban KwaZulu-Natal in particular. This is telling and, as theorists, the interlocutors who form the crux of this ethnographic narrative exercise their authority to claim that inkonkoni, ungqingili, uncukumbili, and ¿s7«/?i/ne/stabane hold little if any appeal to them personally.- Despite this, I argue that other kinds of queer word-making flourish, and through them queer world-making.
Just as in the discussion of performative queer word- and world-making in Chapter 2, metaphors, stories, and vague descriptors can also disguise, render benign, and keep the tacitness of certain knowledges intact. They serve to direct certain understandings while misdirecting others. Interlocutors’ narratives of
Language, subversion, and dignified sounds 133 selves, sexualities, and relationships likewise draw on dignified understandings of what it is to be born different and what it is to love those who are. Cosmologies of birth are reflected in local interpretations of same-sexualities that underpin the words uncukumbili and stabane. In discussing natalpolitics, 1 emphasize that sexualities must not be understood concisely as natal destinies, but rather that certain interpretations of the body and birth remedy the assumption that to infer intersexuality, which is also interspirited in this regard, is epistemically violent and undignified. Interlocutors’ narratives of sexual selfhood elucidate this concept of queer natalpolitics, which points to the reverence of the body, and dignified lives, as ancestral design.
Aside from having 11 official languages, South Africa is also home to at least two ‘gay languages’ that are both queer in their subversive formation and queer in their sexual politics. One is Gayle, a vocabulary of English and Afrikaans lexical items used among some gay men, which notably includes female names matched by alliteration to nouns which they refer to (Olivier 1994: 220). Cage (2003) describes Gayle as a specific type of language, an informal register of English and Afrikaans spoken by the gay community of these linguistic groups to one another. IsiZulu also has a well-known queer language. IsiNgqumo, meaning ‘decision,’ is what Stephanie Rudwick has termed a gay Zulu sociolect (2011: 99). While some of the lesbians I spoke with said they used contemporary words associated with isiNgqumo, particularly the word ¡smash to refer to gay men in LGBTI circles, several people clarified that the language was male-oriented and that not all members of this group would use it.
1 asked male SF affiliate Sifiso, who was involved in local radio programming, whether he used isiNgqumo, to which he replied: “I only understand the New York gay lingo: the reading,” he snapped his fingers, “the shading.”3 Sifiso separated isiNgqumo from this latter (US American) language of drag and ballroom culture representative of a growing global popularity and local resurgences of such artistic practices and their social milieu. However, both of these latter sociolects refer to similar trends: sexually marginalized and socially disenfranchised communities using linguistic strategies as a means of subverting the heteronormativity of everyday language and everyday life.
Though the frequent use of isiNgqumo is generally limited to certain malebodied LGBTI persons and settings, female-bodied LGBTI people in K.ZN form their own queer vocabularies, which also serves as a linguistic strategy of subversion. Queer world-making thus happens through the queer wordmaking of not only sociolects like isiNgqumo but also through the possibilities of languages that allow queer worlds to thrive. In reading, adapting, and creating modes of queer and trans existence, LGBTI people in K.ZN engender new understandings that challenge undignified ones. These concepts highlight the specificities of their own life stories in ways that resonate beyond them, as is the case with a redemptive queer natalpolitics that undermines the negativity of linguistic and cultural associations between same-sexualities and intersexedness.4
