Desire Work: Producing Heterosexuality in South African Pentecostal Gay Men

ABSTRACT

Gay men in Cape Town, South Africa joined a Pentecostal ministry in an attempt to produce what they understood as ‘natural’ heterosexual attraction. In this article, I explore how these gay men try to form new selves through what I call ‘desire work’, or physical and emotional micropractices and discipline. Desire is not ‘natural’, but it is produced through a multitude of engagements with cultural norms, public life, political economies, and social forces. New selves are built through concerted bodily changes and comportment [Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press], and although gay Pentecostal men shared this process, their success was limited. I understand desire work as a response to a larger context in which many Pentecostals are disaffected with the post-apartheid government and withdraw from politics as a result. Their fears of the uncertainties of democracy pushed them to engage in optimistic fantasies of heterosexual lives, which were not often realised [Berlant, Lauren Gail. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press].

KEYWORDS:

• South Africa
• Pentecostal
• gay
• desire
• democracy

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was funded by a Wenner-Gren dissertation research grant. Thanks to my Pentecostal interlocutors in Cape Town for their conversations and openness. Thank you to Carolyn Martin Shaw, Kate Chabarek, and Jennifer Stampe for their insights and suggestions.

Notes

1. I use the definition of Pentecostalism used by my subjects in Cape Town, which they share with Pentecostals throughout Africa. This definition includes belief in demonic possession, gifts of divine healing, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, conservative social values, Biblical inerrancy, and the centrality of an intimate and personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

2. The people and ministry names are all pseudonyms.

3. Men are the majority in most ex-gay ministries throughout the world, including HRM.

4. I use self-referential racial terms in this article. During apartheid, South Africans were categorised as black, white, and coloured, and these terms remain in use today. Afrikaans people are white. Bianca was a biological woman. The men were all married to biological women.

5. The couple dated for almost a year before breaking up.