Realness & the Digital Archive: South African Drag Online

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Notes

1. Abigail de Kosnik, Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 2.

2. ‘Sequins, Self & Struggle: Performing and Archiving Sex, Place and Class in Pageant Competitions in Cape Town’ was funded by an AHRC standard grant (reference: AH/K008102/1). The project team included co-investigators Nadia Davids and Siona O’Connell, postdoctoral researcher April Sizemore-Barber, and project coordinator Jade Nair. Sections of the digital archive can be found at http://sequins-self-and-struggle.com/(accessed October 8, 2020).

3. For a further discussion about ways in which users of colour are innovating digital space see Sarah Florini, ‘“Tweets, Tweeps, and Signifyin”: Communication and Cultural Performance on “Black Twitter”’, Television & New Media 15, no 3 (2014): 223–37.

4. For various analyses of the production of archives in South Africa see the special issue ‘Sequins, Self & Struggle’, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, Volume 18.1 (2017) edited by Nadia Davids and Bryce Lease, and Yvette Hutchison, South African Performance and Archives of Memory (Manchester: Manchester university Press, 2015).

5. Angela J. Aguayo, Danette Pugh Patton, and Molly Bandonis, ‘Black Lives and Justice with the Archive: A Call to Action’, Black Camera 9.2 (2018): 166.

6. Zimitri Erasmus, Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2001), 16. I choose not to capitalise ‘coloured’ in rejection of apartheid forms of racial classification.

7. For a discussion of racial classification and surveillance before, during, and at the official end of apartheid, see Deborah Posel, ‘Race as Common Sense: Racial Classification in Twentieth-Century South Africa’, African Studies Review 44, no. 2 (2001): 87–113.

8. Aguayo, Pugh Patton, and Bandonis, ‘Black Lives and Justice with the Archive’, 167.

9. Stefano Calzati and Roberto Simanowski, ‘Self-Narratives on Social Networks: Trans-Platform Stories and Facebook’s Metamorphosis into a Postmodern Semiautomated Repository’, Biography 41, no. 1 (2018): 25.

10. Alexander Cho, ‘Default Publicness: Queer Youth of Color, Social Media, and Being Outed by the Machine’, New Media & Society 29, no. 9 (2017): 3183–3200 (3184).

11. Maggie MacAulay and Marcos Daniel Moldes, ‘Queens don’t compute: reading and casting shade on Facebook’s real names policy’, Critical Studies in Media Communication 33, no 1 (2016): 6–22 (7).

12. Cho, ‘Default Publicness’, 3188.

13. Ibid., 3193.

14. Nicholas Carah, ‘Watching nightlife: Affective Labor, Social Media, and Surveillance’, Television & New Media 15, no. 3 (2014): 251.

15. For this reason, I would challenge De Kosnik’s separation between ‘composed’ online bodies and offline ‘default’ bodies. See de Kosnik, Rogue Archives, 23.

16. Joanne Enwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 72.

17. Diana Taylor, ‘Save As … knowledge and transmission in the age of digital technologies’, Imagining America 7 (2010), 3.

18. For a discussion of the cultural geographies and modes of embodiment in the pageant see Bryce Lease, ‘Dragging Rights, Queering Publics: Realness, Self-fashioning and the Miss Gay Western Cape Pageant’, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 18, no 2 (2017): 131–46.

19. See Kevin Granville, ‘Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: What You Need to Know as Fallout Widens’, New York Times, March 19, 2018.

20. Calzati and Simanowski, ‘Self-Narratives on Social Networks’, 41.

21. Michael Moss, David Thomas, and Tim Gollins, ‘The Reconfiguration of the Archive as Data to Be Mined’, Archivaria 86 (2018): 120.

22. Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, ‘Moving and Moved: Reading Kewpie’s District Six’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 26, no 3 (2020): 405–38 (413).

23. Moffie is a derogative term for gay and queer men or those gendered as male at birth, but the marker has been reappropriated to embrace camp traditions and to diffuse its derogatory power.

24. The Kewpie Photographic Collection, oral interviews, and additional documentary footage from Lewis’ film are held by the Gay and Lesbian Archives (GALA) of South Africa, a crucial archive founded in 1997 that works against the erasure of LGBTQ histories in collective memory and South Africa’s public institutions.

25. See Graeme Reid, How to be a Real Gay: Gay Identities in Small-town South Africa (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013).

26. For a discussion of the movement of the archive from record to basis for cultural production see de Kosnik, Rogue Archives, 3.

27. Achille Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and its Limits’, Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 20.

28. de Kosnik, Rogue Archives, 57.

29. Cited in Monique Duval, ‘People Still Stereotype Homosexuals: Miss Gay Western Cape Sets Out to Be Bigger and Better’, Athlone News, July 8, 2009, 15.

30. Ibid.

31. Brenda A. Randle, ‘I Am Not My Hair: African American Women and the Struggles with Embracing Natural Hair!’, Race, Gender & Class 22, no. 1–2 (2015): 114–121 (115).

32. See Cheryl Thompson, ‘Black Women, Beauty, and Hair as a Matter of Being’, Women’s Studies 38, no 8 (2009): 831–856.

33. Gary van Wyk, ‘Illuminated Signs. Style and Meaning in the Beadwork of the Xhosa- and Zulu-Speaking Peoples’, African Arts 36, no 3 (2003): 12–33 (14).

34. Cited in Sasha Ingber, ‘Drag Queens in South Africa Embrace Queerness and Tradition’, NPR, September 20, 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/09/20/761990035/photos-drag-queens-in-south-africa-embrace-queerness-and-tradition?t=1597222062486 (accessed August 17, 2020)Image 4Image 5.

35. Email correspondence with the author, August 25, 2020.

36. Marcela A. Fuentes, Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019), 13.