The (un)promised land: queer identity and South Africa’s post-apartheid urban landscape

Abstract

In this article, I explore the intersection of photography and contemporary urban topographies in the production of queer identity in post-apartheid South Africa. To do so I examine Thebeautifulonesarehere, a contemporary photo-collage portrait series by Kelebogile Ntladi, which attempts to queer representations of South African cityscapes to reveal the entrenched homophobia and the systematic rejection of queer subjects. Ntladi, inspired by their own experiences of counter-normativity and the omnipresent threat of violence they face as a result, took to the streets to walk through their home city of Johannesburg to photograph the urban and cultural landscape; these photographic prints were then used as the building blocks in the assembly and fabrication of imagined spaces in which they and their fellow queer citizens would be able to live without fear of violence, where they could move freely and without repercussion. Using the trope of the flâneur as a starting point, I draw on Walter Benjamin’s paradoxical experience of Paris: his writing of Paris as the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’ and ‘the promised land’ of the flâneur exists in stark juxtaposition with his own complex experience of anxiety, dislocation and impending doom while living in the city while in exile during World War II. Ntladi’s personal experience of post-1994 Johannesburg echoes the paradoxical experience.

Keywords:

• Flâneur
• Johannesburg
• Kelebogile Ntladi
• LGBTQIA+
• photography
• post-apartheid
• queer
• South Africa
• violence
• Walter Benjamin

Acknowledgements

I owe my sincerest gratitude to Kylie Thomas for her un-ending support and supervision of my dissertation from which this paper is derived. Thank you to Lebo Ntladi for graciously putting up with my constant queries and badgering. A big thank you to Bradley Rink for introducing me to human geography and encouraging my (queer) queries therein. More broadly, thank you to the LSE-UCT July School whose Urban Modernities course was arguably the genesis of this paper. Thank you to Gender, Place and Culture and the anonymous reviewers who gave constructive feedback on early renditions of this paper. Lastly, I would like to thank the UCT Merit Scholarship and the Standard Bank Bursary for their financial contributions towards my graduate studies and my attendance at the LSE-UCT July School, respectively.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Despite the ever-expanding LGBTQIA + acronym to include increasingly diverse identities, I use the term “queer” as an umbrella taxonomy for all counter-normative performances of gender and sexuality.

2 This is not to say that all queer subjects in democratic South Africa experience discrimination and prejudice equally or in the same way. These experiences are compounded by various factors including race, access to health care facilities, economics, and familial and work support structures.

3 “Corrective rape” is a problematic misnomer which asserts a normative conception of gender and sexuality (Thomas 2013, Lahiri 2011).

4 See, inter alia, Visser (2003a; 2003b), Leap (2005), Rink (2008; 2013), Tucker (2009) and Bhagat (2018).

5 See, inter alia, Livermon (2014) and Canham (2017).

6 By “queercide” I mean the systematic killing and destruction of the counter-normative community. I use it instead of the more common terms “gendercide” and “homocaust” to ensure our understanding of the problem extends beyond rape and gender-based violence within a heteronormative patriarchy to include offenses against all counter-normative and gender non-conforming individuals.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian Michael Müller

Brian Müller is a graduate student at the School for African & Gender Studies, Anthropology & Linguistics, University of Cape Town.