South African Gay Pages and the politics of whiteness

ABSTRACT

In this article, I use Gay Pages as a local archive of cultural meaning to think about the relationship between race, sexuality, and identity in a post-apartheid context. Through an analysis of the quarterly magazine series, I focus on how an invisible and unacknowledged whiteness marks privileged ways of both speaking and being heard. I argue that whiteness continues to function as the custodian of the normative in much of South Africa’s public discourse – a post-apartheid racial politics with implications that exceed this particular cultural text. I focus on editions of the magazine published between 2012 and 2016 in order to identify the continuities in normative racial and gendered power. The analysis extends beyond a consideration of the magazine’s erasure of non-white bodies and takes the form of a close reading of the assumptions and racial histories that underpin a number of articles and editorials. My analysis of the magazine centres on several key themes including the interplay between local ideas and transnational cultural flows; the production and circulation of an assimilationist aesthetic; revisionist histories of the past; and representations of pride marches.

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness studies
• post-apartheid South Africa
• magazines
• assimilation
• masculinities
• transnationalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Theo Sonnekus and Jeanne Van Eeden (2009), as well as Katlego Disemelo (2014), offer important analyses of the politics of race in earlier editions of Gay Pages. This article builds on this existing scholarship, but centres on the question of how whiteness actually works in producing certain forms of gay masculinity.

2. Gavin Brown (2012) is critical of the language of homonormativity, in part because it suggests an “all-encompassing” homogenous force that over-determines people’s lives and undermines the agency of “ordinary” same-sex subjectivities. In this article, therefore, I focus rather on the assimilationist aesthetic that, while drawing on Duggan’s homonormative figure, emphasise the politics of representation.

3. There are some exceptions to the general erasure of non-white bodies and contributors in the editions of the magazine that I analyse here. Sonnekus and Van Eeden (2009) and Disemelo (2014) also offer insightful discussions about some of the instances in which black men are depicted in previous editions of the magazine.

4. Sonnekus and Van Eeden (2009, 86) made a similar criticism of the contributors to Gay Pages several years ago.

5. See Sonnekus and Van Eeden (2009) for a related discussion.

6. See Gay Pages (2012a, 28 and 30, 2012c, 36, 2015a, 32, 2015b, 29).

7. See Gay Pages (2012c, 32 and 35, 2015b, 26–27, 2016a, 27, 2016b, 30).

8. See Sonnekus (2010) for a more detailed discussion of Knysna’s Pink Loerie Mardi Gras and the politics of visibility.

9. Even in those instances where the magazine risks a broader mapping of LGBTI sexual cultures, the featured stories are of white transgender men and women. These include photographs of former athlete Caitlyn Jenner (Gay Pages 2015b, 26, 2016b, 28) and even a story about a transgender man winning the somewhat obscure “Sexiest Vegan Male of the Year” award (2016b, 32). A photograph of unnamed transgender women in India is an exception (2014b, 30).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andy Carolin

Andy Carolin is a researcher in the Institute for Gender Studies at the University of South Africa. He holds a doctoral degree in English literature from the University of Johannesburg. His research focuses on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in South African literary and cultural studies.