https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5268-0800
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ABSTRACT
YouTube has provided a platform for many queer vloggers in South Africa to find audiences and to represent queer lives via a public medium. The platform allows for multiple queer identities to be represented in dynamic ways, complicating the ways in which mainstream mass media often stereotype or distort queer lives and experiences, and simultaneously challenging the widespread social marginalisation of queer people. This article explores how queer South African vloggers have created communities that function as heterotopias, spaces that allow for social and cultural norms to be contested or reversed. These heterotopian YouTube communities provide forums where identity, space and authenticity or “realness” are invoked and reimagined in ways that speak back to the limitations or oppressions experienced in offline spaces. The communities also offer viewers and commenters the space to share, reflect on and demonstrate support for the experiences of others. Videos of influential South African vloggers are analysed to demonstrate the heterotopic potential of these queer communities.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See Glatt (Citation2017) for a detailed discussion of these issues.
2 The term “queer” is used to refer to sexual and gender minorities. This general term is used for the broad range of identities in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and other (LGBTQIA+) community. For a detailed discussion of queer theory, see Annamarie Jagose’s Queer Theory: An Introduction (Citation1996).
3 Queer people currently face multiple forms of discrimination and violence in South Africa, including “corrective rape”, beatings, murder and discrimination or refusal of service by wedding venues and other service providers (Scheepers and Lakhani Citation2017).
10 The film Inxeba (The Wound), which represents queer relationships and characters in the sacred amaXhosa initiation ceremony Ulwaluko, faced massive backlash and countrywide protests for its assumed cultural insensitivity, with many queerphobic discourses evident in protests and social media reactions (Andrews Citation2018b).
19 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVbVao4QtBLarbX01DX9YRg Channel name: Lasizwe Dambuza.
21 The term “coloured” in South Africa is a broad and often contested racial and ethnic classification for people of mixed-race or multi-ethnic backgrounds.