To be black, Christian and gay: Nakhane Touré’s Brave Confusion

ABSTRACT

Released in 2013, Nakhane Touré’s debut album, Brave Confusion, is innovative in grappling with questions of race, sexuality and religion. Enveloped in a beguiling honesty and replete with layers of complexity, this album captures the arduous journey towards the acceptation of a gay identity. Drawing on the theoretical work proposed by Judith Butler in her essay, “Critically queer”, this paper argues that music offers a space that allows Touré to negotiate his gay identity. Centring on the concepts of identity construction, race and spirituality, this paper explores how through broaching gay sexuality in his music, Touré shows that gender and sexual identity are neither fixed nor predetermined phenomena. Actively performing his own sexual and gender identity allows him to construct his being particularly within a sociocultural space that appears intolerant of the sexual orientation and gender identity of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals.

Key words:

• Nakhane Touré
• gay music
• performativity
• gender
• identity
• sexuality
• space
• South Africa