HATE CRIMES AGAINST BLACK LESBIAN SOUTH AFRICANS: WHERE RACE, SEXUAL ORIENTATION AND GENDER COLLIDE (PART I)

This article, which is the first of a two-part submission, examines the phenomenon of gender-based violence against black lesbian South Africans. The course and incidence of gender-based violence against black lesbians are tracked from both media articles and academic contributions. The various forms of criminal conduct which characterize the phenomenon (including “corrective rape” and murder) are also examined. The article concludes with a limited causal explanation for what has emerged as a serious social problem in present-day South Africa necessitating government intervention in the form of a recently announced Task Team.

Making the Invisible Visible: Black Lesbianism in The Color Purple

The paper aims to disclose the factors behind Celie’s preference of transition from an involuntary heterosexual relationship to a homosexual one. I pursue this path due to multiple factors that occur in the novel and which nevertheless lead to Celie’s final homosexual identity. Homosexuality is far too often regarded as a mental illness and people have far too many times misjudged people with other sexual orientation than what the society perceives as “normal”. The findings of my research intend to show that homosexuality implies a variety of psychological, emotional and physical issues and that it is nothing to be ashamed or afraid of. Since racism has always been associated with Black men and sexism with White females, the paper brings the invisible Black lesbians to light.

Nativism

Although the focus of this chapter is a particular recent photographer, its broader concern is with how performative African identities have been and continue to be imagined as anatomically and culturally generalized bodies. Several writers have identified the simultaneous growth of photography, ethnography, and colonizing projects from the nineteenth century. The photographed subject was frozen as an object for others’ scrutiny, with photography reinforcing the huge divide between the meanings attached to the surfaces of the bodies of African people and ideas about whiteness and the West. The chapter focuses on how anthropological constructs and codes perist in ostensibly postcolonial and counterhegemonic representations. It analyzes the contemporary photographs of the internationally acclaimed South African photographer Zanele Muholi, especially images from her “Faces and Phases” photographs of black lesbians and transmen. On one hand, the portraits are powerful political statements: they portray the dignity and courage of certain lesbians and transmen, make a marginalized community visible in a heterosexist and racist public sphere, and gesture toward meanings of African identities that are radically at odds with both colonial and (patriarchal) nationalist identities. On the other hand, viewers are invited to recognize the agency and public visibility of the subject in ways similar to how viewers of colonial and nationalist performances have been encouraged to recognize and categorize the bodies of authentic African women and men.

Conclusion

The conclusion proposes the concept of queer contingency to describe the recurring back-and-forth between the possibility of freedom and the risk of injury that characterizes Black queer experience throughout the diaspora, which is tracked in the book. The simultaneity of vulnerability and empowerment and the uncertainty of which will prevail at any given moment constitute the terrain of queer contingency. Cultural producers respond to the recognition of contingency by offering queer subjects aesthetic redress, or artworks that imagine paths to freedom that move through but never fully beyond threat. The conclusion turns briefly to Zanele Muholi’s photographic series of South African Black lesbians to illustrate this idea of aesthetic redress and offer a final visual example of the artistic exploration of queer contingency.

Bathing Beauties and Predatory Lesbians

Chapter 3 explains how the Black Press featured the overt display and sexualization of black women’s bodies in the context of bathing beauty contests and recreation on public beaches and pools. The Black Press worked to transform pernicious notions of heterosexual black women as ugly, mannish, and uncivilized and meet their readers’ imagined desire for respectable and sexual images of African American women. However, chapter 3 also argues that this transformation was dependent on the demonization of black lesbians whom the Black Press cast as dangerous and predatory. Chapter 3 concludes that black bathing beauties’ photographs challenged vicious white stereotypes and aided a new generation of African American women’s attempts to reconstruct their public image even as they rendered the black lesbian as the embodiment of depravity.

Racialized Femininity and Masculinity in the Preferences of Online Same-Sex Daters.

This study considers how online dating preferences reflect gendered racial inequality among same-sex daters. Research shows that heterosexuals reproduce gendered racial hierarchies through partner preferences, yet little work examines the preferences of sexual minorities, especially lesbians. Moreover, few studies examine racial heterophily (a preference for racial groups other than one’s own), which may influence interracial pairings. Using data from 4,266 Match.com dating profiles, we find that Asian, Latino, and Black lesbians and gays exhibit higher rates of racial heterophily than do Whites. Lesbians of color are less likely to self-exclude or to prefer Whites, and are more likely to not state a race preference than are minority gays. Self-exclusionary minority daters often discuss ideal masculinities and femininities in their profiles, suggesting that such exclusions are motivated by both racialized and gendered ideals for partners. Drawing on theories of homonormativity, we conclude that gays conform more to racialized, gendered ideals than do lesbians.