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Shifting Boundaries of Sexual Identities in Cape Town: The Appropriation and Malleability of ‘Gay’ in Township Spaces

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Abstract

While much has been written concerning the effect of the post-apartheid transition upon gay communities in predominantly more affluent parts of South Africa, little is still known about how this transition affected black African residents in the former townships. This article therefore examines the impact that the political transition had on groups in the former townships through an exploration that highlights first the way it helped create delineated sexual binary relationships. It will then go on to explore how the social expression of these binary relationships has a unique geography within the former townships which in turn also allows us to see how an historically very Westerncentric term of identification ‘gay’ has been appropriated in unique ways.

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Notes

  1. Research for this article began in 2004 and concluded in 2009. Extended periods of time have been spent in Cape Town’s former townships allowing me to engage in long-term participant observation and semi-structured interviews with respondents.

  2. For a more detailed exploration of the differences between township locations in Cape Town, see Tucker (2009).

  3. Additional studies have also pointed out how these terms no not work necessary well at encompassing the diversity of same-sex desire in the West either. See for example, Ross (2005) and Wilchins (2004).

  4. All names given are pseudonyms.

  5. As briefly described above, moffie is another term sometimes used as a label for men who openly proclaim sexual attraction to other men.

  6. As the following profoundly blinkered (with regard to European encroachment) statement made by Dr E G Jansen, the Minister of Native Affairs in South Africa in 1958, exemplifies: ‘Whatever claim, morally or otherwise, that Natives [black Africans] have in other parts of the Union, they have no real claim to be here in the Western Province at all. It is within the memory of many people today that there was a time that a Native was unknown on the Peninsula.’ As Western (2001) points out such a policy was of course never entirely successful. See also Bickford-Smith et al. (1999).

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  1. Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Downing Site, Cambridge, CB2 3EN, UK

    Andrew Tucker

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Tucker, A. Shifting Boundaries of Sexual Identities in Cape Town: The Appropriation and Malleability of ‘Gay’ in Township Spaces. Urban Forum 21, 107–122 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12132-010-9075-8

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