Broadening Postcolonial Studies, Decolonizing Queer Studies: Disciplinary Transitions and Social Change in the “New” South Africa

Abstract

Postcolonial studies, in its analysis of marginalization and subaltern domination, has tended to focus on national identities and borders and the ways in which race, gender, and class are configured within the hegemonic space of the nation, but, until very recently, has neglected seriously the ways in which hetero-sexism and homophobia shape imperial, nationalist, and global power. The elisions that this historical focus on the nation-state entails are not remarkably different from those elisions of sexuality that prevailed before the rise and influence of queer theory.¹ Keeping in mind Gayatri Spivak’s claim that the idea or sheer possibility of the so-called native informant is always already inscribed in the academy as evidence in the production of disciplinary knowledge on the culture of others (Postcolonial Reason 66–67), the elision of which I speak may also be symptomatic of the historical tendency of postcolonial studies to assign a more or less static (hetero-)sexuality to the Other. As disciplinary European knowledge, which circumscribes postcolonial studies in the West, has not adequately engaged the politics of sexual difference, queer inquiry has begun to form a site of contestation, of rupture, to the extent that postcolonial studies often reinvents the sex and gender codes of the West that privilege not only heteronormative social relations, but also a matrix of other normative ideologies pertaining to the body, family and kinship relations, race, national identity, health care, and other social positions, categories, and institutions.