Marginalised and demonised: lesbians and equality—perceptions of people in a local Western Cape community

Abstract

abstract This article discusses the views of people in Mitchell's Plain in relation to same-sex female desire and constitutional requirements of equality. The article describes how ordinary people understand same-sex desire and the rights of lesbians to equality and equity, with the objective of producing meaningful and useful information, which can contribute to social change and the building of democracy and equality. This involved establishing participants' views on equality with regard to same-sex relationships, the possibility of same-sex marriage, partner benefits and child adoption and custody in particular. The research revealed that constructions of lesbians in Mitchell's Plain were complex, multifaceted and at times contradictory. Lesbians were mostly constructed as invisible, sexually ‘deviant’, defiant of conventional gender roles, ‘mentally ill’, ‘incapable’ and ‘unfit’ parents, ‘masculine’, religiously ‘immoral’, ‘abnormal’ and ‘unstable’. Through discourses normalising heterosexuality, the participants represented lesbians as ‘others’, ‘deviants’ who were located outside of ‘normal’ community practices. By accepting the binary oppositions of nature/nurture, good/bad, normal/abnormal, right/wrong, Mitchell's Plain residents were most likely to construct lesbian identity as ‘bad’, ‘abnormal’ and ‘wrong’.