Queer at 25: A Critical Perspective on Queerness, Politics and Futures

Abstract

With a focus on contemporary South Africa, and through the lens of queer identity and politics, the article critiques the limitations and possibilities for queerness and its futures in post-apartheid South Africa. From the advent of constitutional democracy and its ushering in of human rights, the article analyses developments in the politics of sexuality in the context of enduring systems of violence, rooted in colonial and apartheid histories. Discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people – at the intersection with other forms of discrimination – has emerged as a focal point for political resistances in the post-apartheid period. These resistances are interrogated, including the paradoxes of rights struggles that they expose, and the contradictions between formal equality gains and present queer realities that they call attention to. With an emphasis on enduring inequalities within post-apartheid society, and on the racialisation of violence against queerness, the article explores various political formations of and for queer freedom. In navigating these dynamics of inequality and difference, the article urges a radical politics – both for relating as equals, and against the violent ends of othering.