Queering the Lost Child and the Politics of Failure in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City

Abstract

Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010) is a central edifice in the ever-growing genre of South African crime fiction. A decidedly post-apartheid literary trend (though not exclusive to it), crime fiction contributes to commentary on South African futurity, which is often portrayed as violent and almost always disappointing. Understanding the ways in which South African literature has been beleaguered with anxieties about the future, this article employs the figure of the queer child as an analytic to explore the generative politics of failure. Taking up queer theory’s anti-social thesis, recently considered in Andrew van der Vlies’s Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), and the concept of the queer child, put forward in Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), I argue that while the queer child may disrupt a narrative of reproductive futurism, it offers an alternative to both a failed future and a rainbow one. I consider the role of two types of queer children in the novel: the child queered by innocence and the child queered by degeneracy. By examining the exchange of and relationships between these children, I argue that the child queered by degeneracy hitches South African futurity to a queer celebration of state failure.