The Politics of Safety Talk and Practices: Lesbians Constructing Belonging and Queer World-Making in Cape Town

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the interviews from the author's doctoral study with white, black and coloured lesbians, ranging in age from early 20s to mid-60s. It argues that lesbians’ daily management and enactment of their sexuality in public and private spaces in Cape Town, speaks to modes and means of “making place” for lesbian sexuality. Queer world-making considers how lesbians resist and (re)shape hegemonic identities, discourses and practices, revealing “a mode of being in the world that is also inventing the world”. A dominant discourse in South Africa, including in Cape Town, foregrounds the racialised spatiality of vulnerabilities to lesbophobic stigma, discrimination and violence. This has highlighted how the ability to safely enact one’s lesbian desire is experienced unevenly across Cape Town. The chapter explains the discussion of the contestations of patriarchal heteronormativities involved in the politics of belonging within black communities.