Abstract
abstractMuch scholarship into non-normative sexualities on the African continent maintains a pragmatic focus on the deployment of queer identities in the here and now, configuring an African lived experience in the present tense. This inclination extends into analyses of visual culture engaging with notions of sexual and gender dissidence. Using the work of queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz as a point of departure, I suggest another approach to culture work predicated instead upon futurity. In Muñoz's terms, queer futurity is the utopian impulse embedded in queer collectivity: the hope that new ways of being, doing and relating exist just over the horizon. As such it hinges upon an insistence on potentiality and affect, and may offer a radical mode of resistance to a fearful and anxious present. By expanding a space for utopia in the practices of South African artist Athi-Patra Ruga and Zambian artist Milumbe Haimbe – specifically, Ruga's Future White Women of Azania saga and Haimbe's graphic novel The Revolutionist – I build a case for these visual texts as blueprints for a future queer elsewhere.
Published Version
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