Zoë Wicomb's Queer Cosmopolitanisms

Abstract

Taking as its starting point a reading of Zoë Wicomb's 2009 short story “In Search of Tommie”, this paper considers the queer energies at the heart of, and the representation of ‘queer’ characters across, Wicomb's oeuvre. Van der Vlies argues that the chief character of this story is usefully considered as a figure of queer potential not only because he is constructed as gay, but also because of his place at the centre of an imagined family in a non-genealogical revisioning of affiliation that is suggestive for Wicomb's engagement with the cosmopolitan—figured as the opposite of the homogeneous, parochial, or ethno-centric—more broadly. The paper argues that Wicomb's commitment to subversive interrogations of ideas about the nation as family, affiliation, genealogy, and reproducibility, might be said to be ‘queer’ in the sense that queer studies is concerned to reveal the operation of discourses of normalization in the everyday, and to reveal these as the locations of violence. Along the way, the essay addresses the subversive deployment of allusion and intertextuality (in this story, and more broadly), instances of homosexual identification and suggestive queering throughout Wicomb's oeuvre, and the fraught engagement of queer studies with race, class, and ‘reproductive futurity’ that is keenly at issue in debates about the rights of LGBTI South Africans, and about the place of queerness in constructions of authochthony and African identity.