Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fragmentation of the Rainbow Nation

Prismatic Performances explores the gap between South Africa's self-image and its lived realities, focusing on queer embodiments that reveal and animate these gaps. It spans 30 years of cultural production and includes various social locations, such as black lesbian soccer players, white gay performers, black artists, and a primarily heterosexual pan-African online soap opera fandom community. The book argues that when explicitly queer bodies emerge onto public stages, audiences are made aware of their own bodies, identifications, and desires, revealing the inadequacy and violence of the Rainbow Nation as an aspirational metaphor.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 194 pages
Publication date: 04 October 2021
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press

South African President Nelson Mandela's 1994 inauguration introduced the "Rainbow Nation," a vision of a nation at peace with itself and the world. This national rainbow extended beyond racial coexistence and reconciliation to include sexual orientation as a protected category in the Bill of Rights. However, despite the promise of equality and dignity, the new government's alliance with neoliberal interests and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic left South Africa an increasingly unequal society. Prismatic Performances focuses on the queer embodiments that reveal and animate the gaps between South Africa's self-image and its lived realities. It argues that performance has become a key location where contradictions inherent to South Africa's post-apartheid identity are negotiated. The book spans 30 years of cultural production and numerous social locations and includes: a team of black lesbian soccer players who reveal and redefine the gendered and sexed limitations of racialized Africanness; white gay performers who use drag and gender subversion to work through questions of racial and societal transformation; black artists across the arts who have developed aesthetics that place on display their audiences' complicity in the problem of sexual violence; and a primarily heterosexual pan-African online soap opera fandom community who, by combining new virtual spaces with old melodramatic tropes, allow for extended deliberation and new paradigms through which African same-sex relationships are acceptable. Prismatic Performances contends that when explicitly queer bodies emerge onto public stages, audiences are made intimately aware of their own bodies, identifications, and desires. As the sheen of the New South Africa began to fade, these performances revealed the cracks in the nation's self-image and its lived realities.

Weight: 336g
Dimension: 151 x 228 x 16 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780472038794