English Studies

Nigeria and Uganda’s anti-homosexuality laws, when passed at the beginning of 2014, dominated media and activist attention across the continent and globe. Promulgating draconian penalties for people engaged in same-sex relationships and their allies, the Anti-Homosexuality Act in Uganda and the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act in Nigeria held life-altering, life-threatening consequences for those it targeted. An equally pernicious law, passed in Uganda at the same time, received considerably less attention or condemnation -- the Anti-Pornography Act, which criminalised pornography through, inter alia, regulating women’s dress in public. While Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act has since been struck down by its Supreme Court and the Anti-Pornography Act is under review, the concurrent passing of these two laws, which have varying precedents elsewhere on the African continent, offers an instructive analytical vantage point from which to examine the intersection of homophobia and sexism as overlapping, reinforcing oppressive sexuality and gender power systems.
In this essay, I compare African anti-homosexuality laws and “decency” laws, which prescribe dress codes for women, examining the ideological underpinnings of these two sets of mutually reinforcing laws. Drawing on Michael Kimmel’s conception of homophobia as the “repudiation of the feminine”  in men, an idea which has precedent in the queer and feminist theorising of Leo Bersani  and Suzanne Pharr,  I argue that both sets of laws rest on a patriarchal order that seeks to regulate “deviant feminine sexuality” in men and women. Using the example of the Young Women’s Leadership Project (YWLP), a Southern African feminist research and advocacy project that I coordinate at the African Gender Institute (AGI) at the University of Cape Town, I argue that African feminist activism should reconceptualise its activist mandate to include struggles against homophobia since the devaluation and hatred of the undisciplined feminine lies at the root of both sexism and homophobia.

This article employs oppositional black geography as a lens to examine spatiality in the novels of two black South African women writing during apartheid, Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo. In analyzing Tlali’s Muriel at Metropolitan and Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die, it argues that the authors used a critical spatial analysis of the nation to critique apartheid and its oppressive policies. It holds that by insisting on authoring their own worlds in a country that sought to deny them creative agency, Tlali and Ngcobo carved out intellectual space that enabled them to critique dominant ideologies of Afrikaner nationalism and white supremacy, while imagining and writing alternatives to a nation to which their relationships were primarily ones of disavowal and subjugation. Both Tlali and Ngcobo render visible the fissures within the seemingly naturalized apartheid sites they construct in their fiction, revealing the inherent contradictions and injustices of apartheid spatiality. Through their fiction, they were thus engaged in situated knowledge production and a reconfiguration of apartheid space into a more socially just place. In narrating subaltern discourses in their novels from the standpoint of those most oppressed by apartheid law and ideology and by creatively engaging the spatiality of apartheid, Tlali and Ngcobo offer new modes for reading the nation, valuable for elucidating the ways in which the national space genders black women, and how black women, in turn shape and reshape that space.

Family secrets run deep for Grace, a young girl growing up in Cape Town during the 1980s, spilling over into adulthood, and threating to ruin the respectable life she has built for herself. When an old childhood friend reappears, Grace’s memories of her childhood come rushing back, and she is confronted, once again, with the loss that has shaped her. She has to face up to the truth or continue to live a lie – but the choice is not straightforward. Grace is an intimate portrayal of violence, both personal and political, and its legacy on one person’s life. It meditates on the long shadow cast by personal trauma, showing the intergenerational imprint of violence and loss on people’s lives.

What other say about Grace:

“Elegant prose and subtle narration propel Grace’s story into the future while frequently and seamlessly pulling it into the past. Secrets and lies pulse through the story like the southeaster on the Western Cape landscape. The main characters may be Coloured and South African but Boswell shows readers that love, family and attendant relationships are not uncomplicated concepts.” –Makhosazana Xaba

“As writers we consciously avoid being didactic but we are undoubtedly transmitters of messages.The ones  Grace that impacted most are around the complexity of mother-daughter and intimate romantic relationship patterns…that familiar minefield we are all called to navigate over time, towards selfhood.” – Malika Ndlovu