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Caster Semenya: Gods and Monsters

Brenna Munro
Published online: 23 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: Brenna Munro (2010) Caster Semenya: Gods and Monsters, Safundi: The Journal
of South African and American Studies, 11:4, 383-396, DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2010.511782
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2010.511782

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Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies

Vol. 11, No 4, October 2010, 383396

Caster Semenya: Gods and Monsters

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Brenna Munro

Global sporting events are supposed to offer a United Nations-like model of

egalitarian international cooperation, a literal level playing-field on which every
nation alike can compete. They are thus, of course, an opportunity for individual
nations to project power, win prestige, and build patriotic feeling. From Jesse Owens
challenge to white supremacy at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin to Zinedine Zidanes
captaining of a French team full of fellow immigrants to win the soccer World Cup
in 1998, these contests have also changed peoples ideas about race and nation in
unexpected ways, and on a grand scale. One could argue, however, that the winning
of these competitions compensates for, and indeed obscures, real-world global
inequality, and that their staging of exacting and scrupulous fairness in the
judgment of physical achievement draws attention away from far more important
modes of injustice.
Sometimes, though, the disparities and conflicts of the new world order are
made visible through sportsas is the case with the young South African runner
Caster Semenya. The question of whether Semenya is or is not a woman has become
a much-analyzed global media event, in which establishing fairness turns out to be
rather complicated. From one point of view, the fact that Semenyas body might be
producing higher levels of testosterone than other women gives her an unfair athletic
advantage. From another, it seems unjust to deny a teenager from a small African
village a chance at success, especially when she was unaware of her own possible sexvariance. Indeed, women with normal levels of testosterone are capable of running
faster than she hasspectacular as her recent win was, she has not yet broken the
world record for the eight hundred metersand most other intersex people with the
particular condition she might have are not, after all, world-class runners.1
More largely, this event calls into question how we define sex difference, and how
we might make space in the world for people who do not fit neatly into our categories
Correspondence to: Brenna Munro, University of Miami, College of Arts and Sciences, 1252 Memorial Drive,
Ashe Bldg, Rm 321, Coral Gables, FL 33146, USA. Email: bmunro@miami.edu
1
We do not know with full certainty whether Semenya has an intersex condition, or what kind, as I shall discuss
later.

ISSN 1753-3171 (print)/ISSN 1543-1304 (online) 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2010.511782

Downloaded by [70.172.227.126] at 19:21 11 November 2014

384 B. Munro

of both sex and gender, while simultaneously raising the matter of how the world
imagines racial difference and African bodies today. At stake, too, is the way in which
this event is shifting South Africas national imaginary, and, indeed, what that
countrys current protective embrace of this vulnerable, appealing figure of black
female masculinity might mean for other South Africans whose sex, gender and
sexuality do not conform to social norms. On a more academic level, the Semenya
affair also underlines the importance of intersectional analysis informed by queer
theory within African studies. One cannot make sense of this spectacle without
thinking about the afterlife of imperialism under globalization, the international
politics of race, and how models of sex and gender normativity are produced and
circulated in this contextand these forms of normativity are intimately linked with
questions of sexuality. Discussions of contemporary Africa, then, need to attend to
what we might call the postcolonial politics of stigma.
African anxieties about sovereignty and survival have become entangled, to use
Sarah Nuttalls keyword,2 with ideas about the body, sex, and sexuality. In an
important essay, Jean Comaroff draws our attention to how it is impossible to
contemplate the shape of late modern historyin Africa and elsewherewithout the
polymorphous presence of HIV/AIDS,3 and suggests that:
Across Africa . . . discourses of perversion and shame have been common [ . . . ].
The spread of AIDS has spurred the vilification of homosexuality [ . . . ]. It has also
licensed the policing of other forms of sexuality not securely under the control of
normative authority, hence the demonization of independent women, immigrants,
and youth.4

AIDS, homosexuality, rape, and challenges to gender norms, while all bound up
with stigma, are of course very different phenomena, embedded in a wide variety
of social and historical contexts. The danger of linking these issues is that one will
flatten out their differences, and indeed end up reinforcing a narrative of Africa as the
tragic, hopeless scene of violent gender trouble. I am suggesting, however, that
thinking these phenomena together, as well as in their different particularities, might
yield new insights. To take a recent example, anti-gay laws that have been proposed
in Ugandawhich initially included the death penalty for HIV-positive active
homosexuals, and harsh prison terms for people who fail to turn their gay relatives
over to the authoritiesnot only represent the persecution of people perceived as gay
or HIV-positive, but also constitute an alarming extension of government power over
all Ugandans. This law is also, not incidentally, indicative of a strengthening
relationship between right-wing evangelical US groups and African political elites,5
even as leaders like Ugandas President Museveni present homosexuality as a foreign
import, crossing borders promiscuously like the AIDS virus itself I hear European
2

Nuttall, Entanglement.
Comaroff, Beyond Bare Life, 197.
4
Ibid., 202.
5
The Ugandan MP who sponsored the bill, David Bahati, is apparently a member of the Family, a secretive yet
influential US-based Christian organization (see Bartholomew, David Bahati); see also Alsop, Ugandas
Anti-Gay Bill, for more details of American evangelical involvement with Ugandas proposed law.
3

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385

homosexuals are recruiting in Africa, as he said this November.6 This specter of

European re-infiltration of Africa through the bodies of recruited gay Africans
is an uncanny mirror image of the contemporary anti-immigration fever gripping
Europe, in which Africans are imagined penetrating the walls of fortress Europe by
falsely presenting themselves as in need of asylum.
African churches are of course far from monolithic, and a leader in the Ugandan
Anglican church, Canon Gideon Byamugisha, has condemned the proposed law,
saying it would be state-legislated genocide against a specific community of
Ugandans, however few they may be.7 As Marc Epprecht points out: Dissident,
minority sexualities are not an irrelevant sideshow to the great dramas of
underdevelopment and racial conflict in Africa.8 The struggle for freedom from
sexualized stigma in contemporary Africa has become an important component of
the larger fight for democracy and social justiceand against violence.
South African history, in particular, can be read through a series of international
sex/gender/sexuality scandals that seem to rebound upon one another, from the
exhibiting of Sara Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, across Europe in the early
1800s, to Gods Step-Children, Sarah Gertrude Millins 1924 novel about the sin of
miscegenation that was a best-seller in America, to Caster Semenya. Apartheid itself
was enmeshed with histories of sexuality and stigma: it was built on an alliance
between Anglo-South Africans and Afrikaners forged through early twentiethcentury Black Peril panics about the sexual threat black men supposedly posed
to white women, was driven by a phobic preoccupation with interracial sexual
mixing, and was enforced through both endemic, unspoken sexual violence against
black people, and a strict, indeed militarized, gender regime of whiteness.9 Neville
Hoad argues that Thabo Mbekis AIDS denialism was driven in part by a hyperawareness of this history, and the sexual ideology of racismthe ways in which the
colonial imagination figured Africa in terms of deviant bodies and primitive
sexuality.10
The post-apartheid period has been marked not only by AIDS and its disavowal
but also by a much-discussed rape crisis, with media focus shifting from the
infamous baby-rape case of 2001, to the 2005 rape trial of now-president Jacob
Zumain which his accuser was an HIV-positive AIDS activist who identifies as a
lesbian11and, most recently, to the phenomenon of corrective rape of lesbians.12
6

See Gyezaho Musuveni Warns Against Homosexuality.

See Ford and Pomfret, Uganda Church Leader.
8
Epprecht, Hungochani, 207.
9
Samuelson discusses Black Peril discourse in The Rainbow Womb: Rape and Race in South African Fiction
of the Transition. In Apartheid Thinking, J.M. Coetzee makes the case that the intellectual architects of
apartheid were producing a mad response to psychosexual dynamics, suggesting that it did indeed flower
out of self-interest and greed, but also out of desire, and the denial of desire (164). See also Drewetts
discussion of the production of white masculinities and femininities through conscription and its attendant
popular discourses during apartheid (Drewett, Construction and Subversion).
10
Hoad, African Intimacies, xxi.
11
See Gifford, Zuma Rape Case, and Robins, Sexual Politics.
12
See Kelly, Raped and Killed.
7

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386 B. Munro

As Deborah Posel puts it in her analysis of the production of a public discourse about
sexual violence within South Africa, the issue of rape had been thrust to the
forefront of debates about the meaning of democracy and justice, and the manner of
the new national subject.13 These assaults, compounding the social exclusion of
their victims, then re-stigmatize South Africa itself when they get reported in the
global media. At the same time, South Africas post-apartheid democratic modernity
is defined, both at home and abroad, by its promotion of human rights, including its
ground-breaking constitutional enshrinement of gay rights. The targeting of women
who look like Caster Semenya, then, can be read as a sign of the limits or failures of
South African national liberation.
The eighteen-year-old runner comes from a poor background in the rural province
of Limpopo. She first received attention when she won the African Junior Athletics
Championships in July of 2009, improving her previous competition time by seven
seconds, and beating the record held by Zola Budd, the famous white apartheid-era
runner. Her dramatic improvement over the course of a year raised suspicions of
doping, even though she was benefiting from world-class coaching for the first
time.14 Her masculine appearance also sparked rumors, as it has throughout her life;
and when she was in Berlin for the August 2009 World Championships in Athletics,
she was forced to undergo sex verification procedures.15 The International
Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) leaked the fact that she was being tested,
and the press reported on it three hours before the final; in a seemingly effortless
performance, Semenya nonetheless won gold. In the furor that followed her win and
the news of the sex verification test, South Africa rallied behind her, and she was
greeted at Johannesburg airport by a huge crowd of fans, as well as by Winnie
Madizika-Mandela and Jacob Zuma. As journalist Daniel Howden put it, The ANC
has been quick to pick up on popular anger at the perceived humiliation of the young
South African by international athletics authorities. The president of Athletics South
Africa (ASA), Leonard Chuene, resigned in protest from the board of the IAAF, and
expressed his outrage publicly:
Im fuming. This girl has been castigated from day one, based on what? Chuene
said. Theres no scientific evidence. You cant say somebodys child is not a girl.
You denounce my child as a boy when shes a girl? If you did that to my child, Id
shoot you.16

However, the South African Mail and Guardian subsequently broke the story that
Chuene had been instructed by the IAAF to have Semenyas sex tested before the
World Championships, had done so without explaining to her what was going on,
and had then decided to send her to Berlin even though the results were
13

Posel, Baby Rape, 22. See also Grahams discussion of rape discourse in nationalist terms and in the global
media (Save Us All).
14
McRae (Being Caster Semenya) describes Semenyas coach thus: A student activist in the seminal June
1976 Soweto school riots which did so much to rock apartheid, Seme is one of just a very few South Africans
to have reached the IAAFs highest level five in coaching.
15
See Dixon, Runner Caster Semenya.
16
Ibid.

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Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies

387

not good.17 In the wake of this revelation, Chuene resigned from the ASA. In
September, the Australian Daily Telegraph reported that the results of the IAAF sex
testing in Berlin indicated that Semenya did not have ovaries or a uterus; Semenya
was born with undescended testes, the report said, which provided her with three
times the amount of testosterone present in an average female.18 However, the IAAF
responded by saying that the Daily Telegraph claims about the testing should be
treated with caution.19 In November, the IAAF announced, in a belated display of
diplomatic skill, that Semenya had been found innocent of any wrong-doing and
would be allowed to keep her medals, and that the results of the tests would be kept
private. After eleven months of uncertainty about whether she would be allowed to
take part in future races, the IAFF issued a brief announcement in July 2010 that
Semenya can now compete, and that her medical details will remain confidential;
meanwhile, rumors circulate that she has been getting hormone therapy.20
Female athletes inhabit impossible bodies, where our desire for the idealthe
Olympian, the record-breakingcomes up against our drive to normalize. The
physically exceptional is always in danger of being seen as abnormal, deviant, or
monstrous. It seems strangely appropriate that Caster would have a close namesake
in the Castor of Greek myth, the mortal half-twin of a God. All world-class athletes
have queerly God-like bodies, strange genetic gifts; but women whose bodies achieve
a strength, swiftness, agility, hardness, and bulk that we traditionally associate with
the masculinelong-distance runners who no longer menstruate, gymnasts who
have never developed breastsare under particular pressure to visually and
performatively re-feminize themselves, even as their bodily transformations are
required. In the case of Semenya, both her gender performance and her sex are under
scrutiny. In modern sports, the border between male and female is inspected and
policed in a quite literal sense, and Semenya is accused of being an illegal immigrant
across that border. It is international sports itself, though, that has smuggled a
particular set of ideas about sex differences around the world, under the guise of the
universal, the natural, and the scientific. Some of those ideas are: there are only two
sexes; those two sexes are so different as to be almost separate species; and men will
always beat women in physical contest, so it would be unsporting to have them
compete together. The categories of male and female are, however, as man-made
as the decathlon and the nation-state.
Modern Western medicine has attempted to correct, and therefore remove from
social existence, bodies that do not conform to the gender binary, operating on
babies with ambiguous genitalia, usually without the knowledge or consent of the
parents.21 In the 1990s, intersex activists emergedas if out of nowhereclaiming
their right to decide both the sex of their bodies and their gender identities for
17

See Sindane, Semenya Saga.

Levy, Either/Or, scr 2.
19
Smith, Caster Semenya Hermaphrodite Claim.
20
Goldman and Block, Runner Semenya Cleared, scr 1.
21
See Cheryl Chases ground-breaking Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex
Political Activism, in which, among other things, she points out the hypocrisy of Western disapproval of
18

388 B. Munro

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themselves; but the scandal over Semenya is bringing the question of intersexuality to
the attention of a mass audience for the first time. The visibility of sex difference, in
particular, has been thrown into question for the global audience. Semenya looks
somewhat masculine, but her genitalia apparently look femaleinspections of her
anatomy usually satisfied her doubters in the past, as many reporters have
mentioned.22 However, modern sex testing, involving a set of variables that includes
internal organs, hormonal levels, and chromosomes, is strangely invisible, both of the
body and yet disembodied. Moreover, the science of sex is, it turns out, in crisis.
Anne Fausto-Sterling begins her ground-breaking Sexing the Body: Gender Politics
and the Construction of Sexuality (2000) with the question of sex-testing in sports,
pointing out that in 1968:
The [International Olympic Committee] IOC decided to make use of the modern
scientific chromosome test. The problem, though, is that this test, and the more
sophisticated polymerase chain reaction to detect small regions of DNA associated
with testes development that the IOC uses today, cannot do the work the IOC
wants it to do. A bodys sex is simply too complex. There is no either/or [ . . . ].
What bodily signals and functions we define as male and female come already
entangled in our ideas about gender [ . . . ]. Choosing which criteria to use in
determining sex [ . . . ] are social decisions for which scientists can offer no absolute
guidelines.23

Alice Dreger, a professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at

Northwestern University, put it this way in relation to the Semenya affair:
This is not a solvable problem [ . . . ]. People always press me: Isnt there one
marker we can use? No. We couldnt then and we cant now, and science is
making it more difficult and not less, because it ends up showing us how much
blending there is and how many nuances, and it becomes impossible to point to
one thing, or even a set of things, and say thats what it means to be male.24

The verification process adopted by the IAAF is indicative of the complex,

contradictory, and often inconclusive nature of current scientific approaches to
knowing sex. Here is Judith Butlers take on their process:
If we consider that this act of sex determination was supposed to be
collaboratively arrived at by a panel that included a gynecologist, an
endocrinologist, a psychologist and an expert on gender [ . . . ] then the
assumption is that cultural and psychological factors are part of sex-determination,
and that not one of these experts could come up with a definitive finding on his
or her own [ . . . ]. This co-operative venture suggests as well that sex-determination
is decided by consensus and, conversely, where there is no consensus, there is no
determination of sex. Is this not a presumption that sex is a social negotiation of
some kind? And are we, in fact, witnessing in this case a massive effort to socially
( footnote continued )
African FGM (female genital mutilation) practices in light of the surgery routinely performed on intersex
infants.
22
Levy, Either/Or, scr. 2.
23
Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, 35.
24
Levy, Either/Or, scr. 6.

Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies

389

negotiate the sex of Semenya, with the media included as a party to the
deliberations?25

In her commentary, Butler also made a humane suggestion about how sporting
institutions might respond quite differently to this definitional crisis:

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Rather than try and find out what sex Semenya or anyone else really is, why
dont we think instead about standards for participation under gender categories
that have the aim of being both egalitarian and inclusive? Only then might we [ . . . ]
open sports to the complexly constituted species of human animal to which we
belong.26

The Semenya affair indeed prompted the IOC to hold a special conference to
review their policies on gender in January 2010. This gathering of experts did not,
of course, manage to come up with a foolproof sex test; they concluded that rules
should be put in place for determining an athletes eligibility to compete on a caseby-case basisbut they did not indicate what those rules should be.27 They did,
however, have some recommendations for what should be done about athletes who
are deemed to be intersex:
Athletes who identify themselves as female but have medical disorders that give
them masculine characteristics should have their disorders diagnosed and treated
[ . . . ]. Those who agree to be treated will be permitted to participate, said Dr
Maria New, a panel participant and an expert on sexual development disorders.
Those who do not agree to be treated on a case-by-case basis will not be
permitted.28

Treatment is rather vaguely defined here, and seems to go beyond the kinds of
medical intervention that some intersex people do, in fact, need in order to avoid
health problems: one of the treatments they seem to be talking about, for example,
is lowering athletes testosterone levels. Far from opening sports to the complexly
constituted species of human animal to which we belong, this set of recommendations both instantiates intersex conditions as disorders, and forces intersex athletes
to modify their bodies, to reshape their sex, in order to compete.29
25

Butler, Wise Distinctions, scr. 1.

Ibid., scr. 1.
27
Kolata, IOC Panel Calls for Treatment.
28
Ibid. Dr New is a controversial figure, because of her involvement with procedures administering
dexamethasone to pregnant women who might give birth to girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) in
order to prevent their fetuses from developing genitalia that do not look normal. In other words, this is an
attempt to treat something that is a cosmetic issue, not a health risk. Meanwhile, children exposed to
dexamethasone have been shown to be at higher risk for problems with working memory, with verbal
processing, and with anxiety. See Alice Dregers website raising awareness about News experiments and the
lack of FDA oversight, Fetaldex.org.
29
There has been much recent debate about whether intersexuality should be understood as a disorder rather
than an identitymany people would rather be understood as women or men with a particular physical
condition, rather than as being intersex, and are calling for the use of the phrase disorders of sex
development. See Ellen K. Feders Imperatives of Normality: From Intersex to Disorders of Sex
Development. I think there is something of a double bind at work here; there is a form of stigma produced by
becoming a legible minority, but the pathologizing effect of the language of disorders isnt necessarily an
26

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390 B. Munro

As a social negotiation that includes the global media, Semenyas embodiment

and its interpretations cannot be understood without thinking about the signification
of her race. The legacy of imperialism and slavery, and how it has shaped the
figuration of black women, seems to be being re-pixelated, if you will, through the
global media circus over Semenya. The Semenya affair coincided uncannily with
the viral internet image of Michelle Obama PhotoShopped with a monkeys face
that had been causing controversy;30 a black woman hailed as a global icon of
conventional femininity and grace, let alone a woman whose sex is in question, is
persistently defaced by the racist gaze. For South Africans, the questioning of
Semenyas sex not only brings to mind apartheids categorizations of people into
racial groups31a traumatic and chaotic process that involved the inspection of
peoples bodies on a nationwide scalebut calls up the life-story of Sara Baartman,
a chapter of imperial history that has been central to post-apartheid nationalist
discourse.
Baartman was a Khoisan woman who was taken from Cape Town to Europe in
1810, where she became a traveling human exhibit of racial and sexual difference. She
ended up in France, becoming the object of pseudo-scientific study, and as Meg
Samuelson puts it, she was inscribed [ . . . ] as the iconic figure of African
womanhood in metropolitan fantasies: as fundamentally primitive and lascivious.32
After she died, her sexual organs and her brain were displayed in the Musee de
LHomme in Paris until 1974. Baartman has been invoked in a host of cultural
productions since the 1990s, and was the subject of a government campaign to have
her remains returned to South Africa. At her nationally televised funeral in 2002,
then-President Mbeki delivered the speech, and declared her burial place a national
heritage site. As Janell Hobson puts it in her discussion of Baartman and how she has
signified in the Western imagination:
Not only did this treatment of Baartmans private parts usher in pseudo-race
science, which attempts to locate racial characteristics within the racial body, but it
also shaped the ways in which black female bodies are viewed: with an emphasis on
the rear end as a signifier of deviant sexuality. As a result, such associations of black
female sexuality with animalistic characteristics emerge not just in pseudo-scientific
studies of human anatomy but also in popular culture.33

Siobhan Somerville notes that the racial difference of the African body . . . was
located in its literal excess, a specifically sexual excess that placed her body outside the
boundaries of the normal female.34 In Baartmans case, the generous shape of her
buttocks were at issue; with Semenya, it is a supposed excess of testosterone that is
( footnote continued )
easy route to normalization eitherparticularly when connected with the highly charged issue of sex and
gender.
30
See Sweney, Michelle Obama Racist Picture.
31
As Levy points out, Either/Or, scr. 3.
32
Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, 86.
33
Hobson, Venus in the Dark, 46.
34
Somerville, Queering the Color Line, 26.

Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies

391

the problem. The inspection of Semenyas body seems driven in part, then, by
a familiar prurient/Enlightenment will-to-know; it was clear from the start, after all,
that this was not a case of cheating. The small Limpopo village from which she so
recently came is not a likely scene for clandestine sex-change operations. As her father
put it:

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I dont even know how they do this gender testing . . . I dont know what a
chromosome is. This is all very painful for us, we live by simple rules in our culture.
We do not intrude. This is not natural. To go through such an unusual thing must
be very hard for Caster.35

What is not natural, in Jacob Semenyas view, is not the body that defies the
gender binary, but intruding on whatever body one is born with. If the
postoperative transsexual body is a postmodern body, as Susan Stryker suggests,
perhaps the intersex body is a pre-modern body.36 Semenya seems so sympathetic
to Western audiences, in part, because she is the opposite of the knowing modern
subjectinnocent, for example, of the arts of camouflage of conventional femininity.
That many spectators seem to be responding to her public ordeal with concern,
rather than mockery, is a relief; but perhaps there is also a way in which this idea
of Semenya as innocent or pre-modern conveniently reinforces a post-imperial
sense of the natural global order: that the untamed, simple African body is one
that has not yet been streamlined into modern norms, that Africa is therefore both
before and outside.
The interpretations of Semenyas sex, gender and embodiment made by South
African politicians, on the other hand, are primarily inspired by an anti-imperial,
nationalist politics. As Chuene put it, We are not going to allow Europeans to
describe and defeat our children.37 In the immediate aftermath of the race, the ANC
spokesperson, Brian Sokutu, defended Semenya in what we might call feministnationalist terms:
Caster is not the only woman athlete with a masculine build and IAAF should
know better. We condemn the motives of those who have made it their business to
question her gender due to her physique and running style. Such comments can
only serve to portray women as being weak, Sokutu said. Not only has 18-yearold Caster made her family proud but the entire country [ . . . ]. Her determination
to succeed in becoming a world-renowned athlete has made Caster a role model for
young athletes.38

Jacob Zuma echoed these sentiments when he declared that Semenya showcased
womens achievement, power and strength, and had reminded the world of the
importance of the rights to human dignity and privacy.39 There is something
extremely heartening about hearing government officialsand indeed the local
35

Malone, Miller, and Maclean, She Wouldnt Wear Dresses.

Stryker, (De)Subjugated Knowledges, 8.
37
See Howden, South Africa versus the World.
38
See ANC Condemns Semenya Gender Row.
39
See Gevisser, South African Angst.
36

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392 B. Munro

community Semenya comes fromdefending her right to be recognized as the

gender she understands herself to be, regardless of her bodily make-up, and indeed
her right to perform being a woman in unconventional ways. It is worth pointing
out, too, that South Africa is unusual for standing by an athlete found to be too
masculine by an international sporting body; other women in a similar position have
in the past been shamefully abandoned.40 However, this approach does not leave
much room for alternative identities or embodimentswhether intersex, transgender, or transsexualthat complicate the male/female binary. The remarks of the
current president of the ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, make this painfully clear:
Hermaphrodite, what is that? Somebody tell me, what is hermaphrodite in Pedi?
Theres no such thing, hermaphrodite, in Pedi. So dont impose your hermaphrodite
concepts on us.41 As Tavia Nyongo puts it:
Is it her defenders who are perhaps embarrassed and ashamed by her exuberant
embodiment, more than her? [ . . . ]. Young though she may be [ . . . ] who is to say
that her profoundest sense of self lies with being treated and considered like a
girl? [ . . . ]. Semenyas defenders are clearly dealing with a gender panic of their
own [ . . . ]. In the name of protecting African femininity from a western, scientific
gaze, Semenyas defenders also disguise their own patriarchal investment in naming
and controlling this gender excess.42

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who has been appointed head of the official

governmental Task Team assigned to protect Semenya (!) said, in matriarchal
contrast: There is nothing wrong with being a hermaphrodite. It is Gods creation.
She is Gods child. She did not make herself. God decided to make her that way and
that cant be held against her.43
Of course, while Madikizela-Mandela is de-stigmatizing intersexuality here, she is
doing so by presenting Semenya as an innocent child, within a family romance that
also (re)casts her as mother of the nation. Semenya is thus framed very differently
from, say, a butch South African lesbianor an HIV-positive sex worker. Of course
the question of sexuality cannot be conflated with that of gender identity, just as
being intersex is not the same as being transsexual; however, sexuality is more often
than not read through gender performance. Semenyas gender presentation thus
summons up the figure of the lesbian, regardless of what her own sexual orientation
might be.44
40

Fausto-Sterling describes how badly the Spanish government and public treated hurdler Maria Patino when
she failed a sex test in 1985 (Sexing the Body, 12); more recently, Indian runner Santhi Soundarajan was
stripped of a silver medal at the 2006 Asian Games after being found to have androgen insensitivity syndrome.
The government of her state (Tamil Nadu) awarded her the equivalent of the prize money anyway, and after
recovering from what she calls the mental torture of the experience, she has begun rebuilding her life as a
coach (Singh, India Athlete).
41
See Mohaloa and SAPA, No Such Word.
42
Nyongo, The Unforgiveable Transgression, scr.1.
43
See Winnie Mandela Calls on South Africa.
44
While Semenyas masculinity raises suspicions about her sexual orientation for some, for other spectators, her
androgyny makes her sexlessa kind of black Joan of Arc (I would like to thank Senam Okudzeto for that
analogy).

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393

Looking at photographs of Semenya brings to mind, for me, young lesbian South
African photographer Zanele Muholis portraits of butch black women, a rich archive
of female masculinities that charts a communal response to sexual violence and
celebrates queer sexuality and embodiment.45 Muholis work also reminds us that, as
David Smith and Mark Gevisser have pointed out, the very week after Semenyas race
in Berlin, the men who raped and murdered the out butch lesbian Eudy Simelane in
2008 were on trial in South Africa.46 Simelane played for the national womens
football team, and her sporting popularity may be the reason that her case made it to
trialother murders of lesbians have not, although they have provoked a great deal
of local activism.47 Winnie Mandela and Jacob Zuma, however, have not publicly
decried these murders, nor the many more cases of corrective rape that have
occurred over the last few yearsthese women do not, apparently, qualify as
daughters of the nation in the way that Semenya does.48 To use Meg Samuelsons
terminology, it is as if Semenya is being made to embody national unity, while the
bodies that mirror hers are being dis-remembered.49
Nonetheless, it is remarkable to see two such powerful political figures, who have
been associated with homophobia in the past, aligning themselves in defense of this
gender-queer girlsaying firmly that she has rights, that she belongs, and that she
represents South Africa.50 This response might not have been possible if it wasnt for
South Africas rich history of activism around sexuality, gender, and AIDS. Sports has
provided some of South Africas most spectacular transformational moments; and
perhaps this chance series of events, and this remarkable young person, will reactivate
the generous, queer-friendly spirit of the early days of the rainbow nation.
45

Muholi has brought attention to the violent targeting of lesbians in her own township community and beyond
through original research and her striking brand of visual activism, to use her term. Muholis work can be
found here: http://www.michaelstevenson.com/contemporary/artists/muholi.htm.
46
See Smiths Caster Semenya Is a Hero and Gevissers Castigated and Celebrated.
47
For example, a coalition of different gay, womens rights, and antiviolence organizations started the
Campaign 07-07-07 in February 2008, in order to combat growing hate crimes. The campaigns name
commemorates the deaths of two women, Sizakele Sigasa and Salome Masooa, who were murdered in Soweto
on that date. See South Africa: 07-07-07 Campaign. As Kelly (Raped and Killed) reports: Despite more
than 30 reported murders of lesbians in the last decade, Simelanes trial has produced the first conviction, when
one man who pleaded guilty to her rape and murder was jailed last month. On sentencing, the judge said that
Simelanes sexual orientation had no significance in her killing.
48
Kelly (Raped and Killed): Research released last year by Triangle, a leading South African gay rights
organization, revealed that a staggering 86% of black lesbians from the Western Cape said they lived in fear of
sexual assault. The group says it is dealing with up to 10 new cases of corrective rape every week. What were
seeing is a spike in the numbers of women coming to us having been raped and who have been told throughout
the attack that being a lesbian was to blame for what was happening to them, said Vanessa Ludwig, the chief
executive at Triangle.
49
See Samuelsons discussion of women, the nation, and Baartman in Remembering the Nation.
50
Madikizela-Mandelas support of Semenya is paradoxical in light of her history of the strategic use of
homophobic stigma. In 1991, she and her male entourage were accused of the kidnapping and assault of four
youths, and the murder of the youngest of them. Her defense was to accuse the gay white priest who ran the
group home the youths lived in of encouraging them to have sex with each other and of molesting them
himselfshe thus presented herself as rescuing and disciplining the young men. The well-known image of her
supporters outside the court holding a placard declaring that Homosex is not in black culture finds an echo in
the spectacle of Zumas trial fifteen years later, and his supporters vocal fury towards his accuser. See Rachel
Holmes on Madikizela-Mandelas trial (White Rapists).

394 B. Munro

On a global level, Semenyas vexed embodiment thus invokes multiple larger

unfolding histories, even as it provokes a variety of potential shifts in global ideas
about sex, race, and politics.

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