Sex in Transition: Remaking Gender and Race in South Africa

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Barring this one exception, at Simone’s explicit request, I rely on pseudonyms to protect narrators’ anonymity throughout this book in accordance with Human Subjects requirements. 2. Medical gendered transitions are referred to many ways—including sex or gender reassignment, sex or gender realignment, sex changes, or gender confirmation. These differences are not merely semantic but describe various theories of gender and its origin. For instance, some see a “sex change” as a transition from a birth sex to a new sex, while others see this term as derogatory , whereas “sex realignment” refers to changing the body to match unchanged birth gender. I discuss this in more depth later but write with awareness of these debates. In South Africa, “sex reassignment” is the most common way narrators describe their transitions. 3. Turner goes on to describe gendered components of liminality outside of binaries, suggesting, “[i]t is consistent to find that in liminal situations . . . neophytes are sometimes treated or symbolically represented as being neither male nor female. Alternatively, they may be assigned characteristics of both sexes, regardless of their biological sex” (1967: 98). Another pairing of gender liminality is found in Niko Besnier’s work, “Polynesian Gender Liminality in Time and Space” (1994). Besnier uses the concept as a more accurate alternative to “transgender” and similar terminology, yet “much more than conveniently gender neutral labels” (287). Besnier’s use of this concept differs from my own in his link to Turner’s three specific meanings of liminal events and persons (specifically , “their ‘betwixt and between’ locus, outsider status and social inferiority”). I extend and broaden this concept, combining common usage of liminality with understandings of gender outside of anthropological application that allows space for social encouragement and valorization in some times and places. 4. David Valentine (2007) provides an excellent analysis of the term “transgender” and its raced and classed exclusions in the United States. See also Stryker and Whittle, The Transgender Studies Reader (2008), and Currah et 261 262 / Notes to Introduction al., Transgender Rights (2006). I explore this term’s application in South African contexts later. 5. Gender DynamiX is undertaking important public advocacy work in South Africa under the specific rubric of transgender rights; this group and additional organizations doing related political and social work of great importance are discussed in the Conclusion at length. 6. This is despite important exceptions recommending more careful attention to the composition of categories of gender and woman (e.g., Walker 1990; Manicom 1992). 7. While Van Zyl cites Reddy, Reddy relies on Africanists’ work in Rethinking Sexualities in Africa (2004) that preceded his own, indicating intertwined geneaologies. He points out, “Recently Arnfred (2004: 7) has suggested that rethinking sexualities in Africa entails ‘a double move of de-construction and reconstruction ’ beyond the ‘conceptual structure of colonial, and even post-colonial European imaginations.’ This issue of Agenda articulates a similar concern, demonstrating that the meanings of contemporary discourses on ‘African sexualities’ have much to tell us about the discursive aspects of sexuality in Africa” (Reddy 2004: 5). 8. Hoad’s process of reworking theory leads to the following generalizable conclusions: “Rubin’s essay reminds us that theory is produced in and out of a space-time, with political allegiances to that space-time, and that while any theory of sexuality risks reifying and universalizing its space-time, it can be adapted, reworked, and embraced as it travels, and travel it will” (Hoad 2010: xx). 9. The scale of slavery was monumental; Harsch (1980) suggests that within approximately 150 years 25,000 Africans and Asians had been enslaved in the region. 10. The temporality of mine marriages has not been fully explored, as most analyses assume either situational same-sex sexuality (e.g., men having sex with wives because women were unavailable) or historical proof of gay identity. I’m interested in a more gendered interpretation of mine marriages attentive to the intricacies of queer temporalities in all contexts. I return to this concept in Chapter 5. 11. This relationship between South Africa and Britain was maintained until 1961 when South Africa withdrew from the British Commonwealth and became a Republic. 12. In Foucault’s terms, apartheid was a biopolitics as it involved the politics of policing the population but also the politics of its populations’ quotidian daily rituals. 13. Moffies is a term that was considered derogatory when referring to gays and lesbians, and sometimes gay men who are effeminate, with regional dominance in the Western Cape, but...