A Queer Transition: Whiteness in the Prismatic, Post-Apartheid Drag Performances of Pieter-Dirk Uys and Steven Cohen

This essay analyzes the use of drag and gender subversion by two white South African performers, Pieter-Dirk Uys and Steven Cohen, during the long decade bisected by South Africa’s political transition (roughly 1990 to 2001). While satirist Uys invented his drag alter ego Evita Bezuidenhout to critique the hypocrisy of the apartheid regime, his post-apartheid performances modeled a rehabilitated, self-critical whiteness. Breaking the fourth wall, Uys (as Evita) interviewed Nelson Mandela on live television and educated South Africa’s still racially divided communities on voting laws. Rather than embracing the narrative of the rainbow nation central to the new democratic dispensation, performance artist Cohen used his queer body to enact what he calls “monster drag,” highlighting whiteness’s simultaneous alienation and privilege in relation to the black majority state. While vastly different in objective and aesthetic, these performances allowed for what the essay calls a “prismatic” deconstruction of white identity within the context of political transformation. Through a process of categorical ambiguity and affective displacement, each performer used drag to open up a space for the whites who had formerly been classified as “European” to claim a queer form of Africanness. As time has advanced and the dream of the rainbow nation has faded, however, nonwhite drag performers have increasingly taken center stage to challenge the boundaries of both queerness and whiteness. The essay ends with an analysis of black queer South African performance artist Athi-Patra Ruga’s ongoing series The Future White Women of Azania as an example of new directions in South African queer performance.