Sex in Transition: Remaking Gender and Race in South Africa

Chapter 3: Redefining Transition through Necropolitics

Three Redefining Transition through Necropolitics This chapter develops the theoretical frameworks of Chapters 1 and 2 in a new direction. Foucault’s notions continue to be useful and relevant to these considerations of mobile or restricted experiences of the temporality of sex, describing states’ regulations of bodies. But how can his traveling theories be extended and challenged in relation to self-described sexed transitions in apartheid and transitional contexts? Chapter 3 reconceptualizes and personalizes gender transition beyond medico-legal definitions through attention to seven narratives collected from 1997–2009 which detail encounters mediated through inconsistencies in legal rights, incongruous access to medical treatment, and unpredictable relationships and employment opportunities. In so doing, these narratives complicate and redefine gender boundaries, unsettling medical designations of gender liminality and expectations of somatic changes to emphasize the intimacy of decisions about personal transitions in South Africa’s political transition. Part of what makes this analysis different from those of U.S. and European transsexuals’ narratives can be articulated through Achille Mbembe’s critiques and articulations of colonialism. For Mbembe, racism is a technology that facilitates biopower—the domain of life controlled by power—and the cruel relationship between life and death in colonial contexts that he deems necropolitics. He suggests that ultimately, “the notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (2003: 39–40) and alternately identifies necropolitics as a way to relate biopower to the states of exception and siege that have normalized killing, especially in colonial contexts, and to understand the relationships among resistance, sacrifice, and terror. According to Mbembe, the restrictions of racism have been and continue to be violently policed and tested under colonialism in necropolitical contexts. He intimates, 109 110 / Sex in Transition in most instances, the selection of races, the prohibition of mixed marriages, forced sterilization, even the extermination of vanquished peoples are to find their first testing ground in the colonial world. Here we see the first syntheses between massacre and bureaucracy, that incarnation of Western rationality.1 (2003: 22–23) This violent and rationalized racism—often intersecting with sexuality —is critical to the stories of South Africans’ gendered transitions and the racialized lines along which they must be historicized. The related boundaries concerning sexuality and sexed bodies, as well as the differences between them, are not fully articulated in Mbembe’s work. But he alludes to the connections between sexuality and violence/death, arguing that “[t]he truth of sex and its deadly attributes reside in the experience of loss of the boundaries separating reality, events, and fantasized objects” (2003: 15). It is the dissolution of boundaries of the body and the troubling of sexed reality that are of particular interest here. And the capacity to define who matters and who does not, whose life is worth living, as Mbembe, Judith Butler (1993: 16), and Jasbir Puar (2007: 36) put it in different contexts, is characteristic of sovereignty.2 As we will see the in the narratives that follow, the making of reality along both raced and sexed lines is often violent in colonial and postcolonial contexts and rests on vacillating notions. The varying perceptions and roles of the state in its many guises remind us that “colonial terror constantly intertwines with colonially generated fantasies of wilderness and death and fictions to create the effect of the real” (2003: 25). Apartheid was predicated on the attempt to create social categories of race—and sex—as reality. In the narratives in this chapter we see the ability to constantly define and redefine what it means to be “real” (real men or real women) within raced, classed, and located parameters. The forced liminality described in Chapters 1 and 2 further fits Mbembe’s ideas of necropolitical initiatives. In the case of sex reassignment and medical experimentation, transsexuals are sometimes kept in physically and legally liminal spaces, as Mbembe describes colonial slaves, “alive but in a state of injury, in a phantom-like world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity” (2003: 21, emphasis in original). This “state of injury” also speaks to the physical sexual liminality faced by some who have gone through partial and botched sex reassignments, like “specials” and conscripts addressed in Chapter 2, and the social limin- Redefining Transition through Necropolitics / 111 ality of being forced out of gendered spaces, like those who physically transition but cannot change their identity documents. However...