Sex in Transition: Remaking Gender and Race in South Africa

Chapter 4: Stabane, Raced Intersexuality and Same-Sex Relationships in Soweto

Four Stabane, Raced Intersexuality and Same-Sex Relationships in Soweto How does one prove the “realness” of a body? What kinds of evidence create this reality? And how do such realities, in the sense that narrators and Mbembe articulate in the previous chapter, shift and change over time? This chapter examines cocreated visions of the realities and meanings of gendered bodies—how they look, function, and are experienced —through a consideration of the relationships between intersexuality and same-sex sexualities and their violent enforcement. Transitions articulate gender liminality differently in different communities. This chapter extends the concept of gender transition, detaching it from selfchosen identities (such as “transsexual”) and redefining transition as a space moved in and out of in the context of state politics, community expectations, and sexual encounters. It also challenges the temporality of transition in a different way than the chapter before it, considering how bodies can be differently sexed at different moments based on selfrepresentation , community perception, or sexual orientation. Theorists of sexuality and the body have led us to the point where we can confidently assert that the relationships among sexuality, gender, and sex are not fixed and stable but are the contingent outcomes of located and historical practices. Not only are these ways of theorizing the constitution of these categories important, but such distinctions must also be regularly applied to interpretations and theorizations of bodies and relationships. As the previous chapters demonstrated, corporeal expectations of both sex and race have been violently policed and used to justify imperialism. Such concepts have concrete effects because they establish norms about possible ways to be—in a body or in a sexual relationship. And, beyond simple analogy, gendered norms create violent hierarchies of located and raced bodies. 183 184 / Sex in Transition However, despite the destabilization and contingencies of these interconnections and despite persuasive analyses to the contrary, assumptions that all people are strictly “in” female or male bodies have remained central in feminist scholarship. In an effort to unsettle the persistent salience of sex and draw attention to the bases of its disruptions, Sex in Transition asks, in different ways, what circumstances challenge norms of sex, how do sexed expectations create racially normative bodies, and how and by whom are such challenges negotiated? These questions motivate this chapter’s examination of a particular articulation of intersexuality and homosexuality with race and location.1 The concept of stabane is used in Zulu vernacular to describe an intersexual person—that is, to be called stabane is to be seen as having both a penis and a vagina.2 However, those identified and referred to as stabane rarely have intersexed bodies; instead, in contemporary Soweto and elsewhere there is a widespread assumption and cocreated understanding that those who identify as lesbian or gay or engage in particular same-sex practices may be intersexed. This radical situation of stabane exposes the complications and violence the concept evokes in the lives of those labeled as such, as well as highlighting the instabilities of sex— femaleness and maleness—in South Africa and more broadly. Feminist theorists have refigured notions of sex from a biological fact to iterative performativity, “a regularized and constrained repetition of norms” with sex as the effect of “a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface that we call matter” (Butler 1993: 9, 95).3 But how do these theories travel in Edward Said’s sense? Considerations of stabane extend notions developed in the previous chapters to show us how the “matter” of sex is slippery, as sex is constantly recreated and negotiated in ways that are co-produced with culture, race, and location. And stabane highlights the false distinction between sex and gender, suggesting the necessary explication of the gendered body. Heterosexuality and gender “normativity” rely on same-sex sexuality and, in this case, intersexuality, to maintain the perception of their naturalness. How can we bring Africanists’ perspectives to the fore while foregrounding theories like Butler’s? This chapter suggests that accusations of stabane as intersexuality strengthen the boundaries of femaleness and maleness at the same time that they highlight their inconsistencies; that is to say, stabane and its application both reinforce gender binaries while undermining them by allowing for the conceptual and physical possibility Stabane, Raced Intersexuality and Same-Sex Relationships in Soweto / 185 of intersexuality. Chapter 3 articulates the parameters of gendered reality, considering the...