ABSTRACT
The materiality and discursivity of homophobia-related violence have knowledge-power effects that prop-up normative relations and ideologies, as well as making available possibilities to contest such normativities. Queer political discourses on violence reflect the embodied complicities and resistances that are bound up within ruling orders of race, sexuality, gender and class, among others. Being queer at the intersection with violence is a sphere of epistemological, identitarian and political struggle wherein conflicting truths and the interests they advance jostle for primacy in the crafting of queer political futures. Such truths are characterised by competing knowledge claims about the conditions, causes, consequences and ‘cures’ for the violences LGBTI people face. While some ways of knowing violence provide liberatory potential, others constitute new forms of regulation, scrutiny and disciplining of queer subjectivities. Homophobia-related violence doesn’t hold a singular politics, rather one that circuits the respectability, reform and revolution of queers within wider social, cultural and legal fields. The question of, and conceivable ‘answer’ to, homophobia-related violence uncover the historical and contemporary, local and global, identity planes on which oppressive power is both forged and fended off. Violence against queers is neither just about queers, nor just about violence. It is about distance and proximity to conditions of violence and the queer inclusions and exclusions these mark. It concerns both defiance of, and deference to, colonial and apartheid rationalities, as well as democracy’s destabilisations thereof. It is, too, about recognition and misrecognition and 129their routing through queer life in post-apartheid South Africa. Such violence, and how it is articulated, exposes the voyeuristic consumption of queers, as well as queer consumption in an increasingly consumptive world. The emergent politics against violence is a paradoxical pressure point in which strategies of regulation and refusal find form in ways that draw into orbit how queer intersectional identities are being radically transformed, and how too they are redeployed in essentialising ways. Homophobia-related violence has immense force in processes of subjection and in producing the political capacities necessary for its overturning. In tracing multiple interpretive frameworks for homophobia-related violence, the book has explored the productive capacities of discourse in shaping political imaginaries to end violence against LGBTI people. Here queer agency is expressed in multiple ways: some involve the adaptation or regulation of individual behaviour through neoliberal and feminising strategies of self-care, while others encompass collective resistances against the normalisation of gender violence and the intersecting exclusions by which queer lives continue to be governed. These modes of agentic possibility provide frames through which violence can be acted against as a condition of particular histories of identity and of violent subjection.
