ABSTRACT
For many years now I have been preoccupied with the normative conditions that produce violence against queers and the particularities of how that violence comes into representation. Central to this is how homophobia-related violence, as a system of meaning-making, intersects with other forms of violent inequality that operate to legitimise and re-entrench its uncritical reproduction in post-apartheid South Africa. In the mid-2000s, while in the employ of a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activist organisation, I participated in numerous dialogues, seminars and strategy meetings seized with the question of how best to respond to the rape and killing of black lesbians, which had received widespread media coverage at the time. I was struck by how these activist-led interactions were animated by intense confrontations regarding the causes and targets of violence and the responses it demands. The different positionalities from which violence was understood by diverse activists had surfaced conflicting knowledges about violence, the kinds of actions it called for and by whom. These epistemological struggles were inflected with race, gender and class content. Simply put, people seemed to know violence differently and in ways not unconnected to their own raced, classed, sexual, gendered and political locations. As a result, and in the process of seeking strategies to respond to violence, deep divides within queer communities had been forced into view. Violence facing black lesbians in particular had exposed a political tension between the universalities and particularities of queer experiences in post-apartheid South Africa. Talking about violence and its 2impacts had given rise to discursive negotiations of contemporary race, gender and class power relations: the very relations in which violence is implicated. How were we to talk collectively against violence across such fractured planes of knowledge and experience? These encounters with knowing violence had surfaced the differential precarities and political interests of queers across diverse social and identity contexts. This book’s focus on the constitutive capacities of discourses of homophobia-related violence and their implications for queer identity and politics emerge from this context.
