ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Immorality Act (Amendment) Commission of 1968 in South Africa that entailed legislative intervention by the state in order to curtail same-sex conduct. The argument focuses on the broader impact of the regulation of homosexuality in relation to personal narratives by individuals who made submissions to the Select Committee on the Immorality Amendment Bill of 1968. Through discursive readings of testimonies (drawn from an archive), the chapter motivates the view that ‘queer’ identities may be traced to the apartheid state where a particular racialised variant is to be discerned in the submissions. Deploying some legal concepts, the chapter shows how the law impacts on the construction of queer identities and equally on the idea of sexual citizenship based on equality, dignity and mutual respect. The transgression of the South African moral code produces the homosexual as a subject who speaks back and is therefore not silenced by the power that constrains him or her. The submissions thus reveal that identity formation is fundamentally political and that it is produced in relation to a prohibitive power. An important subtext here is the fact that the homosexual emerges in a counter-narrative (one in which he or she has spoken) to the grand narrative of the apartheid project.
