ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on contemporary representations of sex and sexuality of Black queer women in Africa. Specifically, I examine how three short stories from South African-produced collections play with different modes of spectacle frequently used within colonial representation – particularly the exotic erotic and land/body metaphors – to more or less subversive effect. This allows me to explore the challenges and possibilities of writing celebratory erotic fiction when the tropes and language of this kind of representation in English literature are still overly determined by the colonial imaginary that hypersexualised, dehumanised and erased the sexuality of Black people, women and queer people. The three stories under analysis are: “All Covered Up” by Dolar Vasani from Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction (2013), “Coming Into Self-Awareness” by Tiffany Kagure Mugo from Adults Only: Stories of Love, Lust, Sex and Sensuality (2014), and “Mrs Habib’s Hypothalamus” by Suzy Bell from Open: An Erotic Anthology by South African Women Writers (2008). I argue that all three stories affirm queer Black women’s sexual pleasure and agency, but their ability to subvert colonial and other oppressive tropes depends on the extent to which they can escape cliché and a mode of spectacular writing that flattens character, erases specificity, and creates a binary distinction between active bearer of the gaze and passive spectacle.
