ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the possibilities of co-imagining the politics of queer and the meaning of whiteness in contemporary South African writing by white lesbian and gay writers. The first section argues that such imagination involves the negotiation of a radical ‘fissure’ between experiences of life from the point of view of those writing as black and the meaning of whiteness. The second section draws on theorists as diverse as Morrison, Muholi, and Lorde to explore one explication of the need to ‘call out whiteness’ within the politics of solidarity. The last section explores some of the work of key South African fiction writers who position themselves as either ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ in order to discuss their strategies of negotiating the fissure of writing as white and claiming entrance to queer writing activism. The chapter’s conclusion, although tentative, is direct: ‘queer/white’ in contemporary South Africa constitutes an oxymoronic location, impossible to resolve under current conditions of incomplete and ever-receding decolonisation of the state.
