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Embracing
Exclusivity: Same-sex Marriage made legal in South Africa
Janine
Hoek
Department
of Philosophy
University
of the Western Cape
South
Africa
Global
public attention is currently being focused on the
legalization of same-sex marriages as 5 countries have
thus far amended statutes to allow equal privilege to all
marriages and monogamous partnership registrations.
Alongside this, theoretical debates on sexual citizenship
are increasingly expressed as divergent views from what
appears to be opposing camps: gay (lgbt) rights activists
who attempt to assert rights through legal mechanisms and
queer theorists who assert antinormative sexual politics,
with feminism precariously positioned in between (see
Brandzel 2005 and Donovan 2004).
Problematic
as these divided groupings may be - not least of all
because it is a reminder of the negative activist/academic
polarization of resources within feminism - they do
highlight the complexity of the concerns that marriage
brings up: heteronormativity, monogamy, citizenship, state
and religious control, cultural regulation, colonialism
and imperialism, patriarchy.
On
30 November 2006, South Africa became the first country on
a continent where male homosexuality and sodomy is largely
illegal and lesbianism unrecognized, to acknowledge
same-sex civil unions. On 1 December 2006 two white
middle-class gay men became the first couple to take
advantage of the new law, evoking the question: whom does
this civil union bill benefit, and at what cost? Since
this newly constructed civil union institution is
subversive and transgressive in and of itself, the
question can be posed whether it will prove to be more
pliable in allowing subversion and transgression than
heterosexual marriage. What have lesbian and gay activists
agreed to? Have (eccentric) lesbians who refused the
heterosexual contract (De Lauretis 1993) now been lured
into a heterosexualized same-sex contract? Has queer
theory queered identity only to self-subvert by rendering
desire exclusive through the essentializing of desire in a
monogamous heterocentrist model?
This
paper will engage in a postcolonial contemplation of the
complexities surrounding the implementation of such a bill
in South Africa with the intention of encouraging
conversations that demystify and deconstruct the
performance of marriage as a normalizing force, which
works specifically to superimpose a very particular kind
of patriarchy. One of the most insidious mechanisms
employed, is through the continued denial of pre-colonial
history and an example of this is of the memory of an
ongoing tradition of fluid kinship structures in which
woman-to-woman unions openly existed (Morgan &
Wieringa 2006; Njambi & O’Brien 2000) betrayed by
comments that homosexuality (and by implication same-sex
practices) are un-African. Furthermore, despite their
patriarchal complicity, the western model of the nuclear
family has always been inadequate to express the
complexities of African societies. This reveals intimately
how “civil unions expose the paradox of citizenship
itself, as both a universalizing and exclusionary device”
(Brandzel 2005:197)as not all forms of human sexuality are
equally invested in patriarchal values as "many
different kinds of subversion and transgression, many
types of sexual aberration [are] inassimilable to
historically determinate norms and ideals” (Grosz
1996:44).
About
Janine Hoek
Completing
an M.Phil on women and sexual desire. Particularly
interested in autoerotics, corporeality, creating links
between philosophy and sexuality through performance
theory while collapsing binaries between creativity and
academia.
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