Making Place, Making Home: Lesbian Queer World-Making in Cape Town

Abstract

Two dominant, contrasting, narratives characterise public discourse on queer sexualities in Cape Town. On the one hand, the city is touted as the gay capital of South Africa. This, however, is troubled by a binary framing of white zones of safety and black zones of danger (Melanie JUDGE, 2018), which simultaneously brings the ‘the black lesbian’ into view through the lens of discrimination, violence and death. This article explores lesbian, queer and gay women’s narratives of their everyday lives in Cape Town. Their counter narratives reveal how they ‘make’ Cape Town home in relation to racialized and classed heteronormativies. These grey the racialised binary of territorial safety and danger, and produce modes of lesbian constructions of home, notably the modes of embedded lesbianism, homonormativity and borderlands. These reveal lesbian queer life worlds which are ephemeral, contingent and fractured, making known hybrid, contrasting and competing narratives of the city.

Navigating Urban Spaces as Queer Women in South Africa

“…However, such ideas of utopia and safety must also take into consideration how issues of race, class and gender differentially affect queer individuals and that urban space(s) may not always be as accepting as initially hoped for. Work by Holland-Muter (2019) shows how in Cape Town, for example, queer women from different races and classes face challenges in navigating the city, despite it being known as the 'Gay Capital of Africa'. This work shows how black or coloured queer women living in the townships or in suburbs far away from the city centre have difficulty in accessing or feeling comfortable and accepted in queer spaces in the city that are predominately white, gay and middle to upper class.…”

Queering CoMo: an exploratory case study of queer geographies in Columbia, Missouri between 1991-2021

“…Aside from questions of gayborhoods, early queer geography work was preoccupied with cities, and especially those on the coasts of the United States. While many urban sites, communities, and situations warrant valid examination (see Bain, Payne, and Isen 2015;Holland-Muter 2019;Gieseking 2020aGieseking , 2020b for a brief selection), an important shift towards locales outside of the metropolitan and the coasts has been gaining ground in recent years. In what Knopp would identify as a result of the overlapping goals between queer geographies and geographies of sexualities, scholars began to offer detailed and varied looks into the construction and reproduction of interactions between rurality and sexualities, often including queer/LGBT subjects (Poole and Gause 2012;Gorman-Murray, Pini, and Bryant 2013).…”