Coming-Out Confessions: Negotiating the Burden of Lesbian Identity Politics in South Africa

Abstract

For lesbians, "coming out" or disclosing one's sexual orientation has come to be seen as a marker of self-acceptance, actualization, and the imperative first step in the authentication of a liberated subjectivity and social identity. However, other critical schools of thought, largely informed by Foucault's middle writings, have argued that "coming out" is merely a confessional response to an incitement to discourse about sex. This study explored constructions of coming out by a group of self-identified lesbians in South Africa. Data were collected via eight semistructured interviews and subjected to discourse analysis. Although the coming-out stories appear to conform to some discursive practices characterizing confessional modes of response to incitements to speak, they are also de-emphasized as central to the constitution of selfhood. The changing conditions of possibility for the production of sexual subjectivity in contemporary South Africa seem to disrupt understandings of coming out as either solely a confessional or liberatory practice.

“Other” psychologists: An autoethnographic conversation about difference, deviance and defiance

“…Following Ahmed (2006), Elliott wishes to forego the comfort and protections offered by following the prescriptions of compulsory heterosexuality in an intentional queering of the scene: “ I was determined to do this on my terms ”. One side-effect of compulsory heterosexuality, as with compulsory able-bodiedness, is that the “other” is burdened with a need to confess their deviance and, where it cannot be “corrected”, to provide a sufficient explanation for its existence (Kotze & Bowman, 2018).…”

An overview of coming out research: Introducing a three‐lens typology

“…Further, religious concepts have been applied to coming out. For example, Foucault's (1978) writings on confession—a discursive practice rooted in the early 13th century Catholic Church with ‘sex … [as] a privileged theme’ (p. 61)—provides a theoretical framework for some coming out researchers (e.g., Bannink & Wentink, 2015; Durber, 2006; Kotze & Bowman, 2018). When considered a confession in the Foucauldian sense, coming out is ‘a means through which power gains access to the homosexual body, producing the homosexual as an object to be known, assessed, measured, diagnosed, and treated’ (Kotze & Bowman, 2018, pp.…”

Confession, psychology and the shaping of subjectivity through interviews with victims of female-perpetrated sexual violence

“…In keeping with Foucault’s ( 1978 ) account of how modern sexuality has been constituted as a privileged site of insight into self-hood, it is often the technology of the confession as a form of incitement to discourse that prompts the subject to speak about sex and sexuality in the most minute kinds of details that can be continuously dissected to expand the surveillance of human science knowledge (Dominguez-Whitehead et al 2017 ). In this way subjects speak sex into the human sciences, and these sciences carve out new possibilities for sexuality, and therefore the ‘self’ (Kotze and Bowman 2018 ). However, the reach of this confessional apparatus still rooted in the governance of sexuality has more generally emerged as an important resource in the modern project of self-making (Rose 1999 ).…”