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Feeling
Sovereign
Neville
Hoad
Department
of English
University
of Texas at Austin
"My
darling, it (the constitution) means sweet motherfucking
nothing at all. You can rape me, rob me, what am I going
to do when you attack me? Wave the constitution in your
face? I'm just a nobody black queen. But you know what?
Ever since I heard about that constitution I feel free
inside."
There
are multiple possible framings for my opening epigram
which may allow one to get at the relationships between
feeling and sovereignty as ways for establishing and
understanding the reproduction of everyday life in various
contexts: social, political, and analytic, national and
global. I use the word ”feeling” rather than the
minimally more precise “affect” because the former’s
inchoateness, both grammatical and semantic, allows
feeling to be an action as well and can contain elements
of sensation.
Let
me begin with the framing in which I find the quote: an
article by the prominent South African journalist, Mark
Gevisser – South African correspondent for The Nation,
biographer of South African president Thabo Mbeki, he of
the AIDS denialism fame inter alia. The quote, taken from an interview with a black South
African drag queen marching in Johannesburg’s Gay Pride
March in 1994, shortly after the drafting of the new South
African constitution, appears in an article entitled
“Mandela’s Stepchildren: Homosexual Identity in
Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in an anthology, Different
Rainbows, edited by Peter Drucker and blurbed in 2000
as “a pioneering collection of essays on Gay and Lesbian
Movements in the Third World.” I read its appearance in
such an article in such an anthology as representative of
a kind of double gesture:
a move towards an Anti-Eurocentric framing of gay
and lesbian identities through geographic diversity and
histories while positing sexual freedom as a newish
universal human right. Rights talk is probably the most
common, perhaps even hegemonic way of attaching feeling,
or at least, sexual feeling, to sovereignty under
neoliberalism, usually in the negative. The South African
Constitution, to which my multiply ventriloquised drag
queen refers, is precisely such a case in point.
This
talk will investigate the relationship between questions
of feeling and questions of sovereignty in the aftermath
of the world historic inclusion of an anti-discrimination
clause in the 2006 South African Constitution. It will
archive its speculations in a series of cultural and
ethnographic representations.
About
Neville Hoad
Neville
Hoad is associate professor of English and Women’s and
gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is
the author of African
Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization (Minnesota,
2007), and co-editor (with Karen Martin and Graeme Reid)
of Sex and Politics in South Africa: the Equality Clause / Gay &
Lesbian Movement / the Anti-Apartheid Struggle (Double
Storey, 2005), as well as numerous essays and articles on
the intersections of queer and postcolonial studies.
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