Cheryl Stobie
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 369059 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Cheryl Stobie |
| NOMBRES | Cheryl |
| APELLIDO | Stobie |
| FIRMA | STOBIE C |
| AFILIACIONES | University of KwaZulu-Natal |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7138-7340 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 27 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 20 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 27 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2003 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2021 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Taking wing: Vulnerability and queer/trans resistance in The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar
The Covid-19 pandemic has increased the vulnerabilities of groups including lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) individuals, as well as migrants. Zeyn Joukhadar’s novel, The Thirty Names of Night (2020), comprises two alternating narratives of three generations of Syrian Americans questing to establish their identities in societies that quell otherness. Drawing on the insights of Jean-Michel Ganteau, I trace the novel’s represen…
Breaking the Chains of Slavery: Precarity, the Personal and the Political in Nkosinathi Sithole’s Hunger Eats a Man
This article offers a literary analysis of a prize-winning South African novel, Hunger Eats a Man (2015), by Nkosinathi Sithole. I analyse the political and cultural history and sexual politics represented in the novel by employing a theoretical nexus of precarity studies as it intersects with feminist, subaltern and postcolonial studies, enabling challenges to Eurocentric models of the precariat. I outline the conditions creating the precarity o…
Precarity, poverty porn and vernacular cosmopolitanism in NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names and Meg Vandermerwe's Zebra Crossing
This article analyses precarity as variously represented in NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names (2013) and Meg Vandermerwe's Zebra Crossing (2013). We Need New Names was characterized as formulaic "poverty porn", a term that could equally be applied to Zebra Crossing. Challenging the use of this problematic term to censure novels for exposing dire conditions in African countries, the article uses the technique of reparative reading, and applies…
Voices from the margins: Islam, queer identity, and female agency in Rayda Jacobs’s Confessions of a Gambler
This article foregrounds the intersection between queer Islamic masculinity and Islamic female identity in Rayda Jacobs’s Confessions of a Gambler, and shows how these two identity categories are subjugated in light of dominant expressions of Islamic masculinity. The novel’s action takes place within a traditional Cape Muslim community and employs, among other literary strategies, the main protagonist’s vice of gambling and her son’s sexuality as…
“Computer Cowboys” and “Ass-kicking Techno-babes” Challenging Cyberpunk’s Conventional Representations of Gender and Sexuality in the Futuristic Digital World of Moxyland
This article analyses the effects created by Lauren Beukes through her use of the cyberpunk genre in her first novel, Moxyland (2008). Because of its challenge to conventional ideas of embodiment and identity formation, together with its counter-cultural punk ethos, cyberpunk would seem to offer the prospect of transgressive versions of gender and sexuality. However, various critics note that instead of realising this potential, cyberpunk endorse…
Re-tailoring Can Themba’s “The Suit”: Queer Temporalities in Two Stories by Makhosazana Xaba
Can Themba’s iconic story, “The Suit” (1963), tells of a devastating punishment visited upon an adulterous wife, Matilda, by her husband, Philemon. This article begins by examining some implications of Themba’s story and touching on subsequent adaptations that have re-imagined this haunting tale from various perspectives. I then move on to consider two stories by Makhosazana Xaba (2013) which add significant elements to the original fable. “Behin…
Di ta go; ons het dit gedoen; we did it’: Khoekhoe ethnicity, sexuality and temporalities in Proteus
The film Proteus (2003), directed by John Greyson and Jack Lewis, fictionalises the true story of the relationship between two prisoners – a white Dutchman and a Khoekhoe man – who were executed for sodomy on Robben Island in 1735. The film employs anachronistic features to reveal and critique cross-historical instances of cataloguing, language usage, homophobia and racism within the South African context. The textual analysis in this article use…
She Who Creates Havoc Is Here”: A Queer Bisexual Reading of Sexuality, Dance, and Social Critique in Karmen Geï
Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella, Carmen, which inspired Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera, Carmen, has subsequently been rendered in numerous film versions. The Senegalese film Karmen Geï, directed by Joseph Gaï Ramaka (2001), adheres to the basic plotline, but adds various innovations, such as transporting the setting to contemporary Senegal and depicting Karmen as having same- and different-gender attractions and relationships. This article begins by g…
“The Devil Slapped on the Genitals”: Religion and Spirituality in Queer South Africans’ Lives
Uniquely among African countries, South Africa's Bill of Rights offers civil protection to individuals on the basis of vectors of identity including sexuality, gender and religion. Public opinion, however, lags behind the ideals of the Constitution. Against this historical background, a range of books has recently appeared, giving expression to the interface between sexuality, culture and religion from the viewpoint of lesbian, gay, bisexual and …
The music of dead sisters: A feminist comparison of two folktales about singing bones and reeds
This article compares and contrasts two folktales. The first is the traditional ballad, ‘The twa sisters’, collected by Francis J. Child in the 19th century. The Canadian folksinger Loreena McKennitt compiled a variant of this, called ‘The bonny swans’. Many of these ballads feature a musical instrument composed of the bones of the slain sister, which sings the name of her killer, who is her heartless sister. The second folktale is ‘The singing r…
Re-constructing the “Outcast-initiate” in Patrick White's The Twyborn Affair
This article is a postcolonial literary analysis of The Twyborn Affair, by the Australian Nobel-prizewinner, Patrick White. Concepts provided by queer theology, radical feminist postcolonial theology and trans-theology are used as an appropriate critical lens through which to view The Twyborn Affair. In each of the three sections of the novel the main character is in search of love, sex, intimacy and connection with family, and at the same time r…
“ Chew Me Until I Bind ”: Sacrifice and Cultural Renewal in Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat
In Agaat (2006), Marlene van Niekerk presents the future of Afrikaner culture in a new matrilineal and racially hybrid genealogy. This matrilineal genealogy occurs through the self-sacrifice of the white matriarch, Milla de Wet. Van Niekerk disrupts and subverts dominant patriarchal, patrilineal and racial epistemes upon which the plaasroman is based by leaving the farm, not to Milla's son and putative male heir, but to the coloured housekeeper, …
The Guilt of Men”: Re-visioning the Virgin Birth in Thando Mgqolozana's Hear Me Alone
In this article I trace traditional associations of the Virgin Birth as portrayed in myth, literature, contemporary scholarship by Marina Warner and Mary F Foskett, and recent cultural artefacts. I examine the notion of re-vision, a fresh treatment of a prior text with a feminist or postcolonialist purpose, as elaborated by Adrienne Rich and bell hooks. Using these concepts as applied to the South African situation, I critically analyse Thando Mg…
Dystopian dreams from South Africa: Lauren Beukes's Moxyland and Zoo City
The central theoretical concept underpinning this article is Lyman Tower Sargent's notion of the 'critical dystopian' novel, which is not nihilistic, but which disrupts easy binarist classifications, and incorporates elements of opposition to oppression, as well as hope for a more egalitarian future. I examine critical dystopian dreaming as portrayed in two novels by Lauren Beukes, Moxyland (2008) and Zoo City (2010), both set in South Africa, an…
Reading Bisexualities From a South African Perspective—Revisited
This article begins with a brief overview of my original article published in Journal of Bisexuality (2003, vol. 3, issue 1), and a discussion of its personal implications for the author. The author then proceeds to update her research by examining the climate of opinion toward variant homosexualities in selected African countries, including South Africa. She mentions specific cases of homophobia in Malawi and Uganda, a gap between the progressiv…
Indecent Theology, Trans-theology, and the Transgendered Madonna in Chris Abani's The Virgin of Flames
Throughout The Virgin of Flames, Nigerian-born Chris Abani uses many techniques, including the pervasive image of fluidity, to unsettle binaries and render brushstrokes between differing cultures, identities, and embodiments: between Africa and the United States of America, between genders, between religion and sexuality, and between art and life. Abani, who attended a Roman Catholic seminary, employs religious imagery to radical effect in The Vi…
He uses my body: Female traditional healers, male ancestors and transgender in South Africa
This work focuses on the autobiography Black Bull, ancestors and me: my life as a lesbian sangoma by Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde. I delineate the empowerment obtained and tensions experienced in the case of Nkabinde, a sangoma, or traditional healer in South Africa. The name ‘Nkunzi’, meaning ‘Black Bull’, previously belonged to her late male ancestor, who is her main possessing spirit in her healing work. This possession, I argue, serves a validatin…
Ruth in Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat
Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2006), which was translated from the Afrikaans into English by Michiel Heyns, examines the relationship between a dying white woman and her Coloured carer. In the course of the novel it becomes clear that the themes of (post)colonialism, race relations and gender dynamics are being explored; however, the means through which they are conveyed are through the complicated, distressing and moving relationship between the …
Postcolonial pomosexuality: Queer/alternative fiction after disgrace
In this essay I begin by contextualising South African queer/alternative writing against a global postcolonial backdrop. I examine the representation of queer in Coetzee's Disgrace, and outline a cluster of attributes which are absent in that text, but which are present in texts published after 2000: queer sexuality viewed with interior depth, a coming‐out narrative, the normalisation of queer, progressive engagement with gender issues, and techn…
Sisters and spirits: The postcolonial gothic in Angelina n Sithebe's holy hill
In this article I use the framework of the postcolonial Gothic to analyse Angelina N Sithebe's Holy Hill, a novel which combines a focus on Christian religion and traditional African spirituality. Sithebe uses the convent school setting of her text to offer social critiques of power and religion in specific contexts. I highlight the postcolonial dimension of her critique by comparing aspects of the novel with Karen Armstrong's memoir, The Spiral …
Fissures in Apartheid's “Eden”: Representations of Bisexuality in The Smell of Apples by Mark Behr
The totalitarian ideology of apartheid proposed an absolute binarism in terms primarily of race, but also in terms of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. However, novels such as Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples reveal the taboo, interstitial ground which belies the absolute divides of binarism. Examples of the interstitial in the text include representations of adolescence, bisexuality, and "colored" (mixed-race) identity. The bisexual character emb…
Shedding Skins: Metaphors of Race and Sexuality in the Writing of Tatamkhulu Afrika∗
Tatamkhulu Afrika's life story is often presented in triumphalist terms, charting his progression through various personae, the last of which represents hard-won stability in terms of politics, religion, race and artistic creativity. My investigation of selected poems from Mad Old Man under the Morning Star (2000) and Nine Lives (1991), as well as passages from his autobiography, Mr Chameleon, and his novella, “The Vortex” (1996), reveals complex…
Representations of “the Other Side” in Nadine Gordimer's The house gun
In this article I examine ways in which Nadine Gordimer renders, in The house gun, a zone of alterity typified in the novel as the ‘Other Side’. The author represents such alterity, seen mainly as racial and cultural, as alien, even while her purpose is to illustrate the necessity for change in a new post-apartheid political dispensation. Further, her focus on the other Other Side, that of sexuality, is also riven with contradictions, particularl…
Between the Arches of Queer Desire and Race: Representing Bisexual Bodies in the Rainbow Nation
Biopia’ in biography: Representations of Bisexuality in Selected South African Lives
The term “biopia” refers to the recognition of bisexuality as a significant category of sexuality. In Africa, the categories “bisexual” and “transgender” have received scant attention. This paper explores the potential offered by the concept of bisexuality in post-apartheid South Africa, and suggests connections between Homi Bhabha's postcolonial Third Space and interstitial sexuality. The paper briefly examines the popular representation of bise…
Precarity, poverty porn and vernacular cosmopolitanism in NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names and Meg Vandermerwe's Zebra Crossing
This article analyses precarity as variously represented in NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names (2013) and Meg Vandermerwe's Zebra Crossing (2013). We Need New Names was characterized as formulaic "poverty porn", a term that could equally be applied to Zebra Crossing. Challenging the use of this problematic term to censure novels for exposing dire conditions in African countries, the article uses the technique of reparative reading, and applies…
Fissures in Apartheid's “Eden”: Representations of Bisexuality in The Smell of Apples by Mark Behr
The totalitarian ideology of apartheid proposed an absolute binarism in terms primarily of race, but also in terms of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. However, novels such as Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples reveal the taboo, interstitial ground which belies the absolute divides of binarism. Examples of the interstitial in the text include representations of adolescence, bisexuality, and "colored" (mixed-race) identity. The bisexual character emb…
Dystopian dreams from South Africa: Lauren Beukes's Moxyland and Zoo City
The central theoretical concept underpinning this article is Lyman Tower Sargent's notion of the 'critical dystopian' novel, which is not nihilistic, but which disrupts easy binarist classifications, and incorporates elements of opposition to oppression, as well as hope for a more egalitarian future. I examine critical dystopian dreaming as portrayed in two novels by Lauren Beukes, Moxyland (2008) and Zoo City (2010), both set in South Africa, an…
Reading Bisexualities From a South African Perspective—Revisited
This article begins with a brief overview of my original article published in Journal of Bisexuality (2003, vol. 3, issue 1), and a discussion of its personal implications for the author. The author then proceeds to update her research by examining the climate of opinion toward variant homosexualities in selected African countries, including South Africa. She mentions specific cases of homophobia in Malawi and Uganda, a gap between the progressiv…
He uses my body: Female traditional healers, male ancestors and transgender in South Africa
This work focuses on the autobiography Black Bull, ancestors and me: my life as a lesbian sangoma by Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde. I delineate the empowerment obtained and tensions experienced in the case of Nkabinde, a sangoma, or traditional healer in South Africa. The name ‘Nkunzi’, meaning ‘Black Bull’, previously belonged to her late male ancestor, who is her main possessing spirit in her healing work. This possession, I argue, serves a validatin…
Representations of “the Other Side” in Nadine Gordimer's The house gun
In this article I examine ways in which Nadine Gordimer renders, in The house gun, a zone of alterity typified in the novel as the ‘Other Side’. The author represents such alterity, seen mainly as racial and cultural, as alien, even while her purpose is to illustrate the necessity for change in a new post-apartheid political dispensation. Further, her focus on the other Other Side, that of sexuality, is also riven with contradictions, particularl…
Reading Bisexualities from a South African Perspective
This article explores the absence of dialogue about bisexuality in South Africa and in the African continent. While South Africa's new Constitution explicitly vouchsafes protection on the grounds of "sexual orientation," leaders in a number of other African countries have called homosexuality un-African. I discuss the lack of a bisexual discourse in South Africa, and the prejudices and hostility directed towards bisexuals by lesbians and gays. I …
Indecent Theology, Trans-theology, and the Transgendered Madonna in Chris Abani's The Virgin of Flames
Throughout The Virgin of Flames, Nigerian-born Chris Abani uses many techniques, including the pervasive image of fluidity, to unsettle binaries and render brushstrokes between differing cultures, identities, and embodiments: between Africa and the United States of America, between genders, between religion and sexuality, and between art and life. Abani, who attended a Roman Catholic seminary, employs religious imagery to radical effect in The Vi…
Biopia’ in biography: Representations of Bisexuality in Selected South African Lives
The term “biopia” refers to the recognition of bisexuality as a significant category of sexuality. In Africa, the categories “bisexual” and “transgender” have received scant attention. This paper explores the potential offered by the concept of bisexuality in post-apartheid South Africa, and suggests connections between Homi Bhabha's postcolonial Third Space and interstitial sexuality. The paper briefly examines the popular representation of bise…
Somewhere in the double rainbow: Queering the nation in recent South African Fiction
Ten years of a democratic, multi‐cultural South Africa have witnessed the publication of a number of novels which explore the trope of bisexuality. This essay examines three of these texts. Cracks by Sheila Kohler is a gripping but binarised text, as it polices boundaries, entrenching heteronormativity and demonising alternative sexualities. The World Unseen by Shamim Sarif opens a fluid site of interplay between the vectors of gender, sexuality,…
Reading Bisexualities from a South African Perspective
This article explores the absence of dialogue about bisexuality in South Africa and in the African continent. While South Africa's new Constitution explicitly vouchsafes protection on the grounds of "sexual orientation," leaders in a number of other African countries have called homosexuality un-African. I discuss the lack of a bisexual discourse in South Africa, and the prejudices and hostility directed towards bisexuals by lesbians and gays. I …
Biopia’ in biography: Representations of Bisexuality in Selected South African Lives
The term “biopia” refers to the recognition of bisexuality as a significant category of sexuality. In Africa, the categories “bisexual” and “transgender” have received scant attention. This paper explores the potential offered by the concept of bisexuality in post-apartheid South Africa, and suggests connections between Homi Bhabha's postcolonial Third Space and interstitial sexuality. The paper briefly examines the popular representation of bise…
Between the Arches of Queer Desire and Race: Representing Bisexual Bodies in the Rainbow Nation
Shedding Skins: Metaphors of Race and Sexuality in the Writing of Tatamkhulu Afrika∗
Tatamkhulu Afrika's life story is often presented in triumphalist terms, charting his progression through various personae, the last of which represents hard-won stability in terms of politics, religion, race and artistic creativity. My investigation of selected poems from Mad Old Man under the Morning Star (2000) and Nine Lives (1991), as well as passages from his autobiography, Mr Chameleon, and his novella, “The Vortex” (1996), reveals complex…
Representations of “the Other Side” in Nadine Gordimer's The house gun
In this article I examine ways in which Nadine Gordimer renders, in The house gun, a zone of alterity typified in the novel as the ‘Other Side’. The author represents such alterity, seen mainly as racial and cultural, as alien, even while her purpose is to illustrate the necessity for change in a new post-apartheid political dispensation. Further, her focus on the other Other Side, that of sexuality, is also riven with contradictions, particularl…
Sisters and spirits: The postcolonial gothic in Angelina n Sithebe's holy hill
In this article I use the framework of the postcolonial Gothic to analyse Angelina N Sithebe's Holy Hill, a novel which combines a focus on Christian religion and traditional African spirituality. Sithebe uses the convent school setting of her text to offer social critiques of power and religion in specific contexts. I highlight the postcolonial dimension of her critique by comparing aspects of the novel with Karen Armstrong's memoir, The Spiral …
Fissures in Apartheid's “Eden”: Representations of Bisexuality in The Smell of Apples by Mark Behr
The totalitarian ideology of apartheid proposed an absolute binarism in terms primarily of race, but also in terms of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. However, novels such as Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples reveal the taboo, interstitial ground which belies the absolute divides of binarism. Examples of the interstitial in the text include representations of adolescence, bisexuality, and "colored" (mixed-race) identity. The bisexual character emb…
Ruth in Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat
Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2006), which was translated from the Afrikaans into English by Michiel Heyns, examines the relationship between a dying white woman and her Coloured carer. In the course of the novel it becomes clear that the themes of (post)colonialism, race relations and gender dynamics are being explored; however, the means through which they are conveyed are through the complicated, distressing and moving relationship between the …
Postcolonial pomosexuality: Queer/alternative fiction after disgrace
In this essay I begin by contextualising South African queer/alternative writing against a global postcolonial backdrop. I examine the representation of queer in Coetzee's Disgrace, and outline a cluster of attributes which are absent in that text, but which are present in texts published after 2000: queer sexuality viewed with interior depth, a coming‐out narrative, the normalisation of queer, progressive engagement with gender issues, and techn…
Reading Bisexualities From a South African Perspective—Revisited
This article begins with a brief overview of my original article published in Journal of Bisexuality (2003, vol. 3, issue 1), and a discussion of its personal implications for the author. The author then proceeds to update her research by examining the climate of opinion toward variant homosexualities in selected African countries, including South Africa. She mentions specific cases of homophobia in Malawi and Uganda, a gap between the progressiv…
Indecent Theology, Trans-theology, and the Transgendered Madonna in Chris Abani's The Virgin of Flames
Throughout The Virgin of Flames, Nigerian-born Chris Abani uses many techniques, including the pervasive image of fluidity, to unsettle binaries and render brushstrokes between differing cultures, identities, and embodiments: between Africa and the United States of America, between genders, between religion and sexuality, and between art and life. Abani, who attended a Roman Catholic seminary, employs religious imagery to radical effect in The Vi…
He uses my body: Female traditional healers, male ancestors and transgender in South Africa
This work focuses on the autobiography Black Bull, ancestors and me: my life as a lesbian sangoma by Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde. I delineate the empowerment obtained and tensions experienced in the case of Nkabinde, a sangoma, or traditional healer in South Africa. The name ‘Nkunzi’, meaning ‘Black Bull’, previously belonged to her late male ancestor, who is her main possessing spirit in her healing work. This possession, I argue, serves a validatin…
“ Chew Me Until I Bind ”: Sacrifice and Cultural Renewal in Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat
In Agaat (2006), Marlene van Niekerk presents the future of Afrikaner culture in a new matrilineal and racially hybrid genealogy. This matrilineal genealogy occurs through the self-sacrifice of the white matriarch, Milla de Wet. Van Niekerk disrupts and subverts dominant patriarchal, patrilineal and racial epistemes upon which the plaasroman is based by leaving the farm, not to Milla's son and putative male heir, but to the coloured housekeeper, …
The Guilt of Men”: Re-visioning the Virgin Birth in Thando Mgqolozana's Hear Me Alone
In this article I trace traditional associations of the Virgin Birth as portrayed in myth, literature, contemporary scholarship by Marina Warner and Mary F Foskett, and recent cultural artefacts. I examine the notion of re-vision, a fresh treatment of a prior text with a feminist or postcolonialist purpose, as elaborated by Adrienne Rich and bell hooks. Using these concepts as applied to the South African situation, I critically analyse Thando Mg…
Dystopian dreams from South Africa: Lauren Beukes's Moxyland and Zoo City
The central theoretical concept underpinning this article is Lyman Tower Sargent's notion of the 'critical dystopian' novel, which is not nihilistic, but which disrupts easy binarist classifications, and incorporates elements of opposition to oppression, as well as hope for a more egalitarian future. I examine critical dystopian dreaming as portrayed in two novels by Lauren Beukes, Moxyland (2008) and Zoo City (2010), both set in South Africa, an…
Re-constructing the “Outcast-initiate” in Patrick White's The Twyborn Affair
This article is a postcolonial literary analysis of The Twyborn Affair, by the Australian Nobel-prizewinner, Patrick White. Concepts provided by queer theology, radical feminist postcolonial theology and trans-theology are used as an appropriate critical lens through which to view The Twyborn Affair. In each of the three sections of the novel the main character is in search of love, sex, intimacy and connection with family, and at the same time r…
“The Devil Slapped on the Genitals”: Religion and Spirituality in Queer South Africans’ Lives
Uniquely among African countries, South Africa's Bill of Rights offers civil protection to individuals on the basis of vectors of identity including sexuality, gender and religion. Public opinion, however, lags behind the ideals of the Constitution. Against this historical background, a range of books has recently appeared, giving expression to the interface between sexuality, culture and religion from the viewpoint of lesbian, gay, bisexual and …
The music of dead sisters: A feminist comparison of two folktales about singing bones and reeds
This article compares and contrasts two folktales. The first is the traditional ballad, ‘The twa sisters’, collected by Francis J. Child in the 19th century. The Canadian folksinger Loreena McKennitt compiled a variant of this, called ‘The bonny swans’. Many of these ballads feature a musical instrument composed of the bones of the slain sister, which sings the name of her killer, who is her heartless sister. The second folktale is ‘The singing r…
Di ta go; ons het dit gedoen; we did it’: Khoekhoe ethnicity, sexuality and temporalities in Proteus
The film Proteus (2003), directed by John Greyson and Jack Lewis, fictionalises the true story of the relationship between two prisoners – a white Dutchman and a Khoekhoe man – who were executed for sodomy on Robben Island in 1735. The film employs anachronistic features to reveal and critique cross-historical instances of cataloguing, language usage, homophobia and racism within the South African context. The textual analysis in this article use…
She Who Creates Havoc Is Here”: A Queer Bisexual Reading of Sexuality, Dance, and Social Critique in Karmen Geï
Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella, Carmen, which inspired Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera, Carmen, has subsequently been rendered in numerous film versions. The Senegalese film Karmen Geï, directed by Joseph Gaï Ramaka (2001), adheres to the basic plotline, but adds various innovations, such as transporting the setting to contemporary Senegal and depicting Karmen as having same- and different-gender attractions and relationships. This article begins by g…
“Computer Cowboys” and “Ass-kicking Techno-babes” Challenging Cyberpunk’s Conventional Representations of Gender and Sexuality in the Futuristic Digital World of Moxyland
This article analyses the effects created by Lauren Beukes through her use of the cyberpunk genre in her first novel, Moxyland (2008). Because of its challenge to conventional ideas of embodiment and identity formation, together with its counter-cultural punk ethos, cyberpunk would seem to offer the prospect of transgressive versions of gender and sexuality. However, various critics note that instead of realising this potential, cyberpunk endorse…
Re-tailoring Can Themba’s “The Suit”: Queer Temporalities in Two Stories by Makhosazana Xaba
Can Themba’s iconic story, “The Suit” (1963), tells of a devastating punishment visited upon an adulterous wife, Matilda, by her husband, Philemon. This article begins by examining some implications of Themba’s story and touching on subsequent adaptations that have re-imagined this haunting tale from various perspectives. I then move on to consider two stories by Makhosazana Xaba (2013) which add significant elements to the original fable. “Behin…
Voices from the margins: Islam, queer identity, and female agency in Rayda Jacobs’s Confessions of a Gambler
This article foregrounds the intersection between queer Islamic masculinity and Islamic female identity in Rayda Jacobs’s Confessions of a Gambler, and shows how these two identity categories are subjugated in light of dominant expressions of Islamic masculinity. The novel’s action takes place within a traditional Cape Muslim community and employs, among other literary strategies, the main protagonist’s vice of gambling and her son’s sexuality as…
Breaking the Chains of Slavery: Precarity, the Personal and the Political in Nkosinathi Sithole’s Hunger Eats a Man
This article offers a literary analysis of a prize-winning South African novel, Hunger Eats a Man (2015), by Nkosinathi Sithole. I analyse the political and cultural history and sexual politics represented in the novel by employing a theoretical nexus of precarity studies as it intersects with feminist, subaltern and postcolonial studies, enabling challenges to Eurocentric models of the precariat. I outline the conditions creating the precarity o…
Sociology (27 obras) · Gender Studies (23 obras) · Art (18 obras) · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues (16 obras) · Aesthetics (15 obras) · Human sexuality (15 obras) · Literature (15 obras) · Philosophy (15 obras) · Political science (14 obras) · South African History and Culture (13 obras)