(Download) "Postcolonial Pomosexuality: Queer/ Alternative Fiction After Disgrace" by Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Postcolonial Pomosexuality: Queer/ Alternative Fiction After Disgrace
- Author : Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 104 KB
Description
The development of South African queer/alternative writing is illustrated by the shift from William Plomer's oblique re-working of homosexual desire into cross-racial erotics in Turbott Wolfe (1925), through occasional explorations of homosexuality under high apartheid by authors such as Stephen Gray (1988)--although such texts were vulnerable to banning by the censors to increasingly explicit material towards the end of the century, by such authors as Damon Galgut (1995), Ashraf Jamal (1996) and Tatamkhulu Afrika (1996). In addition to authors who are personally invested in queer issues, Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer and J M Coetzee refer to these issues in works from their later periods such as Gordimer's The House Gun (1998) and Coetzee's Disgrace (1999). In view of the apartheid-era legislation declaring homosexuality illegal it is understandable that after the shift to democracy and the passing of legal safeguards for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people a number of authors have explored the painful self-acceptance of gay identities--mainly also white and male--during apartheid. This exploration forms part of the retrospective cartography of the previously occluded queer nation. An interesting turn in the post-apartheid era is the handling of the trope of bisexuality, which opens up a potentially useful domain for considering sexuality and national identifications beyond the constraints of binary models (see Stobie 2007). Since the publication of Disgrace a significant development in queer writing has been the shift to representing a more varied spectrum of sexuality--not necessarily viewed as a prime marker of identity; more awareness of gender issues; a consciousness of postcolonialism; and an exciting experimentation with form in the fictional narration which also visualises a future that can countenance new forms of gender performance and sexuality. This collective shift, more evident in the writing of women authors focusing on queer/ alternative themes, might be called postcolonial pomosexuality. The term "pomosexuality" refers to expressions of queer beyond separatist or essentialist notions of sexual orientation (Queen and Schimel 1997), and my addition of the adjective "postcolonial" sites this intimate domain within wider political power structures. Disgrace offers a useful yardstick of comparison with queer/alternative fiction of the last decade. Developments, however, cannot be understood outside of a global picture. Over the twentieth century there was an increasing representation of queer/alternative sexualities in world fiction, dealing with such matters as homophobia, the normativity of heterosexuality, and gender issues. This burgeoning was made possible by the globalisation of LGBT studies. Latterly, representations of alternative sexualities in world fiction have highlighted the effects of colonialism on the construction of sexuality, expanded and nuanced ideas of contemporary sexuality as developed in the West, and reconstructed culturally specific sexualities.
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