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Before I knew about transgender, I called it gender within gender.
-Zanele Muholi, 2011.
IN HER KEYNOTE ADDRESS to the "African Same-Sex Sexualities and Gender Diversity" conference in Pretoria, South Africa, in February 2011, Desiree Lewis pointed to Zanele Muholi's photograph Ms. D'vine I as exemplifying the Utopian possibilities of queer liberation. With Lewis, we observe the complex and playful textures of Ms. D'vine's self-possessed performance of gender in the photograph, her waist draped in beads woven in the colors of the South African flag, a brightly decorative yet slightly stiff necklace around her neck, and the sole of one of her bright red shoes worn through. The setting of long grass marked by discarded plastic bags in which Ms. D'vine poses at first recalls then unsettles an image of rural Africa by testifying to the continent's urban realities. Lewis notes that this vivid and "emphatically queer" image "blurs markers of tradition and modernity . . . and defies the usual emphasis on violence, on health, on statistics" that reduces African sexuality to an instrumental litany of deficits and disease. Instead, in Muholi's photograph Ms. D'vine observes no requirements of authenticity and no strictures on self-expression and, therefore, to Lewis, appears "entirely free, dethroning] normality, heteronormativity, and homonormativity."1 In her camp persona, Ms. D'vine consciously inhabits a marginal and original space, rather than a pragmatic and respectable one, and thereby embodies the promise of freely imagined possibilities for the self.
This possibility of a radical playfulness and the Utopian promise of pleasure and self-invention in Muholi's photography continues a strong theme in recent African feminist and queer of color writing on sexuality.2 It is particularly striking because of the pall cast over debates about gender and sexuality in Africa by the charge that "homosexuality is un-African," an accusation that extends to expressions of diverse genders, because sexuality and gender are often conflated in such views. No matter how often historians, sociologists, and other scholars show convincing evidence to the contrary, the trope that varied genders and same-sex sexualities in Africa are corrupt practices imported from the West is stubbornly invoked by conservative politicians, as well as religious and civic leaders, to strategic effect, as their claims to represent authentic African culture often deflect attention from...