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FEMINIST THEORISTS OF SEXUALITY and the body have led us to the point where we can confidently assert that the relationships among sexuality, gender, and sex are not fixed and stable but are the contingent outcomes of located and historical practices. Not only are these ways of theorizing the constitution of these categories important, but such distinctions must also be regularly applied to interpretations and theorizations of bodies and relationships. Corporeal expectations of both sex and race have been violently policed and used to justify imperialism. Such concepts have concrete effects because they establish norms about possible ways to be- in a body or in a sexual relationship. And, beyond simple analogy, gendered norms create violent hierarchies of located and raced bodies.
However, despite the destabilization and contingencies of these interconnections and despite persuasive analyses to the contrary, assumptions that all people are strictly "in" female or male bodies have remained central in feminist scholarship. In an effort to unsettle the persistent salience of sex and draw attention to the bases of its disruptions, I ask what circumstances challenge norms of sex, how do sexed expectations create racially normative bodies, and how and by whom are such challenges negotiated? These questions motivate my examination of a particular articulation of intersexuality and homosexuality with race and location. Here, I explore the concept of stabane,1 used in Zulu vernacular to describe an intersexual person- that is, to be called stabane is to be seen as having both a penis and a vagina. However, those identified and referred to as stabane rarely have intersexed bodies; instead, in contemporary Soweto and elsewhere, there is a widespread assumption and co-created understanding that those who self-identify as lesbian or gay or engage in particularly gendered same-sex encounters may be intersexed.
This radical situation of stabane exposes the complications and violence the concept evokes in the lives of those labeled as such, as well as highlighting the instabilities of sex- femaleness and maleness- in South Africa and more broadly. Over the past two decades, feminist theorists such as Judith Butler have refigured notions of sex from a biological fact to iterative performativity, "a regularized and constrained repetition of norms" with sex as the effect of "a process of materialization that stabilizes over...