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Accepted Paper:
Queer livelihoods and public forms of representation in Cape Town
Isabel Bredenbröker
(Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
Based on ethnographic research in Cape Town, South Africa, this paper applies a feminist-materialist analytical approach to unpack the tensions that exist in sustaining queer livelihoods between collective organising, forms of public representation and framing of queerness as heritage.
Paper Abstract:
The city of Cape Town advertises as a destination for queer tourists and travelers, given the specificity of the South African constitution and its game changing inclusion of queer rights at the end of the apartheid regime. Yet, being queer in Cape Town is a different matter to visiting the city as a tourist and queer livelihoods make lines of division that continue to exist in South African society visible, as recently described by South African scholars such as b camminga or Zethu Matebeni (2023). This paper unpacks the intersection of making a living as a queer person in Cape Town, public ways of displaying queer existences as a brand (such as through PRIDE) or heritage (such as in the art market and museums), and access to spaces that form the material basis for both of the above. Applying a feminist-materialist lens to ethnographic observations, I look at ways of being queer in Cape Town as sites of tension. Instead of a ‘queer community’, there exist manifold differentiated queer communities that do not necessarily have much to do with one another. With a growing hyper-capitalization of queer forms of public representation and an awareness of queerness as a localized (South African) brand, the tension lies in a constant negotiation of sustaining a livelihood by making use of opportunities provided in this field versus providing care for chosen family and other queers or re-appropriating places for a different kind of public representation of queer lives.