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Paper short abstract:

The Kewpie Collection, featuring the gays and girls of District Six (1950-1990), offers a crucial yet unexplored practice of grief that is at odds with the South African nationalist, ‘gay rights’ impulse that shaped its 1990s archivalisation: a practice that seeks to enable expansive, queer futures.

Paper long abstract:

As the question of so-called gay rights emerged as an element of South African public culture, amid efforts to ensure the passage of the equality clause in the 1996 Constitution, the continent’s first Gay and Lesbian Archives, newly-established in Johannesburg, acquired 600 photographs and three interviews featuring their collector, Kewpie. These materials depict self-described gays and girls living in Cape Town’s District Six from 1950-1990. Classified 'Coloured' under apartheid, the girls had been among 60,000 forcibly removed from the District by the Nationalist government.

While framing the Kewpie Collection’s 1990s archivalisation as an effort to establish historical precedent for a contemporary political agenda, this paper suggests that Kewpie’s use of gay exceeds the discourses of sexuality in which those politics invested. Indeed, Kewpie curtails her interviewers’ rhetoric of political progress through activism. Across interviews, Kewpie resists ideological co-option by declining to co-operate with her archivists’ optimistically future-oriented projects and by embedding in her testimony a disruptive practice of grief and concomitant dissonant temporalities.

Accommodating grief for losses erased from the public sphere, and marking the cost of working to sustain what she terms ‘gay life’ while living in proximity to death, Kewpie’s melancholic practice insists on bringing with those failed – those made ‘late’ – by contemporary nationalist political movements. This paper highlights the as-yet-unexplored artistic and cultural significance of this practice, which seeks to make presently devalued forms of life more possible than their erasure allows and, ultimately, to materialise the expansive futures that Kewpie’s photographs help us imagine.