Book Section
Ruth Ramsden-Karelse

Towards a Genealogy of Moffie

Troubling the Binary Model of Understanding either Homosexuality or Homophobia as Un-African
Customarily a pejorative marker for individuals read as effeminate men, the Southern African word moffie has been somewhat reclaimed over the past few decades. Foregrounding moffie’s predominance in relation to formerly classified-‘coloured’ communities, this chapter sketches an alternate genealogy in relation to two twentieth-century ‘scenes’ which underscore the misleading nature of the debate about what is ‘un-African’ — a debate that limits possible answers to ‘homosexuality’ or ‘homophobia’.
Title
Towards a Genealogy of Moffie
Subtitle
Troubling the Binary Model of Understanding either Homosexuality or Homophobia as Un-African
Author(s)
Ruth Ramsden-Karelse
Identifier
Description
Customarily a pejorative marker for individuals read as effeminate men, the Southern African word moffie has been somewhat reclaimed over the past few decades. Foregrounding moffie’s predominance in relation to formerly classified-‘coloured’ communities, this chapter sketches an alternate genealogy in relation to two twentieth-century ‘scenes’ which underscore the misleading nature of the debate about what is ‘un-African’ — a debate that limits possible answers to ‘homosexuality’ or ‘homophobia’.
Is Part Of
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
20 May 2025
Subject
moffie
genealogy
South Africa
gender
queer
coloured
apartheid
Rights
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Language
en-GB
page start
323
page end
341
Source
Breaking and Making Models, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Marietta Kesting, and Claudia Peppel, Cultural Inquiry, 33 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 323–41
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Publication scheduled for 20 May 2025