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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