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
|
- OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024) <https://www.oed.com/>
- Adhikari, Mohamed, Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005)
- Adhikari, Mohamed, ‘“God Made the White Man, God Made the Black Man…”: Popular Racial Stereotyping of Coloured People in Apartheid South Africa’, South African Historical Journal, 55.1 (2006), pp. 142–64
- Bowen, Frank C., Sea Slang: A Dictionary of the Old-Timers’ Expressions and Epithets (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1929)
- Camminga, B, Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa: Bodies Over Borders and Borders Over Bodies (Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92669-8>
- Chetty, Dhianaraj, ‘A Drag at Madame Costello’s: Cape Moffie Life and the Popular Press in the 1950s and 1960s’, in Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa, ed. by Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron [1994] (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 115–27 <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315021782>
- Choonoo, R. Neville, ‘The Sophiatown Generation: Black Literary Journalism during the 1950s’, in South Africa’s Alternative Press: Voices of Protest and Resistance, 1880s–1960s, ed. by Les Switzer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 252–65
- Dooms, Tessa, and Lynsey Ebony Chutel, Coloured: How Classification Became Culture (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2023)
- Erasmus, Zimitri, ‘Introduction: Re-imagining Coloured Identities in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, in Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town, ed. by Zimitri Erasmus (Cape Town and Maroelana, SA: Kwela Books and South African History Online, 2001), pp. 13–28
- Erasmus, Zimitri, ed., Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town (Cape Town and Maroelana, SA: Kwela Books and South African History Online, 2001)
- Farred, Grant, Midfielder’s Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa [2000] (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018) <https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429040351>
- Foucault, Michel, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. by Donald F. Bouchard, trans. by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 139–64
- Foucault, Michel, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. by Paul Rabinow, trans. by Catherine Porter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 32–50
- Foucault, Michel, Le Discours Philosophique, ed. by Daniele Lorenzini and Orazio Irrera (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2023)
- Gevisser, Mark, ‘A Different Fight for Freedom’, in Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa, ed. by Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron [1994] (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 14–86 <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315021782>
- Gevisser, Mark, and Edwin Cameron, ‘Defiant Desire: An Introduction’, in Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa, ed. by Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron [1994] (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 3–13 <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315021782>
- Heyns, Jackie, ‘The Moffie Manuscripts’, Drum, July 1977
- Hoad, Neville, ‘Between the White Man’s Burden and the White Man’s Disease: Tracking Lesbian and Gay Human Rights in Southern Africa’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 5.4 (1999), pp. 559–84 <https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-5-4-559>
- Jeppie, Shamil, ‘Popular Culture and Carnival in Cape Town’, in The Struggle for District Six: Past and Present, ed. by Shamil Jeppie and Crain Soudien (Cape Town: Buchu Books, 1990), pp. 67–87
- Leap, William, ‘Strangers on a Train: Sexual Citizenship and the Politics of Transportation in Apartheid Cape Town’, in Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, ed. by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin Manalansan IV (New York: New York University Press, 2002), pp. 219–35 <https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814790182.003.0016>
- Lease, Bryce, and Mark Gevisser, ‘LGBTQI Rights in South Africa’, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 18.2 (2017), pp. 156–60 <https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2016.1270013>
- Lorenzini, Daniele, ‘On Possibilising Genealogy’, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 67.7 (2020), pp. 2175–96 <https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2020.1712227>
- Mamdani, Mahmood, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014)
- Manion, Anthony, ‘Guide to the Gay and Lesbian Archives of South Africa’, in Sex and Politics in South Africa, ed. by Neville Hoad, Karen Martin, and Graeme Reid (Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2005), pp. 228–52
- Msibi, Thabo, ‘The Lies We Have Been Told: On (Homo) Sexuality in Africa’, Africa Today, 58.1 (2011), pp. 55–77 <https://doi.org/10.2979/africatoday.58.1.55>
- Munro, Brenna M., South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012)
- Pettman, Charles, Africanderisms: A Glossary of South African Colloquial Words and Phrases and of Place and Other Names (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1913)
- Rabie, Francois, and Elmien Lesch, ‘“I Am Like A Woman”: Constructions of Sexuality Among Gay Men in a Low-Income South African Community’, Culture, Health & Sexuality, 11.7 (2009), pp. 717–29 <https://doi.org/10.1080/13691050902890344>
- Ramsden-Karelse, Ruth, ‘Moving and Moved: Reading Kewpie’s District Six’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 26.3 (2020), pp. 405–38 <https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-8311772>
- Ramsden-Karelse, Ruth, ‘“People Can’t Say I’m A Man, They Can’t Say I’m A Woman”: Reality Expansion in the Kewpie Collection’, in The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric, ed. by Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), pp. 207–14 <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003144809>
- Reid, Graeme, ‘Fragments from the Archives II’, in Sex and Politics in South Africa, ed. by Neville Hoad, Karen Martin, and Graeme Reid (Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2005), pp. 174–77
- Srinivasan, Amia, ‘Genealogy, Epistemology and Worldmaking’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 119.2 (2019), pp. 127–56 <https://doi.org/10.1093/arisoc/aoz009>
- Swarr, Amanda Lock, Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023) <https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478093763>
- Tucker, Andrew, Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity, and Interaction in Cape Town (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009) <https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444306187>
- Visser, Gustav, ‘Gay Men, Leisure Space, and South African Cities: The Case of Cape Town’, Geoforum, 34.1 (2003), pp. 123–37 <https://doi.org/10.1016/S0016-7185(02)00079-9>
- Walker, Oliver, K*****s Are Lively: Being Some Backstage Impressions of the South African Democracy (London: V. Golancz, 1948)
- Wicomb, Zoë, ‘Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa’, in Writing South Africa, ed. by Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 91–107 <https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511586286.009>
- Williams, Bernard, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)