Embracing dis-ease: imagining queer African performance

Abstract

This article is a theoretical musing around ideas of queer Africanness and performance. Butler argues that the body is always exposed to other bodies, and the social and political spheres. Because of differential power relations, queers and their bodies are cast outside existing codes of intelligibility – as invisible, unreal, less-than-human. However, this negative (diseased/dis-eased) position can be productive, since it affords queers the opportunity to redefine a new social order outside current grids of intelligibility. I argue Africans occupy a similar position – Africa is a queer continent and a queer positionality can be a productive subject position for Africans. The value of queer performance lies in its potential for imagination – onstage we can imagine configurations of gender, sexuality, selfhood and kinship that seem impossible in reality. In performance we can imagine new configurations of being African and queer. I posit performance as a Foucauldian heterotopia – a space in which utopia can be enacted. Here utopia is not a passive dream of a better world, but an active critique of the present. In performance, utopian queer imaginings not only critique what is, but these imaginings can become enacted as they are performatives, as they are executed through the live, real and present bodies of performers. The article concludes with a discussion of the physical theatre piece I Stand Corrected by South African dancer-choreographer, Mamela Nyamza, and British actor and writer, Mojisola Adebayo.

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