Moffies, Artists, and Queens:

Race and the Production of South African Gay Male Drag

DRAFT

 

 

Amanda Lock Swarr

University of Minnesota

 

 

 

This paper is under review with the Journal of Homosexuality and will be published as part of a special issue on drag queens.  Please do not cite without permission. 

 

 

Abstract: Contemporary South African drag allows us to consider not only how social differences influence drag, but also how drag produces race and gender.  In this paper, Swarr draws on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa to postulate that two distinct sex/gender/sexuality systems have emerged among urban whites and in the black and coloured townships since the end of apartheid.  She argues that urban drag produces whiteness through opposition to blackness and explores how township femininity creates gender, sex, and sexuality.

Moffies, Artists, and Queens:

Race and the Production of South African Gay Male Drag

Amanda Swarr

 

Drag performances take many complex forms in contemporary South Africa. Drag can be intentionally humorous, intensely glamorous, or shockingly political.  It is performed widely in elite white clubs, gay township shebeens, and as part of mainstream community celebrations.  When apartheid ended in 1994, South African gays and lesbians were the first in the world to obtain constitutional protection based on sexual orientation.  Yet they continue to live in a society fraught with enormous social, economic, and political contradictions.  Understanding the disparities inherent in this context is fundamental to understanding South African drag and allows us to see not only how social differences influence drag, but also how drag produces race and gender. 

Three central assumptions about the relationships between gender and race underpin this chapter.  First, gendered and raced categories of identity and analysis are inseparable and are produced by specific historical practices.  It is impossible to generalize about drag without exploring the ways that each drag performance reflects and produces the simultaneity of race, class, history, and sexuality.  Analyses of gender performances that pose race and class as supplementary are always incomplete, as there is no generic “woman” or “man” represented in drag--there are only particular raced, classed, and historically-specific genders. 

My second assumption is that sex, gender, sexuality, and race are inherently unstable yet socio-politically important.  Though these categories may seem to be fixed, their meanings are never fully consistent and must constantly be reworked and negotiated.  Race, sexuality, sex, and gender are, as Judith Butler (1991) puts it, imitations for which there are no originals.  Race and gender are not solid entities; they come into being and constantly change through repeated performances and everyday practices.  Drag is one of the practices that I speak of throughout this chapter as consequently “producing” race and gender.  At the same time, categories such as white/black or man/woman may be critical to individuals’ self-perceptions.  The simultaneous instability of identity categories and their use as terms of self-description present methodological difficulties.  For instance, I rely on the racial designators of apartheid--“white,” “coloured,” and “black”--as these are ways that South Africans describe themselves, while recognizing the problematic assumptions underlying such categories.^[1]   Similarly, terms like “transgender” and “cross-dresser” imply that there are only two sexes/genders, and “drag” indicates a rupture between gendered appearance and sex that essentializes anatomy.  I necessarily employ the same words and ideas undercut by my own research, and I consciously work within this paradox here.

Third, sex, gender, sexuality, and race operate oppositionally.  Heterosexuality is conceptualized at the borders of queerness (Chauncey 1994), femininity and femaleness operate in opposition to masculinity and maleness (Kessler and McKenna 1978), and blackness serves as the negative antithesis of whiteness (Said 1978).  None of these categories are monolithic, and close examination reveals that though commonly conceived of as binaries, they mask multiple human differences and similarities.  However, these categories function socially as oppositions, and examining their relationality reveals how drag is produced by and produces sexuality, sex, gender, and race.  In this chapter, I analyze the dichotomous constitution of whiteness/blackness, masculinity/femininity, and heterosexuality/homosexuality and the cracks within these dichotomies.   

This chapter draws on interviews, life histories, and participant observation to highlight the words and experiences of South African drag performers.  In particular, I consider historical and contemporary drag in the urban centers and surrounding townships of Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Pretoria from the perspectives of its participants.  I articulate how social differences such as race, space, and class shape drag, and I analyze how drag not only performs but also produces race and gender by making three arguments.  First, I postulate that two distinct sex/gender/sexuality systems have emerged in South Africa that shape and are shaped by historical manifestations of drag.  Second, I argue that urban drag produces whiteness by positioning races in opposition to each other.  Finally, I contend that an examination of township femininity illustrates not only the ways that drag produces gender, but may affect how we understand and define “drag” itself.   

 

I.  Racing South African Drag

Although since the end of apartheid South Africans have created a nation based on the rhetoric of freedom from oppression, the legacy of apartheid and the forms of racial and economic division that it ruthlessly enforced are still central components of South Africans’ daily lives.  Those who perform in drag are no exception.  Gay men of all races in South Africa drag, but drag venues, forms, and opportunities are largely determined by race and class.  Performances by white gay men are generally centered in urban bars and clubs in front of largely white audiences.  As part of a troupe, they do not receive tips but are paid by the owner of the venue and are usually part of a choreographed show.  While some urban troupes include black and coloured performers, most black and coloured gays drag primarily in pageants and competitions for titles.  Unlike most white gay men, many coloured and black gays also drag publicly in their daily lives.

            Differences among drag performances are rooted in the racialized sex/gender/sexuality systems within which South Africans operate.  Distinguishing among sex (the male or female body), gender (performances of masculinity and femininity), and sexuality (sexual practices and orientation) is critical to understanding these systems.  White South African drag performers function within a self-policed gender/sex/sexuality system that links sex and gender.  Generally, most white gay men who identify as gay are masculine; homosexuality is not necessarily related to gender.  Indeed, while playing with gender in social settings is accepted, transgender identities are looked down upon within white gay communities.^[2]  White South African drag parallels this sex/gender/sexuality construction.  For most South African urban whites, drag is an aestheticized form of self-expression confined to bars and clubs--it is a bounded spectacle, not an everyday practice, performed by a “drag artist.”  Drag is an integral part of urban gay communities, but it is not necessarily reflective of the gender of the person who is dragging.   

Within urban white communities, same-sex desire indicates a homosexual identity; males who have sex with other males label themselves “gay.”  However, in coloured and black township communities, masculine males who have sex with feminine males are often considered “straight.”  Here, homosexuality is defined not only through same-sex desire, but through transgenderism.  That is, in order to be a black or coloured “gay” man in the townships, one must have both same-sex desire and a feminine gender.  In fact, most gay men in the townships have relationships with “straight” men, those who have sex with other men but who are considered “butch.”  These masculine/feminine same-sex relationships among men are central to many township gay experiences.^[3]  Thus, in township sex/gender/sexuality ideologies, gender is disconnected from sex and instead coupled with sexuality.  

In recent years, as I discuss in chapter five and as Reid (1999) and Donham (1998) have pointed out, white and northern definitions of “gayness” have influenced the ways that urban black and coloured gay men identify.  Among educated and professional gay men, especially those who are upwardly mobile and move out of the townships, there are increasing numbers of black and coloured masculine men who identify as gay.  However, according to the approximately 150 informants I spoke with during my ethnographic research in the Western Cape and Gauteng, these men are still the exception to township ideologies.  In fact, feminine gay men in the townships fall outside of the man/woman binary, creating their own categories as moffies (in coloured townships) and istabane or skesana (in some black townships).^[4]  In South Africa’s townships, drag performances are not simply spaces for personal expression; they have implications for relationships and for a person’s visibility within his/her community.  Dragging in pageants and to attract masculine males’ attention is also an important way that township “drag queens” affirm their feminine gender identities.  In these contexts, drag not only reflects racialized sex/gender/sexuality systems, it produces these systems through drag performances.

These two sex/gender/sexuality ideologies and the ways they are constituted today cannot be separated from the specific national and regional histories of South Africa.  South Africa is well-known for its brutal system of legalized racial segregation, but the apartheid government was not only preoccupied with racial oppression.  Like most colonial states, the apartheid regime legitimated itself by enforcing separation and by fixing identity categories such as race and gender as a means to maintain repressive authority.  These restrictions affected the specific ways drag developed in South Africa.   

Historically, drag has not simply been an aesthetic practice for black and coloured gays, but a component of everyday life.  In the coloured townships outside of Cape Town, moffies dragged in their jobs, often as hairdressers or caterers, and in sport on gay netball teams in women’s leagues (Gevisser 1994).^[5]  The annual Coon Carnival has also been a site for drag performances since at least the 1930s.  Although the name of the carnival itself is contentious to outsiders,^[6] it is the highlight of the year for many working-class coloured people of the former District Six and the coloured townships surrounding Cape Town.^[7]  While historically women have not participated, femininity is represented in the Coon Carnival through moffies in drag, who have been an integral part of the festivities since its inception.  Although historians have claimed that moffies reversed or subverted gender and sexuality through their roles in the Coon Carnival in ways similar to carnivals in other parts of the world (Jeppie 1990, Chetty 1994), the moffie might alternately be seen as a crucial part of the sex/gender/sexuality system unique to coloured township culture. 

As apartheid undermined the Coon Carnival beginning in 1948 by restricting the movement of coloureds through the 1966 Group Areas Act and similar legislation, troupe captains increasingly viewed moffies as symbolic of autonomy and freedom (Martin 1994: 16).  In this way, drag represented racial pride and resistance among coloured Capetonians.  However, despite the defiant attitudes of many participants, apartheid officials simultaneously manipulated the Coon Carnival to demonstrate the supposed inferiority and “primitiveness” of the coloureds (Martin 127, 130).  The perceived outrageousness of both Coons, who sing and dance in satin costumes with painted faces, and moffies was a source of entertainment for whites, and often a source of embarrassment for aspirant coloureds (Jeppie 1990).  Furthermore, the entrenchment of specifically “coloured culture” through events like the Coon Carnival increasingly distinguished coloureds from blacks and reinforced apartheid rhetoric.

Drag among black South Africans was also accepted by apartheid officials when it served the interests of the state and capital.  Historically, same-sex relationships between black South Africans have been common, though not always indicating “homosexual” identities.  One such example of drag occurred in gendered “mine marriages” among black men who lived in the compounds of South Africa’s diamond and gold mines.  For mine workers, such relationships were beneficial to “husbands” as a source of sex, companionship, and domestic service.  “Wives” participated, according to Philemon, a Tsonga miner, “for the sake of security, for the acquisition of property, and for the fun itself” (Wa Sibuye 1993: 62).  Under colonialism and apartheid, these same-sex relationships included both a feminine and masculine partner and were accepted among miners.  The feminine partner, who was usually younger, would often drag to attract partners, receive protection and privileges, or establish roles in the relationship (Moodie 1989; Murray and Roscoe 1998).  Philemon explains how “wives” would drag,

 

They would get pieces of clothing material and they would sew it together so that it appeared like real breasts.  They would then attach it to other strings that made it look almost like a bra so that at the evening dancing ‘she’ would dance with the husband.  It would appear very real. … That was a norm on the mines.  (Wa Sibuye: 54)

 

These same-sex relationships were common enough to be normative and acknowledged, and indeed encouraged, by the state.  Homosexuality and drag on the mines allowed an outlet for black male sexuality, as men were confined to the compounds, and provided domestic service for the miners, which kept them from demanding to bring their wives to the mines and hence necessitating higher wages (Elder 1995).  Consequently, black same-sex sexuality and, by association, drag, was supported by the apartheid government and capitalist interests to the extent that it facilitated control over black labor.

            Among white gay South Africans, dragging was not an everyday practice but a form of entertainment.  Like with black and coloured drag, the South African state attempted to use white drag to reinforce its own power.  For example, former drag performer Matthew Krouse describes how dragging in the South African Defense Force during 1984 was sometimes organized by the military, which paid for costumes and wigs.  Shows were attended by “a couple of thousand soldiers” (Krouse 1994: 216) and intentionally posited male homosexuality as abnormal by linking it to femininity.  Drag performers were objectified by the largely straight audience; in Krouse’s words, “During the performance there was an enormous din of catcalls and mocking masturbatory behavior” (ibid.).  These shows reinforced the inferiority of drag artists and the masculinity of their straight audiences in ways he found degrading.  According to Krouse, “I can only imagine that the upper echelons of the camp must have felt a tremendous sense of strength on those nights [of drag performances]” (218), as they reaffirmed the state’s control over white drag’s subversive potential.

White homosexuality and drag also threatened the hegemony of the South African state to such an extent that apartheid officials struggled to enforce heterosexuality through laws and police violence (Retief 1994).  Although access to private spaces and the privileges of whiteness often served to protect upper class white homosexuals from detection, policing of white males’ gender and sexuality was especially vigorous under apartheid (Elder 1995).  Uncontrolled threats posed by drag and homosexuality were not accepted under Christian Afrikaner nationalism, since supposedly normative gender and sexuality were essential components of the racial categories of apartheid (McClintock 1995, Stoler 1991).  For the first half of the twentieth century, white homosexuality was of little concern to the colonial and apartheid governments.  However, after a raid of a 1966 party of approximately 300 white homosexual men in Forest Town (a suburb of Johannesburg), the apartheid government was shocked to discover the extent to which homosexuality existed in middle and upper class white society (Retief 1994, Gevisser 1994).  This posed a direct threat to the purity of the volk, the Afrikaner Christian nation.  Thus, in 1969 Parliament enacted a variety of laws intended to suppress “homosexual” behaviors, including the Prohibition of Disguises Act 16 of 1969 that criminalized males dressing in feminine clothing, and gay men of all races were increasingly charged with “masquerading as women in public” (Gevisser 1994, Cameron 1994).^[8]  Drag, as a public marker of disruption to apartheid conceptions of sex, gender, and sexuality, was outlawed when outside of the control of the state.  Not surprisingly, drag still flourished in private parties and white gay bars and clubs, but it was driven further underground by restrictive legislation.  Today, white drag continues to be largely confined to urban gay bars and clubs, while black and coloured men continue to incorporate drag into their daily lives.

           

II.  Urban Whiteness and Drag

In June 1997, Lili Slapstilli, a member of the drag troupe “Mince,” took to the stage to mime to Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary.”^[9]  Her performance at On Broadway in Cape Town was favorably reviewed in the mainstream Cape Times newspaper as “one of the most convincing impersonations of Tina Turner on the market” (Devenish 1997).  Slapstilli gyrated to a live recording of “Proud Mary,” her mime perfectly matching the difficult lyrics, and, as the tempo of the song increased, she danced flawlessly like Turner in concert.  Slapstilli herself does not try to perfectly mimic the women she impersonates, stating, “At 6’2” there’s no way I’ll look exactly like them.”^[10]  However, the fissure in Slapstilli’s authenticity came not through her height, her skill, or her costume, but through her race.  Lili Slapstilli is white.  How is it that she could be considered to be an “authentic” Tina Turner?

Despite outward differences between Slapstilli and Tina Turner, white South African audiences overlook perceived “racial” differences when white performers impersonate black women.  In some ways, Slapstilli’s authenticity as Tina Turner might be interpreted as undermining racial expectations and revealing the fiction of race; Slapstilli’s clothes, miming, and mannerisms superceded phenotypical differences in the eyes of the audience and reviewers.  Impersonations of Eartha Kitt, Millie Jackson, Jennifer Holiday, and Aretha Franklin by white drag performers in South Africa’s urban clubs and bars garner similar praise.  However, this is not because whiteness is unimportant; instead, drag produces whiteness as an unmarked category, a space in which to create characters, while black and coloured performers are largely restricted to impersonating women of color.  Whiteness in South Africa is anxiously policed, as the new post-apartheid “non-racialism” threatens this category which still retains enormous legal, social, and economic privileges.  Drag is one means through which the instability of whiteness is fixed and its meaning is produced.

Whiteness in South Africa, as elsewhere, hinges on an implicit comparison to those who are “non-white,” a catch-all category that tends to elide differences.  Race is predicated on the hierarchical conception that whiteness is not only fundamentally different from, but also superior to blackness.  Edward Said’s (1978) explanation of the way that “the west” is created through its opposition to an imagined/constructed “east” serves as an important model for us in conceptualizing how white drag is embedded in implicit comparisons to black and coloured drag.  Although South African racial constructions actually include categories beyond black and white--and coloureds were singled out at the apartheid government at various points in history for political purposes--the apartheid regime nevertheless concieved of itself in term of whiteness, with all other categories implicitly falling into the inferior “non-white” category.^[11]

Drag among South African urban white gay men is socially accepted primarily if confined to commercial performances, and gay male drag is found in almost all gay-owned bars and clubs in both Cape Town and Pretoria.  Performers in these contexts are hired as part of troupes, and positions in troupes are highly competitive.  Some urban drag may be glamorous, while other performances are comedic.  The comments of a white bar owner, Warren, allow us to explore how comedy serves as a site for producing racial juxtapositions.^[12]  Warren is not only the owner of a prominent urban gay bar, he hires performers, choreographs all of their numbers, and even chooses costumes, stage names, and musical pieces. 

When describing how he envisions drag shows and performers’ roles, Warren states that coloured and black performers must be comic in order to entertain a white crowd.  Most white South Africans, accustomed to interacting with non-whites in inferior positions, find it difficult to take black and coloured people seriously.  In urban drag, white audiences are comfortable seeing black and coloured performers in the roles of entertaining and silly clowns.  However, it is important to note that Warren’s comment is undermined by the sensual acts of the few coloured and black members of his drag troupe.  These performances reinforce the contradictions of racial production, as well as the autonomy of the artists themselves.  Black sexuality is simultaneously desired while repressed as immoral.  Given white fears of this sexuality, glamorous and sensual performances by black and coloured artists are potentially both titilating and disruptive to their largely white gay and straight audiences. 

White drag artists may also differentiate among and complexify forms of whiteness.^[13]  One such performer is Sonja Koekemoer, who during 1996-1997 performed as a boeremeisie, literally “farm girl,” a favorite trope of Afrikaans drag artists in Cape Town and Pretoria.  The boeremeisie embodied on stage is a classic example of unsuccessful femininity.  Koekemoer as a boeremeisie wore bright, clashing colors and garish styles as well as giant plastic flowers or bright ribbons in her teased blonde hair. She moved awkwardly and used props such as bedroom slippers to emphasize her working class values.  Koekemoer’s drag included silver and blue make-up with sparkles contrasted with her intentionally hairy arms, and she mimed in Afrikaans to traditional songs in an overdramatized, tragic style.  Her performances were immensely popular; she was featured in all of the mainstream newspapers in Cape Town and was the headline performer in a national drag tour.^[14]  Koekemoer illustrates contemporary ambivalence about the place of Afrikaner culture in post-apartheid South Africa.  Upwardly mobile Afrikaners, in particular, often distance themselves from their working class, rural roots.  However, Koekemoer’s popularity also reflects white gay men’s increasing rejection of traditional South African values in favor of an emerging international urban gay sensibility.    

Racial tension is often produced by drag performances.  For instance, when Brenda, a coloured drag artist, performs comically to the “Click Song (Qongqothwane)” by Miriam Makeba, a legendary black South African singer, she contributes to the white/black dichotomy and stereotypes of black inferiority.  Brenda’s traditional African costume and padded buttocks, her exaggerated miming and ridicule of the clicks of the Xhosa language, and the overtly sexualized dancing during which she intentionally opens her legs to expose her crotch leave her white audiences in stitches.  Further, Brenda’s performances occur in the context of Cape Town’s coloured/black racial tensions exacerbated by divisive labor policies and voting privileges afforded to coloureds under apartheid.  As a coloured performer stereotyping a black woman, her performances affirm the coloured/black distinction and her superiority in South Africa’s racial hierarchy as a coloured person.  But Brenda’s tenuous position and her strict supervision by a white bar owner in this urban context also reinscribes the white/black binary through this performance. 

Drag is an important way that specifically gay whiteness is constituted in South Africa.  The sex/gender/sexuality system under which urban white gay men operate values masculine gender identities, and many middle class white gays are concerned with respectability and social approval.  Despite the acceptance of drag in commercial performances, transgender identities are often rejected and ridiculed.  For example, Jan, a white middle class gay man from an urban area, believes that drag artists are “backwards,” especially those who cross-dress in their daily lives.  He sees them as “unresolved” psychologically and claims that in the gay and lesbian movement, “we don’t want court jesters.”  Jan’s comments are commonplace in white bars and organizations, and in South Africa such sentiments have distinctly racial overtones.  Jan disdainful of white drag artists’ performances, but he is far more condemnatory of black and coloured drag queens with transgendered identities.  Here, he implicitly establishes his own gender and race as superior and normative, while drag queens are seen as somehow inferior and inappropriate. 

Warren’s comments are similarly instructive for understanding how drag produces racial differences in urban contexts.  In interviews, he repeatedly distinguishes between “drag artists,” those who perform in his bar, and “common drag queens.”  Such a comparison is loaded with racial and classed meanings and simultaneously constructs hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality.  White drag is considered superior in this context because it is a conscious performance, an upper class theatric art form (thus the preferred term, “drag artist”) that is economically valuable.  Such drag usually does not explicitly challenge the sex/gender/sexuality system within which it operates, as performers are not transgendered--they drag as actors, as characters in a play.  Black and coloured drag queens, in comparison, are not part of an aestheticized art form; their drag is part of their gender identities.  Like the apartheid government that saw black and coloured drag as a way to produce racial difference, white gays posit “drag queens” as indicative of the differences between white and non-white gayness.  Gendered differences between forms of drag allow white gays to make judgements that subtly establish their racial and economic superiority.

 

III.  Femininity and Township Drag 

            I now turn to an examination of coloured and black South African township drag to explore the ways that drag enables the binary construction of masculinity and femininity as opposites, at the same time that it constitutes “gayness” as its own gender category.  I consider three components of this construction: drag pageants, drag and sexual relationships, and the vulnerabilities drag facilitates. 

Black and coloured drag is usually a way that performers produce their femininity.  Individuals drag in pageants that follow the formats of beauty contests, featuring various dress competitions and interviews.  Participants sometimes pay to enter, instead of being paid as in urban drag, though pageant winners may obtain cash and other prizes.  They enter competitions as individuals and answer questions based on their opinions, not as characters or “artists” in a show.  For example, the Miss GLOW 1999 pageant final (Gays and Lesbians of the Witswaterstrand) was held in a gay shebeen (township bar) in Sebokeng and attended by gay and straight members of the black township communities surrounding Johannesburg.  The seven finalists showcased both casual and evening dress, and each answered two questions on topics ranging from trivia about local gay icons to their own positions on coming out.  Participants in Miss GLOW 1999 did not wear false breasts or wigs to make their bodies appear female, but performed femininity through their dress, make-up, and movements.   

In the eyes of the audience and judges, contestants embody a particular form of township drag in which juxtapositions between male bodies and feminine performances are the norm.^[15]  Here, drag produces gender in ways consistent with township sex/gender/sexuality systems such that gender (femininity) is more important than sex (maleness).  In his discussion of the 1993 funeral of Linda Ngcobo, a well-known black gay activist, journalist Mark Gevisser describes some mourners wearing “that peculiar androgyny of township drag borne of scant resources and much imagination, nodding at gender--inversion with no more than a frilly shirt, a pair of garish earrings, a touch of rouge, a pair of low-heeled pumps, a third-hand wig” (1994: 14-15).  In township contexts like these, the raced ways that drag produces femininity, while perhaps slight or even indecipherable to an outsider, provide signposts to indicate the parameters of the performance to those who can read them.  This form of drag, “borne of scant resources and much imagination,” as Gevisser puts it, produces gender contextually.  “Imagination” is a useful concept here, as it explains how drag queens and their audiences form an mental image of something not entirely real--gender--and encapsulates how gender relies on specific cues to sustain the collective illusion of gender.

Drag queens articulate their physical bodies with their audiences, especially masculine men, in mind.  To prepare for the Miss Gay Universe 2000 pageant, Nasreen, a self-defined coloured drag queen from an urban township, describes having her eyebrows shaped and growing her hair, in addition to making her own gowns.  She is primarily concerned with helping audiences forget that she has a male body.  Nasreen believes that passing and being sexually desired while dragging are the greatest affirmations of her femininity.  Dragging also provides her with family and community approval.  She describes how a neighbor told her mother about seeing Nasreen in a pageant: “You know, I saw your son, but I didn’t know he was your son, I thought he was a real lady.”  Her success in presenting herself as a woman despite her male body leads her family to be, in Nasreen’s words, “not proud, but supportive.”  While Nasreen fits into the sex/gender/sexuality ideologies of her township community as a moffie, she would rather be a woman and drags to pass.  Township drag produces contradictions within sex and gender.  Township gender and sexuality systems are multiplicitous and inclusive of moffies, istabane, and skesanas, but the man/woman binary retains significant social relevance.  Drag queens like Nasreen produce gender and sex in ways that redefine what it is to be a “woman,” while they also produce cracks in the coherence of this category.

            Drag is also an important component of black and coloured drag queens’ sexual relationships, and these relationships actively produce gay femininity through contrast with its supposed opposite, the “real man.”  Relationships with masculine and especially straight men reinscribe the gender binary and thus affirm drag queens’ gender identities.  The more masculine their partner is, the more feminine they are by association.^[16]  Many drag queens, like Rashid and Kenneth, go solely to “straight” bars because they are only interested in “real men” as partners.  Their sexual relationships, which are frequently characterized in townships as “butch/femme,” render same-sex sexuality culturally intelligible within their communities.  They make it easy for families to understand gay relationships because they pair masculinity and femininity.  Further, butch/femme roles, embodied publicly through drag, clarify sexual expectations in relationships.  Nasreen explains this popular sentiment among both coloured and black drag queens: 

 

[Butch/femme relationships are] very, very, very good…you’ll see it’s like boyfriend and girlfriend, the one is passive and the one and active.  You know which one is the girl and which one is the boy. … I enjoy being a drag queen, because I know who I am.

 

Sexual roles and drag are important in constructing credible femininity and masculinity for both partners, and the binaries within which they function secure these identities.  Gender and sex are not simply produced through drag performance, but through sex acts themselves in which partners collectively imagine their respective genders as masculine and feminine.   

Although embodying a convincing femininity is a goal of most drag queens and the ability to “pass” is idealized, passing also leads to one of the ambiguities of township drag.  That drag queens are also moffies, skesana, or istabane--categories neither entirely man or woman--makes individuals constantly unsure whether or not they are passing as women, which can be quite dangerous.  This liminal production of gender can threaten sex/gender/sexuality ideologies.  Brandy, a coloured drag queen who was extremely successful in drag competitions in the Western Cape in her youth, describes the difficulties she faced:

 

I was even shot for my beauty.  I didn’t know that this man was stalking me all the time in Mitchell’s Plain at a night club, and eventually the man found out I was gay and the man shot me right here in this spot.

 

The dangers that Brandy and other drag queens confront may seem contradictory considering the social acceptance of gays in many townships.  As Farid points out, for example, “people adore gays” in the coloured townships.  But this approval is not uniform, even within accepting communities, especially because of the violent gangs that dominate South Africa’s townships.  Farid explains that, despite the general tolerance of the community, drag queens are targeted by tsotsis or skollies (gangsters) to be terrorized and even murdered.  He states, “That’s why I basically had to stop [dragging] because it just got too dangerous for me….I just felt that this was not the life for me.”  Both homophobia and sexism make drag queens common targets for township violence.  In the wake of social upheavals and frustrations following the end of apartheid, South African women are subjected to extreme levels of sexual violence, and drag queens, because of their embodiment of femininity, are frequently raped and murdered, as well.^[17]  Drag clearly has contradictory draws and consequences for black and coloured South Africans.  They produce femininity through pageants and relationships, but their genders also put them at risk for violent attacks. 

Analyzing the complexity of South African township drag allows us to reconsider the meanings of drag itself.  As Judith Butler has pointed out, drag illustrates the performativity of gender.  All gender is a performance, and the specificity of drag simply calls attention to this quality of gender which is central to its social production (1990, 1993).  Butler’s gendered conception of “performance” can also be racialized.  Like gender, race is a performance for which there is no original, and its cracks and fissures illustrate the constructed and insubstantial nature of race as itself.  In township gay vernacular, “performance” has another meaning.  To perform is to try to gain attention, to act outrageously, to cause a scene.  For example, a moffie who gets drunk and acts flamboyantly in a public place may be accused of “performing,” the essence of which is drama.  When a drag queen “performs” in this sense, she is acting without a stage.

In most scholarship, gay male drag is defined as that which is performed on stage in front of an audience cognizant of performers’ male bodies.  Township drag fits this criteria, while calling attention to the racial, class, national, and cultural assumptions that underlie it.  Few black and coloured South African gay males have the opportunity to drag on stage, as white men do.  Instead, they create their own drag with the resources they have.  The audience to drag queens’ “performances” are community members and township streets are their stages.  Audiences know performers have male bodies, but these bodies are less relevant that their feminine genders to their success as “women.”  South African township drag thus blurs and races the distinctions among “drag,” “cross-dressing,” and “transvestitism.” 

 

IV.  Conclusions

            South African urban and township drag differ in many ways.  Urban drag is aesthetic, while township drag is based in transgendered identities.  Urban drag artists are paid to drag in gay bars and clubs, while township drag queens perform for community recognition in pageants, competitions, and in their daily lives.  As both of these forms of drag emerge from the racially segregated history of South African apartheid, they reflect the historically-based sex/gender/sexuality systems of their communities.  However, drag does not merely mirror the societies in which it occurs.  Instead, drag produces race and gender through artists and queens’ performances.  As we have seen here, whiteness is not a static and stable identity illustrated in drag; it is a fragile set of illusions performed and produced in drag performances and in the judgements of white gay men.  The complexity of race and gender are constituted through their relationality.  Masculinity and femininity create one another through juxtaposition in township drag and community life, at the same time that moffies, istabane, and skesanas challenge genders’ dualistic composition. 

Analyzing race, sex, gender, and sexuality comparatively in specific historical, geographic, and socio-political contexts exposes the subjectivity and heterogeneity of these constructs.  South African productions of race and gender are constantly changing and can often be misunderstood by those who do not fully understand their ideological contexts.  Through this analysis of some of the complexities of South African drag, we can not only ascertain the motivations of individual performers, we can also begin to see the contexts in which their performances are created and understand something about the ways that social differences are formed and produced.    

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