Through a process of categorical ambiguity and affective displacement, each performer used drag to open up a space for the whites who had formerly been classified as “European” to claim a queer form of Africanness. While vastly different in objective and aesthetic, these performances allowed for what the essay calls a “prismatic” deconstruction of white identity within the context of political transformation. Rather than embracing the narrative of the rainbow nation central to the new democratic dispensation, performance artist Cohen used his queer body to enact what he calls “monster drag,” highlighting whiteness’s simultaneous alienation and privilege in relation to the black majority state. Breaking the fourth wall, Uys (as Evita) interviewed Nelson Mandela on live television and educated South Africa’s still racially divided communities on voting laws. While satirist Uys invented his drag alter ego Evita Bezuidenhout to critique the hypocrisy of the apartheid regime, his post-apartheid performances modeled a rehabilitated, self-critical whiteness. This essay analyzes the use of drag and gender subversion by two white South African performers, Pieter-Dirk Uys and Steven Cohen, during the long decade bisected by South Africa’s political transition (roughly 1990 to 2001). Significantly, while predominantly phenomenological in nature, this article to also partly auto-ethnographic as I draw from my own experience as a queer subject born in apartheid-era Johannesburg and living in democratic South Africa. Through Ruga’s radical aesthetic and disruptive artistic intervention with the Johannesburg Central Police Station – a site which has deeply penetrated South Africa’s cultural imaginary – this paper examines state violence against those who are identified as queer to expose the limits of the Rainbow Nation project, question the transformation of the South African police, and serve as an unsettling reminder of the complex and often dangerous societal position of women and queer subjects in South Africa. However, misconduct and violence at the hands of the police – referred to as ‘Priscilla’ in the gay South African argot, Gayle – continues under democracy albeit of a divergent nature. For queer subjects, South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994 brought with it many significant de jure changes to the daily lived reality of life in South Africa. the Naïveté of Beiruth (2008) photographic series as its genesis, this article employs critical approaches to semiotics and textual analysis to examine the history of police brutality in South Africa with a focus on the experiences of the queer community both under apartheid and after the transition to democracy – a history that repeatedly doubles back to the former-South African Police Force headquarters: John Vorster Square/Johannesburg Central Police Station. Using South African performance artist Athi-Patra Ruga’s.
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