Corrective rape, transactional sex and the undoing of lesbian identities in Namibia
Robert Lorway
In 2001, I began ethnographic research with a community of young people engaging with queer rights discourses emanating from the Namibian sexual minority rights NGO known as the Rainbow Project (TRP).1 From 1995 until 2005, when President Sam Nujoma finally stepped down from office, numerous government officials from the ruling party, the South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO), vilified gays and lesbians, likening them to infectious diseases, genetic mutation, anti-nationalism, neocolonialism, corruption and globalisation. My original concern was how this intensely homophobic climate and the resultant public health silences shaped the HIV vulnerability of young people living in the impoverished township of Katutura.
I also grew fascinated with some young people’s vivid displays of gender sexual non-conformity, which appeared remarkable at a time when ruling government officials were deploying virulent anti-homosexual rhetoric. However, multiple overlapping forms of violence periodically interrupted their gender-dissident performances, as the following description excerpted from my field notes for May 2003 illustrates:
After many long hours, our HIV/AIDS awareness committee finished painting the walls of TRP in preparation for a safer-sex poster exhibition. As some of us began crumpling up the newspapers that served as a drop cloth, from the corner of my eye I watched a heated argument spark between Hanna, a self-identified ‘butch lesbian’, and Melvin, who often dressed in partial feminine drag. Hanna accused Melvin of sexually coercing a young, gay friend of hers at a ‘safer sex’ educational weekend organised by the Rainbow Project (TRP) a few weeks previously. Melvin adamantly denied it.
Despite our best attempts to settle the argument it continued to escalate, especially when Melvin placed his hands on Hanna’s shoulders. We all knew that this physical contact would further ‘set off’ Hanna who had endured intense physical and sexual abuse at the hands of men since she was a child. As more members of the working group became drawn into the dispute, a barrage of insults flew, such as: ‘at least my mother didn’t die of AIDS’, ‘Your aunt is a prostitute and has a sugar daddy’, ‘You only have Standard 6 [education level]’, ‘Ovambos are dirty’ and ‘Damaras don’t have real culture’. Such deeply cutting insults culminated into physical violence between six of the members. The eventual casualties included a bloodied lip, a broken tooth, a slashed-open knee and other bodily bruises.
Beyond the physical injuries, what unsettled me most was the gendered form that the violence took during the episode. The previously proud composure of the butch lesbians noticeably drew downward while the posture of the three ‘feminine’ males inflated. Earlier that day I witnessed these same feminine males request ‘the men’ (Hanna and some of the other butch lesbians) to move the furniture in preparation for the painting, gesturing that they were physically too delicate to accomplish the task themselves; and Hanna and her butch friends were more than happy to demonstrate their strength. Now, the vibrant physical presence of these women diminished. They appeared vulnerable and tentative, similar to when other young women in Katutura encountered violence from men. As for the dainty, feminine-acting males, they appeared to drop all traces of effeminacy before my eyes, transforming into violent and aggressive men.
The episode reached an abrupt denouement when Hanna noticed two ‘non-members’ lurking about outside the office. She insisted that both young men, botsosos [criminals] she called them, wanted to rob TRP. One of them asked if he could enter the centre, even though it was well after hours. Hanna instantly shouted ‘Nie [no] man … you can’t come in’ and then bent down and began to draw an imaginary outline around the front of the office door with her hand while repeating, ‘This is LGBT safe space. You are not allowed in here’. One of the men began ridiculing Hanna and the other butch lesbians saying ‘why are you dressing like men?’ He then called us all ‘moffies’, with great distain, and proceeded to hurl a large, empty beer bottle at one of the newly painted walls inside the centre, sending fragments flying, just missing a few of us. In the midst of this commotion, Hanna, with almost manic devotion, repeated her mantra: ‘This is LGBT safe space’.
When ‘butch bodies’ draw downward and become vulnerable during such violent episodes, what does this suggest about the pursuit of lesbian modes of self-determination in Namibia? How does the idealistic notion of safe space, as iterated by Hanna, and other queer rights discourses of bodily integrity shape sexual self understandings in their continual collision with gender-based violence, and its refraction – homophobia?
This chapter specifically examines moments in which female gender-sexual reversals appear to unravel as they get caught in the complex web of power relations between deeply entrenched gender-sexual inequality and the transnational ensemble of human rights interventions designed to improve the wellbeing of Namibian sexual minorities. I place less emphasis here than elsewhere (Lorway 2008) on how these young women achieve and sustain their enactments of butch defiance. Rather, I choose to focus on the underside of such identity formation, highlighting moments of insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty surrounding the pursuit of a lesbian identification in Namibia. From this perspective, we may better understand how multiple and sometimes contradictory subjectivities emerge along a winding trajectory. This perspective coincides with contemporary approaches within gender and sexuality studies that have increasingly moved away from the concept of sexual identity in favour of sexual subjectivity (Boellstorff 2005), which I loosely define as the way individuals understand and experience gender and sexuality within shifting relational fields of power. Furthermore, this conceptualisation avoids the idea of a singular sexual identity that stands whole prior to social inequality. Instead, I recognise the ways sexual self-understandings register in subjectivity as social inequalities unfold and iterate in people’s lives.2
Three hegemonic discourses have come to characterise a particular set of truths about the sexual experience of African lesbians with men – pseudo-homosexuality, corrective rape and survival sex – and currently disseminate through TRP’s human rights development projects, feeding out from and into larger public debates in southern Africa (particularly South Africa). Read together, these discourses provide fertile terrain for public commentators to explain the prevalence of heterosexual behaviour among Namibians who self-identify as lesbians. Furthermore, these discourses allow African lesbians themselves to construct narratives of authenticity to achieve a sense of belonging within the larger transnational LGBT rights networks that connect through TRP. However, by semantically cementing their sexual relationships with men to trauma, abuse and exploitation, the pervasiveness of these discourses raise a significant question: Is oppression the only lens through which to interpret the sexual relationships that form between African lesbians and men?3
In the next section, I sketch out the broader discursive terrain that articulates the experience of being a lesbian in southern Africa and I provide some interrogation. Drawing on recent fieldwork conducted in the Coastal Namibian town of Walvis Bay, I then illustrate how local versions of these discourses surface, in conflicting ways, within the subjectivities of young women who have begun to pursue sexuality training programmes offered by TRP in 2007.
On 14 July 2007, a white South African Pastor and educational consultant from Inclusive and Affirming Ministry held a public talk at TRP’s head office in Windhoek entitled ‘My Child is Gay – What Now?’ This well-attended presentation was offered to help parents ‘cope’ with the ‘loss’ of discovering that their child is gay. ‘Such loss includes’, the pastor emphasised, ‘the loss of the dream of grandchildren’.
This presentation followed on a series of training workshops that taught spiritual (Christian-based) counselling techniques to young TRP members. Drawing on O’Neill and Ritters’ (1992) eight phases of ‘spiritual awakening for lesbians and gay men’, the lesbian pastor, with her usual rousing tone, insisted that parents and youth could ‘transform loss into a liberation. The journey doesn’t have to end in victimisation. There can be freedom at the end!’
Of all TRP-sponsored presentations and workshops I attended over the years, Christian, religiously oriented workshops always drew the largest crowd from TRP youth and the wider public. During interviews with young people, it also became evident that it was tremendously important for them to reconcile being gay and being a Christian. Although TRP workshops generally set forth delineations between lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender identities, the religious workshops, by contrast, rarely referenced bisexuality.
From my ethnographic work, I knew that many of the lesbian women sitting in the audience practised bisexual behaviour and had children, so I posed the following question to the pastor during the discussion period: ‘How would O’Neill’s stages work for parents who discover that their child is bisexual?’ Some of the women nodded in agreement with my question, a few also grinned at me slightly. The pastor paused looking mildly perplexed and began muttering for a few moments. Then, with a tone of conviction she cited the term ‘pseudo-homosexuality’ stating: ‘Some people are not true homosexuals … for example, if a woman is sexually abused she may think that she is a lesbian. But she is not a true lesbian and she must therefore seek counselling’. A few of the women squirmed in their seats, others crinkled their faces. However, the usually vocal TRP members remained respectfully silent.
The issue of sexual abuse and lesbian authenticity resurfaced in 2008 during TRP’s public forum held in conjunction with the Media Institute of Southern Africa as part of their new gay–straight alliance initiative entitled Straight Talk with Straight Friends. The forum began with a presentation by a prominent young, black lesbian activist who rose to define a range of sexual identity terms: anatomical sex, gender, sexual identity, bisexuality, transgenderism, transvestitisms, intersexuality, etc. Then, during the question period, a male audience member asked ‘can a woman become a lesbian if she is raped by a man?’ This question captured the audience’s interest as a lively debate on the subject ensued. Attempting to settle the debate authoritatively a German psychotherapist, who worked at a local violence and trauma counselling NGO, known as PEACE, responded firmly: ‘Yes, it is possible for a woman who has become sexually abused by a man to believe that she is a lesbian’.
The term corrective rape recently came to the fore in the international press when the South African Human Rights Commission released a report on 12 March 2008, stating that: ‘There is a growing phenomenon of corrective rape … where a male learner rapes a lesbian female learner in the belief that after such a sexual attack the learner will no longer be lesbian’ (McGreal 2008). However, this disturbing phenomenon made its strongest appearance in 2003 when 33 South African lesbians publicly released their stories of sexual abuse:
Lesbians are being raped, assaulted and victimised every day in the townships, in an attempt to force a change in their sexual orientation. Since January this year, 33 black lesbians have come forward with their stories of rape, assault, sexual assault and verbal abuse to organisations fighting hate crimes in Johannesburg townships. Zanele Muholi, a reporter for the lesbian and gay publication Behind the Mask, has documented 12 rapes, four attempted rapes, six verbal abuse cases, three assaults with a deadly weapon and two abductions. She said:
Since we started on this project [The Rose has Thorns] we’ve realised that this kind of thing happens every day, everywhere … The age group of the victims ranges from 16 to 35 years, and two of the rape survivors are teenagers … 24 of the 33 women who were subjected to hate crimes were ‘butch’ women who had been victimised … Kekeletso Khena fled from Soweto after being raped three times before she turned 19 … It’s a practice called corrective rape, where men try to turn you into a real African woman. I was raped because I was a butch child. I was 13 years old the first time it happened.
(Mufweba 2003)
Currently, notions of corrective rape has become a hallmark for representing the human rights struggles of Namibian lesbians in local forums. For example, the rape of lesbians feature prominently in a new video documentary sponsored by TRP entitled, ‘Forgotten Survivors’. In 2007 and 2008, TRP screened this film before LGBT youth throughout Namibia as well as at the national film festival held in the capital city. It has also won a few awards in southern Africa. In one poignant scene, two butch lesbians in their early twenties sit together outside a shack in a small southern Namibian township as one begins to recount the following story:
My friend’s name is Barbara and she was raped in 2003. This was done by a guy who was HIV positive. We were together in the afternoon. She went into town to drink. While on her way back, the guy followed and raped her … The guy was not found guilty. She passed away. We were very scared afterwards. The same guy also threatened to kill us.
During interviews I conducted in the township of Katutura, lesbians’ stories commonly carried accounts of rape and attempted rape, often committed by men known to their family. For instance, during my first interview with 21-year-old Monica, she stated:
When I was 11, if a man tried to touch me, I always had a fist for him. If a woman did, well that was a different thing. A friend of my family, he came and told me I must do it [have sex] … I was 15. I didn’t want to. He forced me and that day I was pregnant. That was the only time I had sex with a man. That day I also became HIV positive.
As I came to Monica over the coming years, I learned that she did have sexual relationships with other men, on occasion, for money. ‘I just don’t make enough selling fish, you know; I have to pay school fees for [my child] and my younger brother and sister. I am the oldest daughter’.
How African women become vulnerable to HIV infection through ‘transactional sex’ has received significant attention from academics and policymakers. By 2004 local multimedia campaigns in Namibia began to portray the danger of sugar daddy relationships on billboards, posters and small television spots. Today, sugar daddy relationships are commonly referred to in daily discussions of sexual politics in the townships. But it is only recently that these relationships have become associated with African lesbians in the emerging HIV prevention discourse on WSW or women who have sex with women. In 2007 the Dutch humanitarian foundation, Schorer, expanded its global health development programme known as the Prevention Initiative for Sexual Minorities (PRISM) to include Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa. I was involved in the development of the community-based methodology for Namibia’s needs assessment sponsored by Schorer. At a planning workshop, lesbians and WSW, defined as ‘closeted women in heterosexual settings’, were identified as a vulnerable group that needed to be targeted for the needs assessment. Representatives from the Netherlands and various African sexual minority rights organisations concluded that because of economic dependence and stigma, WSW frequently came to be in unwanted heterosexual relationships.
In my research, the narrative of survival sex was also invoked by participants with respect to motherhood:
I mean I am proud to say I am a lesbian but then people say ‘but you have children?’ That is the one thing that was hurting me the most … We all have a pressure to belong, because of the society, the pressure out there. Somehow there were pressures from my family to have children. There was a reason why I had to go out and sometimes [have sex with men]. I don’t reject my children; they are a blessing in my life. But just the fact of how they came made me unhappy …
It was not because I really wanted [sex with men] but because of circumstances. Sometimes I had nowhere to sleep. I even never wanted to drink or smoke, but having to be with men when I didn’t want to … it dragged me into that! … That is how I got my first child. His father took advantage of my weaknesses and the circumstances I was in and I had no choice and I needed a place to sleep, and something to eat … [T]hat is how it happened and with my second and third child as well. Until I realised that this is not getting me anywhere, this is just hurting me more.
(Audrey, aged 26)
These discursive formations variously figure the sexual lives of African lesbians in terms of oppression. However, they pivot on a similar bounded notion of sexual identity that maintains a hetero-homo binary. Part of what is understood to constitute the traumatic character of sexual abuse and exploitation is the deformation, dissolution or crossing of this boundary of authenticity.
The discourse of pseudo-homosexuality proffers a degenerative narrative whereby sexual abuse damages the integrity of heterosexual identity – posited, tacitly, as an original and impressionable surface – corrupting its ‘natural’ separation from homosexuality. This implies a psycho-pathological state in which the sexually abused individual falsely recognises herself as a homosexual to escape from the anxieties surrounding the sexual abuse event(s). Employing this logic, the lesbian pastor not only positions heterosexuality as the normative, healthy default sexuality, but she casts African female bisexuality as a conflicted sexual subject position: where heterosexual remnants continually return to resist the foreclosure of a ‘false’ lesbian identity enforced by traumatic memories. In other words, the pastor’s deployment here calls into question the authenticity of the lesbian identification taken up by many of the women in her audience, thus inadvertently undermining their space of political belonging. Although these women hold a firm connection to global lesbian activism in their personal and collective pursuits of sexual self-determination, many have shared (and continue to share) sexual intimacies with men and have encountered various forms of sexual-gender violence over their lifetime. But what I find salient in the discourse of pseudo-homosexuality pertains not only to concerns over authenticity and belonging, per se. I am particularly troubled by how its deployment seals over potentially wider political resonances between these women’s struggles and other non-lesbian identifying women.
In the case of corrective rape, it is held out in the media as a particularly heinous form of rape – a homophobic hate crime – that is distinguishable from heterosexual rape, which is widespread and frequent in southern Africa. This distinction prompts us to accept that the experience of lesbian corrective rape is innately different from heterosexual rape, even though, by definition, both forms are committed against unwilling individuals. Does this distinction suggest that the spectrum of heterosexual rape encompasses a possible grey zone shaded by sexual desire, where heterosexual desire itself becomes exploited? And are we to only understand the experience of lesbian rape contrastively: as strictly devoid of this zone of (different sex) sexual desire? What is clear about the discourse of corrective rape is that it takes as given, and therefore reifies, the boundaries of sexual difference assumed to exist between lesbians and heterosexual women.
Although social scientists recognise that ‘women approach transactional [sexual] relations not as passive victims, but in order to access power and resources in ways that can both challenge and reproduce patriarchal structures’ (Hunter 2002: 101), do deeply embedded structural inequalities and the local fields of economic strategy they bring into play occlude all possibilities of affection forming between men and women in these relationships? In the emergent public health discourse on WSW, lesbians involved in transactional sex are made to exemplify ‘true’ sexual exploitation and ‘survival sex’, for it is based on the notion that a lesbian could never truly experience pleasure or affection in her sexual relationships with men. Similar to the discourse of corrective rape, the distinction made between ‘lesbians’ and ‘heterosexual women’ in the discourse of transactional sex upholds the division and opposition between homosexual and heterosexual desires.
In the next section, I demonstrate how the narratives of young, lesbian-identifying women living in Walvis Bay in many ways coincide with these discursive formations. However, the extended time spent inhabiting the ordinary social spaces where young people regularly socialise allows me to present a more nuanced picture of the sexual intimacies that form between lesbian-identifying women and men.
I first met Loran during a TRP sexuality training workshop at Walvis Bay in August 2007. She sat around the workshop table wearing long baggy shorts with her legs sprawled widely apart and her arms folded in a masculine way much like her three butch friends who sat near to her. It was their first time attendance at this kind of workshop, although Loran informed me that she had already learned about ‘LGBT’ identities from her butch friends in Windhoek. During the first interview, 22-year-old Loran identified her gender and sexual identity:
I describe myself as a lesbian, but not a man, but as a woman. In my community we didn’t use it [the term ‘lesbian’] in the beginning; we were called tomboys. When I heard the word ‘lesbian’ for the first time, it felt so much better to use the word ‘lesbian’ than the word ‘tomboy’.
A month later I met Loran at TRP’s head office in Windhoek for a training workshop on community-based research, which I was asked to lead. TRP’s health officer and I had decided to train unemployed youth as the researchers from three high-HIV prevalence zones in Namibia (Oshakati, Walvis Bay and Windhoek). Loran was selected for the community research training because she was very intelligent, well-known and well-respected among her peers in Walvis Bay.
At the conclusion of the training, we all headed to the Angolan dance club, Chez Ntemba. However, while we waited in the queue, Loran, who entered ahead of us, quickly exited the club. Looking very upset, she pulled me aside to explain why she was refused entry. During the regular weapons check, the female security guard told her that pregnant women were not allowed in the club in case a fight broke out. On the verge of tears, and somewhat intoxicated, she said: ‘Please just tell the group that I have to go back to my room because I forgot my money or something. I am really embarrassed, I don’t want them to know that I am pregnant or they will wonder “how is this lesbian pregnant? She cannot be a real lesbian.” ’ Ironically, many of the other lesbians waiting in the line had given birth to children already.
I saw Loran again in January 2008 when I returned to Walvis Bay to conduct interviews with LGBT youth. She invited me to her home to meet her family and see her new baby girl who had been born prematurely and extremely underweight. Her mother beamed with pride when she showed me the sleeping baby. Loran just rolled her eyes and then quickly whisked me away to meet her butch friends who lived nearby.
Over the next two months, I came to spend a great deal of time with Loran’s mostly unemployed friends at places where they regularly hung out: at Independence Beach, the soccer fields, the nearby cuca shops (pubs) and a few shebeens (small drinking establishments). Over the Easter long weekend, I witnessed numerous drinking binges that lasted from Friday afternoon until Sunday evening. The cost of alcohol was much less than escalating food prices, and it was especially cheap in the township where beer could be bought almost at cost. That weekend, Loran’s mother threatened to take the baby away shouting: ‘you are not looking after the baby properly. You are running off with your friends drinking when you should be saving money for your baby’s milk!’
Eventually Loran explained why she felt some resentment toward her baby:
I was turning 17 – my first time with a man. There is pressure from the community to be straight. Mostly I got from people ‘how could you be with a woman? Why don’t you take a man?’ It felt very offensive to me.
From my side of view, I have a baby and [hesitates] … basically there wasn’t the bonding of love or anything when I had sex with the father; it was the alcohol while I was drinking. I don’t want to blame it on the alcohol, but it was all done while I was under the influence of alcohol.
In clubs, sheebeens and cuca shops, I watched as the butch lesbians tried and usually succeeded in ‘hooking up with the ladies’, many of whom were sex workers. I also witnessed many flirtations between the butch women and men as more alcohol was consumed. Late one evening Loran and one of her butch friends grew excited when one guy dressed all in white, dressed like R&B artist Art Kelley, approached. ‘He is looking so fly!’ ‘He is very sexy’, they commented.
Learning that I was intrigued by how lesbian women came to have sexual relationships with men, Loran stated during an interview:
Lots of my friends are having sex with men. I mean I feel that women who are identifying as lesbians who are having sex with men … I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. I guess some of the butches may feel ashamed to talk about it openly because they are suppose to be men, and they are afraid of what other people will say.
During the daytime, Loran regularly took me along to visit with her friends like 25-year-old Linda, who also had a young baby. After we had been introduced, Linda said how difficult she was finding it to get any work other than washing the neighbours’ clothing. ‘This didn’t pay much money’, she explained.
After attending TRP workshops, Linda began to reflect on her struggles with men, linking them to the discrimination faced by the LGBT community in Walvis:
I started dressing like a man since I was 14 years of age, but I only heard of lesbians when the president was saying bad things about them … in the 90s. I learned about what a lesbian was only recently at TRP, their workshops, you know. I only attended two workshops so far. After that I am feeling now that we lesbians must protect ourselves from people. Maybe I am in a club for example and they are saying like ‘you moffie’ and wondering if I want a drink and then later on they want sex in payment … well this one guy after we had sex, it was for money, he beat me and didn’t pay me. Lesbians are experiencing it a lot here from men.
(Linda, aged 25)
People living in Kuisebmund commonly supplemented their household income with selling drugs: dagga (marijuana) and rocks (crack). When I was introduced to Loran’s friend Kenya, I was asked to first wait by the gate until her family could hide some of the drugs they were organising for sale.
Kenya and I sat outside in the backyard discussing her life story and how she came to understand her gender and sexuality after taking TRP’s sexuality training:
I feel I am a lesbian and a man. Well I guess I am transgender then [pauses to reflect]. I very much liked the workshops because I learned more about who I am and about how to protect myself from HIV.
(Kenya, aged 23)
When we came to the subject of sexual violence between lesbians and men, Kenya said:
There are these boys … Oh! They beat this one lesbian. They also beat me last weekend [shows stitches on her scalp] … they said ‘oh you moffie! You see, I am going to bring you down. I am going to make you straight again’.
‘What did they beat you with?’ I asked. She responded:
I was beat like this with a bottle. I didn’t even say any word. I didn’t even swear at them. They just came up and beat me and took my cell phone. They call us and they said I want you to be my girlfriend … but they know [we are lesbians].
I was surprised when 23-year-old Kenya showed up at a beach party with her two young boys. By this time she had grown comfortable with me and she said: ‘These are my children. I was much younger when I had them, I thought I liked men then, I was drinking a lot then’.
Kenya and Loran insisted that I meet another lesbian, ‘Boy’, who had also suffered an attack. Boy’s mother led us to the back of her cinder-block house to a smaller, makeshift shack. ‘This is Boy’s place’, she said with a slight grin. Twentyyear-old Boy greeted us at the door with a wide smile and invited us in so we could be properly introduced.
Boy was anxious to tell me his harrowing tale of violence. ‘It is important for you to know the problems facing my community’. His intense political sensibility was cultivated in Windhoek while receiving human rights training:
I am a lesbian … a man. The first time I heard it was from a friend, a member of TRP because I asked her about it. I was 13 when I knew what I was, although I didn’t know the word ‘lesbian’. I told my parents at 15, they are OK with it … I am ‘out of the closet’. I told my mum that I am feeling more comfortable with women and I don’t want to be with men. They fully accept me now.
When we came to the subject of violence, Boy recounted his recent assault:
[We] were drinking and this guy started asking questions. He approached me saying ‘I want to date you’ and I said ‘no I am not into men I am a lesbian’. And then he said ‘you lesbian people, you are illegal here in Namibia’ and he slapped me in the face and I slapped him back and ran, and he hit me on the head with a broken bottle and cut it open … see here [shows stitched-up wound].
Boy stated that it would be good for my research to interview his girlfriend, Kathe, who was a ‘real lady’. Because Kathe had not attended a workshop yet she was somewhat tentative in her discussion of her sexual identity:
I see myself as a lady, not a lesbian. Although I am not really sure what a lesbian is. I do not define myself as a lesbian. I mean I have a girlfriend but I am bisexual. When my boyfriend found out about her he tried to kill me, to strangle me [laughs]. This is my first relationship with a woman. It’s only 2 months. It is better than being with a man … when my boyfriend is working at the sea and coming back he is drinking with his friends, he is partying till late.
(Kathe, aged 19)
The theme of absent male partners arose during interviews with several of Loran’s young friends, including Naomi:
I never went off with guys really but, but one guy he came and decided to give me a child and then ran away. He is working as a fisherman down the coast at Lüderitz, and he just left me pregnant and that is why I decided to become a lesbian.
(Naomi, aged 21)
Among the 20 women I interviewed, fear of HIV infection was the most common theme used to explain how they came to engage in same-sex sexual practices:
Before I started to date women, I was going out with boys. I am a bisexual. My parents say ‘what is the problem?’ now that I start to date women. I said because of AIDS I see too many of my friends dying of AIDS, and that is why I’ve turned my life to women, because of safety. My mum and my grandmum reacted negatively because they say a woman is supposed to take a man so they can produce children. They said: ‘How will you get children if you are with another woman?’
The lived realities of participants point to a set of interrelated axes around which sexual subjectivities emerge: the HIV epidemic, gender inequality, poverty and the identity politics disseminating from TRP programmes. But it is important to look beyond the three reigning discourses, their confining politics of truth/authenticity and the pathologising framing they impose. Determining whether or not the participants in this study are in fact ‘true lesbians’, is less fruitful for considering possibilities for emancipation than, I propose, acquiring an appreciation for the complex quality of their engagement: how these women cross numerous borders, establishing connections between domains cordoned off in human rights and development discourses. Recognising their continual crossing not only calls the realness of these borders into question but brings the participants’ struggles into a wider focus and resonance. Indeed, their struggles for sexual self-determination do not exist outside the political economy of sexuality that configures gender inequities for other women in their community. An appreciation for how these women make political connections as they cross between the multiple borders of nationhood, class, gender and identity opens up an avenue to explore greater possibilities for alliance between the advancement of sexual minority rights and global health and development projects concerned with furthering gender rights.
1 Many thanks are due to the members and staff of the Rainbow Project in Windhoek and Walvis Bay. Gratitude is also owed to the Wenner-Gren Foundation, which generously supported the most recent phase of this research.
2 My thinking here borrows insight both from Monique Wittig’s (1980) thesis (how the ‘straight mind’ is produced by gender inequality) and from Diana Fuss’ (1989) interrogation of Wittig’s thesis (41–5).
3 Sexual abuse and rape committed against African lesbians is also emphasised in life stories discussed in Morgan and Wieringa (2005: 317).
Boellstorff, T. (2005) The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fuss, D. (1989) Essentially Speaking: Feminism Nature and Difference, New York: Routledge.
Hunter, M. (2002) ‘The Materiality of Everyday Sex: Thinking beyond “Prostitution” ’, African Studies, 61 (1): 99–120.
Lorway, R. (2008) ‘Defiant Desire in Namibia: Female Sexual-gender Transgression and the Making of Political Being’, American Ethnologist, 35 (1): 20–33.
McGreal, C. (2008) ‘Traumatised South African Children play “Rape Me” Games’, Guardian, 13 March; available at www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/13/southafrica.internationalcrime (accessed 30 July 2008).
Morgan, R. and Wieringa, S. (2005) Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men and Ancestral Wives: Female Same Sex Practices in Africa, Johannesburg: Jacana Media.
Mufweba, Y. (2003) ‘Corrective Lesbian Rape makes You an African Woman’, Saturday Star (South Africa), 18 November; available at www.globalgayz.com/RSA-news03-04.html#article14 (accessed 4 April 2005).
O’Neill, C. and Ritter, K. (1992) Coming Out Within: Stages of Spiritual Awakening for Lesbians and Gay Men, New York: HarperCollins.
Wittig, M. (1980) ‘The Straight Mind’, Feminist Issues, 1 (1): 103–11.