Since the 1600s, travelers, scientists, and doctors have claimed that “hermaphroditism” and intersex are disproportionately common among black South Africans. In Envisioning African Intersex Amanda ...Lock Swarr debunks this claim by interrogating contemporary intersex medicine and demonstrating its indivisibility from colonial ideologies and scientific racism. Tracing the history of racialized research that underpins medical and scientific premises of gendered bodies, Swarr analyzes decolonial actions by intersex South Africans from the 1990s to the present, centering the work of organizers such as Sally Gross, the first openly intersex activist in Africa and a global pioneer of intersex legislation. Swarr also explores African social media activism that advocates for intersex justice and challenges the mistreatment of South African Olympian Caster Semenya. Throughout, Swarr shows how activists displace doctors’ impositions to fashion self-representation. By unseating colonial visions of gender, intersex South Africans are actively disrupting medical violence, decolonizing gender binaries, and inciting policy changes.
All author royalties from Envisioning African Intersex will be donated to Intersex South Africa.
Amanda Lock Swarr debunks the centuries old claim “hermaphroditism” and intersex are disproportionately common among black South Africans by interrogating how contemporary intersex medicine its ...indivisibility from colonial ideologies and scientific racism.
Sex in Transition Swarr, Amanda Lock
2012, 2012-12-06, 20120101
eBook
Honorable Mention, 2013 Ruth Benedict Book Prize presented by the Association for Queer Anthropology Honorable Mention, 2014 Distinguished Book Award presented by the Section on Sexualities of the ...American Sociological Association Winner of the 2013 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies presented by the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies Sex in Transition explores the lives of those who undermine the man/woman binary, exposing the gendered contradictions of apartheid and the transition to democracy in South Africa. In this context, gender liminality—a way to describe spaces between common conceptions of "man" and "woman"—is expressed by South Africans who identify as transgender, transsexual, transvestite, intersex, lesbian, gay, and/or eschew these categories altogether. This book is the first academic exploration of challenges to the man/woman binary on the African continent and brings together gender, queer, and postcolonial studies to question the stability of sex. It examines issues including why transsexuals' sex transitions were encouraged under apartheid and illegal during the political transition to democracy and how butch lesbians and drag queens in urban townships reshape race and gender. Sex in Transition challenges the dominance of theoretical frameworks based in the global North, drawing on fifteen years of research in South Africa to define the parameters of a new transnational transgender and sexuality studies.
In the past decade, violence targeting South African lesbians has increased exponentially. This article explores the multifaceted causes of this violence and its theoretical implications. Unstable ...parameters of masculinities and men’s exclusive claims to them are revealed in the ways that lesbian butchness threatens what it means to be a man, a question heightened in contemporary South Africa. The paradoxes of butchness and the possibilities offered by South African activists combating corrective or curative rape and murder suggest new models for reconceptualizing gender and sexuality more broadly.
Provocative, timely, and global, this volume offers a critical and grounded engagement with transnational feminism through the lens of praxis—the juncture of theory and practice. In so doing, it ...grapples with questions of power and representation while remaining deeply committed to radical critiques and agendas of transnational and postcolonial feminisms. Long-time activists and well-known scholars speak to a wide range of issues and practices, including women's studies curricula; NGOs; transnational and LGBTQ studies; feminist methodologies; and film. These essays similarly conceptualize ways to more effectively theorize feminist collaborative practices while subverting such rigid, established dichotomies as theory/practice, academic/activist, individual/collaborative, and the global North/South. A number of transnational projects are highlighted: the Guyanese Red Thread collective; the Ananya Dance Theater; the Philippine Women Center of British Columbia; the Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance; the VIVA! Project; and the Indian organization Sangtin. Comprehensive in scope and rigorous in critical scrutiny, these powerful essays set the twenty-first-century agenda for political engagement through feminist scholarship. "The mix of styles makes for a lively read that is accessible for its extraordinary candor, its combination of theory with firmly grounded empirical examples, and an unflinching confrontation of pain and conflict. It made me think about entirely new things and about familiar things in new ways and to make connections among them." — Louise Fortmann, University of California Berkeley Amanda Lock Swarr is Assistant Professor of Women Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Richa Nagar is Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author (with Sangtin writers) of Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India.
Swarr and Nagar depict the struggles of women who enter into same-sex relationships as they draw on the oral histories of four women living in India and South Africa. They underscores the need for ...feminist scholars to bridge the gulf between development theory/praxis and lesbian studies by conceptualizing new frameworks that explores the mutually constitutive struggles for resource access and material survival on the one hand and sexuality, intimacy, identity, and community on the other.
"Shoot the Drag Queen! . . . and Daisy Died," Queer Life Web site Most importantly, these theoretical contestations play out on the bodies of those who are caught at the fractures of the heterosexual ...matrix. Since the end of apartheid, the promise of the new constitution for creating a framework for gender and sex equality and protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation has not been actualized for those commonly labeled as stabane.
On the day she won, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the governing body that oversees all aspects of inter-national track and field competitions, ordered her to undergo ...gender verification testing: the IAAF and other female runners were suspicious of Caster Semenya's "rapid perfor-mance improvements." Semenya's body. has been made a case of too many things-mis-taken identity, unfair advantage, impossible being-by many com-batants in the debate who display little awareness of the history of the scientific gaze on the gendered and sexualized body for, at least, the last three hundred years.2 In recognizing these intricacies, we hope to avoid either objectify-ing Semenya's gender liminal position or "reinforcing a narrative of South Africa as a'tragic, hopeless scene of gender trouble'" by plac-ing colonial, apartheid, and democratic histories, as well as the global struggles based on them, at the center of this piece.3 In this article, we draw from a variety of South African print media sources, including the Mail & Guardian (a liberal newspaper that has the largest readership in South Africa), the Sowetan (a newspaper aimed primarily toward a black readership), and various South Afri-can social justice websites that focus on gender, sexuality, and intersex justice.
Moffies, Artists, and Queens Swarr, Amanda Lock
Journal of homosexuality,
01/2004, Letnik:
46, Številka:
3-4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article draws on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa to explore the experiences of urban and township drag performers. I show that two distinct sex-gender-sexuality ...systems have emerged based in the sociopolitical history of South Africa, and I argue that urban drag produces race oppositionally and examine how township femininity creates raced forms of gender, sex, and sexuality. Contemporary South African drag foregrounds the performativity and constitution of race and gender. My analysis attempts to challenge definitions of "drag" and "audience," suggesting the necessity for an integrated reconceptualization of drag studies.
