When the rainbow is not enough: Sexual citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa

While South Africa's democratic transition was widely regarded as a radical historical break in the economy of race sexuality also emerged as a politicized social field. One of the sites in which this took place was the globally unprecedented inclusion of "sexual orientation" in the constitutional equality clause. Focusing on the national conversation about sexual orientation prompted by this provision, I consider how lesbian and gay identities adhered to "the sexual orientation clause" and produce a particular form of citizenship in relation to it.; "Sexual orientation" first emerged in relation to the discourses of equality and multiculturalism that saturated the transition, but national politics soon shifted to a concern with post-colonial, African nationalism in which "Western sexual rights" were positioned against "African tradition." Thus, supporters of the clause refocused their initial pursuit of a politics of identity to representing gay African identities and universalizing their appeals for equality.; The conversation converges on a series of liberal delineations of sex, nation, law, and "culture." South Africa's "sexual citizens" transgress and transform these limits, producing an interstitial space of sovereignty. Activist leaders began to define this space in relation to new national imaginaries during the constitutional negotiations, primarily through litigation. Since then, many others have come to occupy that space, for example through ritual and performance, to transform the meaning of "sexual citizenship" especially in terms of racial and economic justice.; The dissertation explores the tensions at play in the constitutional accommodation of "difference" and "identity," and in democracy and liberal legality. Moreover, it responds to the ongoing conversation about the relation between "law" and "society." I wanted to account for the excess of meaning which compels so many to the law and explore that quality of law that propels the imagination and materialization of social worlds. I suggest that we understand a realm of law as a form of fantasy which exceeds law as it exists and provides a vision of law which is not yet realized. It is a sphere which fills the persistent space between public law and social existence from which South Africans continually redefine national belonging.