The topic of queer identities has been contentious in postapartheid South Africa. The country adopted a progressive constitution, which included protections for gender and sexual minorities, after the end of apartheid and legalized same-sex unions in 2006. However, queer South Africans continue to face widespread violence and social stigma, and same-sex sexualities and nonnormative gender identities are often framed as “un-African” in public discourse. April Sizemore-Barber's book Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fragmentation of the Rainbow Nation explores multiple queer public performances in South Africa since the end of apartheid, across many different “stages” that queer people have occupied. The book reads these queer performances as prismatic, refracting, and disrupting meanings of South African postapartheid identity, and argues that these queer performances, whether in the political arena, on the theatre stage, on television, or in quotidian acts in township and city life, all serve to challenge simplistic concepts of South Africanness. These prismatic queer performances disrupt the idyllic concept of South Africa as the “Rainbow Nation,” a term that had been widely adopted in the early postapartheid years to describe the supposedly inclusive multiculturalism and communitarianism of the country. As Sizemore-Barber explains, “queer embodiments, because of their ambiguous relation to the nation-state, serve as unstable and prismatic lenses on the postapartheid moment” (18). The rainbow refracted through prismatic performances, Sizemore-Barber argues, reveals the forms of erasure inherent to the philosophy of what feminist scholar Pumla Gqola calls “rainbowism” and exposes the racial, class-based, and gendered tensions and divisions that affect queer South Africans.
An evocative moment of tension is described in both the Introduction and Conclusion to frame the discussions of prismatic performances: namely, when the One in Nine Campaign, a group of Black women, many of them lesbians, protested the 2013 Johannesburg Pride March by placing their bodies in the path of the mostly white, middle-class gay men who marched through the wealthy suburbs of the city. This protest showed that the ruptures that had been entrenched during apartheid still lingered in the postapartheid moment, and that even between different groups of queer people there existed little sense of a unified community. This moment also illustrates how queer people engage their bodies in performances to speak to diverse experiences.
The four chapters in Prismatic Performances explore very different types of queer performance. Sizemore-Barber describes these performances in lucid, vivid detail and writes in a very accessible style; the book reads like an intimate account of witnessing and critiquing these performances from up close and feels like an authentic, insider perspective on queer experiences in the country. For example, Sizemore-Barber describes her interactions with one of the soccer players she interviews for her project by infusing familiar sights and sounds of Johannesburg into the description:
That Saturday morning, as Manika and I crossed over Bree Street, I could hear [the soap opera] Generations’ synth-y Afropop theme song echoing in the breeze . . . The familiar refrain was accompanied by local Kwaito, American hip-hop, and gospel wafting out of the cramped “hair saloons” lining the Bree Street taxi rank, where we caught our minibus koombi taxi to head back to her home in the East Rand township of Vosloorus. (14)
The first chapter, “A Queer Transition: Prismatic Whiteness in Postapartheid Drag Performance,” discusses drag performances by two white men, Pieter-Dirk Uys and Steven Cohen, in the transition and early postapartheid years; Uys played the character of Evita Bezuidenhout, and Cohen adopted multiple disruptive queer identities through drag. These performances challenged concepts of white male identities and staged dramas of white people grappling with their place in a supposedly new nation. Sizemore-Barber explains: “Through a process of categorical ambiguity and affective displacement, Uys and Cohen each used drag to open up a space for the whites who had formerly been classified as ‘European’ to claim a queer form of Africanness” (25).
In Chapter 2, “Living in the As-If: Queering Ikultcha with the Chosen FEW Soccer Team,” the author describes her interactions and interviews with a group of lesbian soccer players called the Chosen FEW. The chapter outlines how the group perform their gender and sexual identities in impoverished township spaces while recognizing and playing up political dimensions of their identities during interviews and in front of the camera lens.
Chapter 3, “In-Hypervisibility: Aesthetic Displacement and ‘Corrective’ Rape,” brings into conversation the photography of Zanele Muholi and the play I Stand Corrected by Mamela Nyamza and Mojisola Adebayo. Muholi's photography is primarily discussed as “performance” because lesbian subjects performed their identities in images, as they recognized that they “were creating Art and participating in a larger political project” (88). The chapter sees these queer performances as disrupting discourses around “corrective rape,” the belief among some South Africans that male-perpetrated rape can “cure” lesbian women of same-sex attraction and gender nonconforming behavior, a practice enacted mostly against Black lesbian women. Through the performances, Muholi, Nyamza, and Adebayo confronted largely white, middle-class audiences with their own complicity in the everyday violence that queer people suffer, and challenged the way that discourses around corrective rape obscure the lived realities of lesbian women and totalize their experiences as being mere objects of heteropatriarchal violence.
Chapter 4, “When Jason Kissed Senzo: Prismatic Soap Opera Fandom on Gensblog,” performs a close reading of an online message board about a popular South African soap opera, Generations, which ran for more than twenty years. The show introduced a gay couple in 2009, and the chapter explains how discourses of African identity, homophobia, tradition, and rainbowism were interspersed with online discussion of the couple on the message board.
The diverse range of topics covered in the four chapters—prismatic in themselves—demonstrates the multiple ways queer people engage in embodied performance that can offer new perspectives on postapartheid identities.
An impressive feature of the book is how it seamlessly interweaves a wide range of queer theory—and, importantly, a great deal of African and South African theory—to analyze the prismatic potential of queer performances. While the book is limited in scope, focusing closely on the four topics described above, its depth of inquiry allows an intimate window into diverse queer South African lived experiences. The performances become forms of theorization themselves and put queer theory into embodied practice. The book succeeds in centering the voices and perspectives of the queer people discussed, and the accessible style makes this book one that can appeal to a wide audience, rather than only to scholars working in queer South African performance studies.
Readers who are already familiar with the history of queer performance in South Africa might not find much that is new in the book's content; however, the unifying thread of reading these performances as prismatic—as ways to refract and play with understandings of South African identities—makes it a worthwhile and rewarding read.
