Abstract
This dissertation involves reading for the affective economies which surround—and shape the surfaces of—black male bodies represented in three, post-apartheid South African texts: The Reactive (2014) by Masande Ntshanga, the film Inxeba (2017) and Room 207 (2006) by Kgebetli Moele. Through a theoretical lens combining feminist and queer phenomenology, post-structuralist influences, affect theory and critical race theory it will be argued that the literary representations of black masculinities in the texts reveal how affective economies surrounding black male bodies come to shape the surfaces of those bodies while, in some instances, constituting moments of queer disorientation which disrupt the “straight line”(Ahmed, 2006) of culturally-idealized forms of black masculinities. This is done by framing the texts as sites where the discursive and material (im)possibilities of black, male subject formation can be read, analyzed and critiqued. Echoing Ratele (2014), I argue that masculinity studies in South Africa requires an incisive move away from the pathologizing of black males toward a deeper understanding of how African traditions along with past colonial regimes come to interact with the ontological position of domination and inequality that majority of black males in South Africa find themselves in. Focusing on the ontological position of black males in South Africa allows for truly transformative gender work which “radically revisit[s]” Black, White, straight and queer masculinities as gendered expressions which too require “forms of empowerment” that reach toward a more gender-equitable society (Gqola, 2007b:117). I argue that to empower men toward a revision of their relationships with discursively-constructed masculinities requires a critical investment into the emotional lives of men, seeking to understand how attachments to specific, idealized, masculine objects shape what black, African male subjects can do with their emotions. Such an investment is crucial for any gender transformative project. I contend that the literary and film artefacts under analysis offer an aesthetic, affective and discursive way of thinking about how the “cultural politics of emotion” (Ahmed, 2014a) impacts the gender order in South Africa.
M.A. (English)