Sex and the Sacred: Queering Black Performing Arts in Cape Town, South Africa

Cape Town has been popularised as the ‘pink’/‘gay’ capital of Africa. This is partly due to its location in South Africa, which is itself a symbol of queer rights and freedoms but also because of the city’s celebration of gay culture in the arts and social scene.

However, this image of the city neglects the continued effects of pervasive racial and socio-economic inequalities, shaped by the country’s history of apartheid. Whiteness, homonormativity, and neo-liberal capitalism in Cape Town excludes black queer and trans folk from economic, cultural, and social power.

A growing body of work has placed religion at the centre of African queer struggles, where it plays a role both in the justification of queerphobia as well as a site for renewing dreams for queer freedoms and motivating activism towards this.

This project explores these struggles in the performing arts which has historically been used in Cape Town and South Africa as anti-apartheid tool, and holds great potential for (re)imagining political and social orders and queer futures.

‘Sex and the Sacred’ aims to explore the potential of performing arts for (re)constructing the narrative of queerness in South Africa, and of Africa more generally, by exploring the relationship between sexuality and the sacred in the work and lives of black queer performing artists in South Africa.

The term ‘black’, in this project, is understood inclusively and politically as referring to people of various racial and ethnic backgrounds who historically have been, and still are, marginalised by the historic hegemony of whiteness in South Africa and who have resisted this by implicitly or explicitly embracing various forms of contemporary ‘black consciousness’. 

This project’s focus on race contributes to decolonising queer studies by interrogating economic and political systems and inequalities. Uniquely, by adopting the term ‘sacred’ to conceptualise religion and spirituality, this project goes beyond a narrow focus on institutionalised religion, and foregrounds the ‘wild’ (dynamic, hybrid and unruly) manifestation of religion – including Christianity, Islam, and African indigenous religion (AIR) – in post-apartheid South Africa. 

The three aims framing this project will be achieved by conducting an ethnographic study that explores how Black performing artists negotiate religious norms, and creatively engage with the sacred in Cape Town.

1. To innovatively explore various manifestations of the sacred in the work and lives of Black performing artists in Cape Town.

2. To critically theorise the negotiations that happen at the intersections of Blackness, sexuality and the sacred in a city shaped by historical and contemporary race and economic politics

3. To analyse how the performing arts functions as a site for a queer Black consciousness.