Sexuality and cultural heritage at odds: I Fuck What I Like, an ode to the young queer black woman in South Africa

Sibisi, Noluthando Mpho

Sexuality and cultural heritage at odds: I Fuck What I Like, an ode to the young queer black woman in South Africa

Thesis / Dissertation

2021

Abstract

I write this paper as a theatre practitioner to complete a creative research project in line with complicating and archiving queer black women's narratives in the South African performance and literary canon. As a strategy of social reform, I aim to complicate what I argue to be an insistent narrative of queer black womanhood as emblematic of abjection by exploring the concept of queer black woman joy. I use Sara Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness, alongside Lethabo Mailula's theory of a tripartite erasure of queer black women, to frame what I consider to be queer black women's cultural heritage. In search of research methods, I turn to the work of Koleka Putuma, Zanele Muholi, Athi-Patra Ruga as my artistic influences, from whom I garner multivocality, collage, ode, and play as methods for my autoethnographic explorations concerning writing, performing, and archiving joy as part of the queer black woman narrative. This research project culminates in the writing, performance, and archiving of I Fuck What I Like as an ode to the young queer black woman in South Africa.

Keywords

Theatre and Performance

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