The Biopolitics of Identity Work: LGBTQ Activism in Argentina and South Africa

• In Event: 50 Years of LGBTQ Scholarship at APSA Mini-Conference: Political Homophobia and Resistance

Abstract

In October 2011, a dozen members of the South African black lesbian organization Free Gender protested police inaction in the murder case of a young lesbian, Nontsikelelo Tyatyeka. Despite the confrontational tactic, the group highlighted lesbian belonging to multiple communities, including the local black African community. The same year in Argentina, the lesbian organization La Fulana held a major public even following the murder of fellow lesbian, Natalia Gaitán. La Fulana presented activists’ embodied lesbian visibility at the event as a vital way to oppose deadly violence. Scholarship on strategic identity work has focused on how organizations strategize a single identity (e.g. sexuality), emphasizing the “sameness” or “difference” from the majority (Einwohner, Reger and Myers 2008). Recent queer scholarship insists on the biopolitical construction of sexuality in tandem with race, class, and gender, but tends to be skeptical about the use of identity to achieve social change. This paper incorporates a biopolitical perspective into the literature on identity work to capture the way the intersection of race/class/gender/sexual identities form requirements for entry into the nation, the stakes of which are exposure to violence and death (Alexander 1994). Based on over two years of participant-observation with Free Gender in Cape Town and La Fulana in Buenos Aires and more than 160 in-depth interviews, I argue that LGBTQ activists manipulate multiple identities to produce new forms of relationality that extend past the bounds of citizenship. This research has implications for future work on identity strategizing and accounts of queer resistance.

Author

• Julie Moreau, University of Toronto