gender issues digest

Why gay marriage is the South African women’s movement’s problem October 20, 2006

A friend who is a gay rights activist recently told me that a lesbian colleague of his had left the public hearings on a same-sex civil partnership bill in Soweto in dismay. “Why” I asked. “Because members of the public and representatives from the ANC Women’s League spoke against the bill and trotted out the same old stereotypes about being gay and lesbian being ‘unAfrican’ and ‘unnatural’”.

South Africa’s laws and social attitudes
South Africa has one of the most liberal constitutions in the world, with a Bill of Rights that includes the right to non-discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. Yet wider social attitudes towards sexual minorities have been slower to change.

The incident above shows that there can be no complacency around the struggle to maintain and extend equal rights for Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgendered (LGBT) people in South Africa. Homophobia continues to rear its ugly head on a regular basis in South Africa, most menacingly in ‘corrective’ rapes in townships by homophobes trying to ‘straighten out’ lesbians. In 2003, a gruesome homophobic massacre at a club in Cape Town left 8 gay men dead.

There’s still lively and ongoing debate among the LGBT activists about the exact impact of the constitution’s sexual orientation clause and associated law reform on social attitudes. However, few would dispute that South Africa’s tolerant legal provisions at the very least provide legal remedy against the most egregious, institutionalized aspects of discrimination, especially by the state.

In the absence of such legal remedies, shocking violations of the human rights of gay and lesbian people in other African countries continue to be reported in the South African press and on gender e-mail lists on a regular basis. For instance, a Ugandan newspaper has recently reported the names of known ‘gays and lesbians’ with the aim of ‘naming and shaming’ them. Some of these people have been forced to move house and have lost their jobs as a consequence of these reports. In 2005 lesbian activist Fanny Ann Eddy was murdered in her offices in Sierra Leone.

While South African lesbians and gays enjoy more legal rights than in other African countries, the right to marry is still a key outstanding injustice to be rectified for gay and lesbian people to have full and equal rights before the law.

The relationship between patriarchy and homophobia
I now want to return to my conversation with my friend and discuss something that really disturbed me about it. I feel particularly disturbed by the fact that these homophobic views were put forward by members of the ANCWL- the most influential women’s organization in South Africa. This might strike some people as odd. Why, they might argue, should straight women and ‘mainstream’ women’s organizations care about the rights of lesbian and gay people?

There is a lot I could say about this, but I’ll try to be brief. Firstly, lesbian and gay people and ‘straight’ women are enchained by patriarchy in many similar ways. This is because sexuality is a key part of gender relations. ‘In what ways?’, you might then ask.

Sexuality is not just reducible to the sex act ‘sex’, or genital-genital sexual action, it is all the sum total of all the complex social relations, cultural codes and practices we build around our bodies’ ability to respond pleasurably to physical stimulus. Society promotes and presents as ‘normal’ certain expressions of gender identity and sexuality.

Women are expected to be sexually passive, appearance-obsessed and perfect home-makers and mothers. Men are expected to be sexually dominant, breadwinners who protect (sometimes violently women). Dominant, violent, coercive and controlling expressions of masculine sexuality and identity, such as violence against women, are usually aimed at ‘proving’ both ‘manliness’ and ‘straightness’. Social stigma also falls upon both gay and lesbian people and straight people who defy these norms (ie. non-violent, passive men, or assertive women).

Similarly, reproduction and marriage are presented as the norm by society and in the media. These norms disproportionately stigmatize single, childless, straight women as ‘frigid’, ‘on the shelf’, ‘weird’, or ‘lesbian’. Infertile or childless ‘straight’ couples also face massive amounts of stigma for not having children. By contrast, single, childless ‘straight’ men are usually viewed as ‘rolling stones who gather no moss’, who are ‘traveling light’ and ‘sowing wild oats’.

The overwhelming social pressure to get married and have children is a source of oppression for gay and lesbian people too. Child-bearing and rearing is something many gay and lesbian people do not, or cannot, afford to opt to participate in (due to the costs and difficulties of surrogacy, adoption, obtaining a sperm donor and/or IVF). Additionally, marriage remains legally unavailable to them in South Africa. As a consequence, gay men and lesbians are stigmatized as being ‘unmanly’, ‘unwomanly’, ‘abnormal’, and, if they are black as being ‘brainwashed’ by whites.

Given these common points of oppression by patriarchy, it’s hardly surprising that ending sexism, violence against women and rigid (often violent) policing of traditional gender roles are central demands of both the women’s and gay rights movements.

‘Nature’ and sexuality are socially constructed so it can’t be ‘un-natural’ to be gay
Before I move onto discussing how such views divide the women’s movement and damage a valuable alliance with the gay rights movement, it may be worth considering the ‘merits’ of the homophobic arguments themselves.

Firstly, in the case of the argument that same-sex sexuality is un-natural, this argument can be most easily destroyed by arguing that there is no essential ‘nature’ which humans can see objectively outside our own social and cultural biases. In the humanities and social sciences this body of thought is called ‘social constructionism’. In the case of sexuality people making these types of arguments usually build on the work of the French thinker Michel Foucault (1976). He argued that category ‘homosexual’ as a ‘type’ of person was invented in the nineteenth century. The motivation for doing this type of policing was to make sexuality economically useful (to reproduce labour) and politically conservative (to maintain the political status quo) (1976:11).

This brings into question any essentialised rigid construction of the accepted categories of ‘gay’ and ‘straight’. Foucault wasn’t the first theorist to question how ‘natural’ and rigid these categories were. Alfred Kinsey found that fifty percent of white males where not exclusively heterosexual throughout their lives. This led him to argue that we should re-examine ‘homosexual’, ‘bisexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ as categories and perhaps conceive of sexual orientation as being more of a sliding scale of desire between the poles of same and opposite sex (Stein, 1990: 3-4). In this regard, it is also interesting to note that research into the so called ‘gay gene’ appears inconclusive at this stage.

Perhaps I can draw out the political implications of what I am trying to say here by analogy with race. Race is a genetic fiction: there are more genetic variations within so-called races than between them. In an ideal world the world would not be divided by race and it would be an irrelevant categorization. However, anti-black racism is still a socio-economic, political and cultural reality, so black people around the world still need to develop political solidarity around their race and organize as black people. Similarly, in an ideal world, there would be no homophobia and all people would be able to express their sexual orientation as they wished. For instance, there wouldn’t necessarily be ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ bars or nightclubs. However, because homophobia exists and is institutionalized and backed by powerful lobbies, for the meantime the self-descriptions ‘gay’, or ‘lesbian’ and political and social solidarities and organizing around those categories are required.

Homophobia is unAfrican
More politically powerful in the African context has been the argument that same sex sexuality is ‘unAfrican’. In relation to Southern Africa, historian Marc Epprecht has persuasively demolished these arguments. Firstly, he argues that the very idea of Africa as one unitary entity is Eurocentric. Secondly, homophobes in the region “…often use biblical, public health or ‘family values’ arguments that appear to be borrowed wholesale from social conservatives in the West while the repressive laws are a direct legacy of colonial rule” (2006:7). He goes on to argue that even the claim same-sex sexuality is unAfrican appears to have originated in the West (2006:7). Epprecht, drawing on court records, oral histories, novels and archival material, finds that traditional culture in the region was in fact de facto more tolerant of sexual diversity than homophobes acknowledge (2006:39).

It is true that same-sex sexuality as an exclusive identity did not exist in pre-modern Southern African societies in the modern sense. So, same-sex sexual activities took place but those who practiced them would not have described themselves as ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’. Heterosexual reproduction was seen as paramount in rural pre-modern societies in Southern Africa. However, same-sex sexuality was tolerated as any physical acts except those where a penis penetrated a vagina could be seen as ‘non-sexual’ and were tacitly accepted provided they were discreet and did not interrupt reproduction (Epprecht, 2006:223-4).

Why feminists not supporting gay marriage amounts to betrayal
I want to end by discussing the political fall-out caused by members of the women’s movement speaking out against the right of lesbian and gay people to marry. The issue of ‘corrective’ rape against lesbians is perhaps most illustrative of the links between violence against women and homophobia. Given that lesbians face the dual oppression of homophobia and sexism, it should come as little surprise that they have played, and continue to play, an important role in the struggle for women’s rights in this country.

Ann Levitt and other pioneers in founding the rape crisis movement were lesbian. At the 1995 Beijing conference, Bev Ditsie famously argued that there can be no women’s rights without recognizing lesbians’ rights to non-discrimination and equality. Vicci Tallis and Dawn Cavanaugh at the Gender AIDS Forum do vital work promoting the rights and leadership of women living with and affected by HIV. Space prevents me mentioning the many other lesbians who have played and continue to play a vital role to promoting women’s rights for women of all sexual orientations.

Using homophobic arguments to deny the right of lesbians to choose to marry- something that straight women take for granted- amounts to stabbing them in the back. This might sound a little harsh on first reading, but I feel it needs to be said that straight women in the women’s movement shouldn’t deny lesbian women a right they take for granted. It also reinforces the (perfectly legitimate) perception that many straight women in the women’s movement are ‘fair-weather’ friends to lesbian women and that women’s movement is not a safe space for lesbian women.

On an interpersonal level, these homophobic arguments are cruel and unfair to lesbians. They are also based on irrational and prejudiced arguments akin to racism, which do not hold up to academic scrutiny, or even basic feminist principles. The division they cause in the women’s movement is dangerous at a time when South African women should unite to combat the twin gendered epidemics of HIV and violence against women.

References:

EPPRECHT, Marc, (2004) Hungochani: The history of dissident sexuality in Southern Africa. (Montreal and Kinsgton, McGill-Queens University Press)

FOUCAULT, Michel, (1976) “The perverse implantation: From A history of sexuality: Vol 1.” In (ed.) E. Stein, Forms of desire: Sexual Orientation and the social constructionist controversy (New York and London, Routledge, 1990).

STEIN, Edward, (1990) “Introduction”, Forms of desire: Sexual orientation and the social constructionist controversy (New York and London, Routledge).