3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/45
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Item The House of Indigo: an ethnographic study of drag performance, beauty pageantry, and cosmopolitan femininity in Johannesburg(2021) Disemelo, KatlegoThis ethnographic study explores the subcultural world of drag performance and beauty pageantry at one of Johannesburg’s landmark gay nightclubs – Club Indigo. It examines how the participants’ consumer identities, material culture, and kinship systems were constructed within and beyond the subculture. This study investigates how this community, located at the longest-running queer institution of its kind, was shaped by the contextual politics and realities of race, class, queerness, and gender identity. This mixed qualitative study incorporates various research materials such as interview and archival data, ethnographic fieldnotes, as well as digital and online social media content. By providing critical discourse and social semiotic analyses, this study argues that these aspirational performances of consumption (and towards cosmopolitanism) were at once liberating and constraining for the various subcultural members. The empirical chapters provided in this study critically analyze the different ways in which queer kinship, beauty pageantry, drag performance, and online practices of self-stylization simultaneously empowered and limited the subcultural members’ claims towards belonging and queer citizenship. This interdisciplinary study contributes to the scholarship on drag and beauty pageantry by paying specific attention to the members’ practices of consumption and the collective construction of material cultures within this subcultural context. This ethnographic study interrogates how the intersections of race, class, gender, and queer subjectivity were performed through the world-making practices of drag and beauty pageantry at the House of Indigo. Moreover, this study provides an ethnographic snapshot into one of Johannesburg’s most premier queer subcultural institutions during its final days. By so doing, it also demonstrates how this queer landmark institution contributed to the city’s queer entertainment landscape. Moreover, it shows how this particular subcultural community enabled its members to make discursive claims about public visibility, upward mobility, and queer citizenship through drag performances and beauty pageantry. Key words: Drag, beauty, performance, performativity, consumption, aspiration, queer, identity, visibility, self-stylization, cosmopolitanism, hyper-femininityItem The House of Indigo: an ethnographic study of drag performance, beauty pageantry, and cosmopolitan femininity in Johannesburg(2021) Disemelo, KatlegoThis ethnographic study explores the subcultural world of drag - Club Indigo. It examines how the participants’ consumer identities, material culture, and kinship systems were constructed within and beyond the subculture. This study investigates how this community, located at the longest-running queer institution of its kind, was shaped by the contextual politics and realities of race, class, queerness, and gender identity. This mixed qualitative study incorporates various research materials such as interview and archival data, ethnographic fieldnotes, as well as digital and online social media content. By providing critical discourse and social semiotic analyses, this study argues that these aspirational performances of consumption (and towards cosmopolitanism) were at once liberating and constraining for the various subcultural members. The empirical chapters provided in this study critically analyze the different ways in which queer kinship, beauty pageantry, drag performance, and online practices of self-stylization simultaneously empowered and limited the subcultural members’ claims towards belonging and queer citizenship. This interdisciplinary study contributes to the scholarship on drag and beauty pageantry by paying specific attention to the members’ practices of consumption and the collective construction of material cultures within this subcultural context. This ethnographic study interrogates how the intersections of race, class, gender, and queer subjectivity were performed through the world-making practices of drag and beauty pageantry at the House of Indigo. Moreover, this study provides an ethnographic snapshot into one of Johannesburg’s most premier queer subcultural institutions during its final days. By so doing, it also demonstrates how this queer landmark institution contributed to the city’s queer entertainment landscape. Moreover, it shows how this particular subcultural community enabled its members to make discursive claims about public visibility, upward mobility, and queer citizenship through drag performances and beauty pageantryItem Black men as pink consumers? A critical reading of race, sexuality and the construction of the pink economy in South African queer consumer media(2015-02-02) Disemelo, KatlegoThe notion of a Pink Economy has become a significant aspect of queer visual and consumer culture over the past two decades. This study investigates the media discourses of the Pink Economy in order to understand and contextualize their historical foundations, as well as their social implications within the queer body politic. This study focuses on post-apartheid queer consumer media in order to investigate the constructions of the Pink Economy and the queer consumer identities which are therein represented. Moreover, this study seeks to locate black queer male subjectivities within the queer media landscape, and investigates the extent to which they are represented as possessing consumer agency, or as legitimate participants within the media discourses of the Pink Economy. A corpus of post-apartheid queer media texts was constructed and organized thematically in accordance to the discourses of sexual identity politics, queer consumption and representations of racialized masculinities. Semi-structured participant interviews with the editors of successful contemporary queer media publications were also designed and incorporated within the corpus for analysis. This was done in order to provide contextual background as to the history of these publications and the editorial motivations behind certain representations which were found to be most salient and interesting. A qualitative discourse analysis was undertaken in order to explore the ways in which the media texts spoke to or problematized the research questions. The assimilationist ideologies which informed the homonormative discourses within these various media platforms were theorized and critiqued accordingly. The homonormative discourses of the Pink Economy were shown to be highly exclusionary in terms of the marginalization of black queer male consumption. This study, therefore, provides a cogent and insightful theory of the homonormative inflection of the discourses of the Pink Economy within post-apartheid queer consumer media. Key terms: queer consumption, Pink Economy, Pink Rand, queer consumer media, sexual identity politics, representation, consumer-citizenship, visibility, “niche” marketing, advertising, DINKS, luxury, leisure, travel and tourism, homonormativity, assimilation, neoliberalism, commodification, hypersexuality, black masculinity, black sexuality, fetishization, stereotype, marginalization.