3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Queer theory

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    Fabricating pleasure, fabricating black queer experience: the time and space of FAKA
    (2019) Zikalala, Zukolwenkosi
    This research report argues that deployments of pleasure by the black queer cultural duo FAKA, reconfigures engagements with time and space. Using performance studies as a method, I examine FAKA’s video works, autobiographical utterances, and sartorial strategies, to think about the manifold ways in which pleasure is utilized by black queers, particularly the inhabitation of black femme, in a quest for greater freedom. Theorizing in affect and sensation studies, queer African Studies, and literary studies, allows for us to probe into the many ways in which black queer genealogies, erotic archives, and memories are surfaced by the duo.
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    Becoming queer, being African: re-thinking an African queer epistemological framework
    (2019) Ombagi, Eddie Cavines
    This project was initiated by the need to read queer lives and subjectivities in Kenya in the face of the hostile and violent homophobic religious and nationalistic rhetoric. In this project, I argue that Kenya has become a site of and frame for the contradictions of queer liveability on one hand and queer fungibility on the other. What I mean is despite virulent attacks by the political and religious section of the country against queer sexual expressions, intimacies and visibility, there exists a productive queer existence that is predicated on both embodied lived experiences and spatial subjectivity. In this project, I investigate the selected spaces – both geographical and literary - in ways that enable its users to perform this visibility and allow for the myriad possibilities that exist within this contradiction. I speculate on how the users imagine themselves within these spaces and the kinds of significations and meanings that accrue to the users subjectivities. I further contend that the structure of these spaces allows for queer, queering and queered flows that makes it possible for queer users to subvert them in ways that enables them to read, locate and recognize queer subjectivities. My critique is about how we understand queer subjectivities, lives and bodies outside of the common narratives of decadence, violence and its theorization as a western import. I wonder what sorts of positionalities and intensities accrue when Nairobi queer bodies inhabit spaces as they variously transition. Here, I aim to show that reading and contextualizing these connected and disconnected liminal spaces, reveals a deeper understanding of how queer individuals restructure the spaces that they occupy in order to account for, and narrativise their lives in light of the socio-political conditions in Kenya. My reading draws on insights on ‘becoming’ to insist that to adequately and forcefully locate queer bodies, expressions, desires and spaces within popular imaginaries and cultures, a theoretical spectrum that calls attention to the incoherence and unintelligibility of sexualities in nuanced complexities around community and/or the social fabric as well as lived experiences, spatial subjectivities, and embodied existences is necessary.
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    Gauteng-based Psychologists’ Constructions of Polyamorous Clients
    (2018) Spilka, Avri
    Polyamory is a relationship practice rooted in the belief that it is possible to pursue meaningful romantic, sexual, and/or emotional partnerships with more than one person simultaneously. This research sought to explore how South African psychologists construct polyamory, as international research suggests polyamory is produced as problematic within mental health contexts. Six Gauteng-based psychologists were recruited using purposive sampling. Data was collected using semi-structured interviews. Interview transcripts were analysed using Foucauldian informed critical discourse analysis. Findings reveal that a discourse of damage informs psychologists’ constructions of polyamory: Polyamorists are presented as pathological, primitive and infantile individuals. Their relationships are constructed as risky, complicated arrangements which oppress women and break up homes. These constructions justify the need for intervention and reproduce Western, Christian, cisgender and heterosexual monogamy as the pinnacle of ‘healthy’ and ‘real’ love. These findings form part of an initial critical engagement with polyamory in the South African context.
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    Queer animation: a creative project in constructing fantastical worlds of desire
    (2017) Del Castello, Daniel
    The aim of the research report is to establish a link between the field/practice of queer theory and the field/practice of animation. I propose that the linking factor between these two bodies of theory and practice is fantasy. the purpose of exploring this link s to understand how formal elements of the animated medium can be used to articulate queer scenarios of desire: [Abbreviated Abstract. Open document to view full version]
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