The blind gaze: a critical examination of disability and queer sexuality in South Africa

Abstract

This dissertation takes an interest in how marginal and different bodily and sexual identities are produced, and how these constructions contribute to or disrupt normative ways of living in the world. This project pays specific attention to queer, disabled individuals in South Africa. The interest is examined through qualitative semi-structured interviews with interlocutors from different socio-economic backgrounds who identified as both queer and disabled in Gauteng, South Africa in 2016-2017. Their stories are analysed through an intersectional analysis to examine how queer, disabled persons in South Africa construct and confront these identities simultaneously. This study asks what the implications of these constructs are for the complex relationship between identities and power. The theoretical framework of the dissertation is queer and crip. The theoretical framework is developed in connection with decolonial theories and critiques to create a lens calibrated to the analysis of the production of disabled and queer lives in the global South.