South Africa’s dreams of a black queer feminist liberation

Abstract

The process of ‘coming out’ to myself (which escalated in 2017) unearthed an obsession with everything or anything black, queer and feminist. Prior to 2015, I was not entirely sure of the brand of feminism I fit into but knew I belonged to a long, complex spectrum of black feminism. It is vital to note that my brand of black feminism is constantly in flux as I continue to learn and unlearn. During this process of coming out to self, I became completely enamoured with the people, voices and things that not only looked like me but felt like me. To be more precise, I became fascinated by the authors, books, poems, movies, songs, artwork, photographs, and films that even made the slightest attempt to represent my being. For instance, films such as Moonlight (2016), books such as The Quiet Violence of Dreams (Duiker, 2001) and poems such as Water (Putuma, 2017) heavily shaped my way of thinking about and seeing the world. I began to find myself within the likes of such texts. Perhaps, I yearned to ‘find myself’ for the greater part of my life that I forced to see representation of myself in such texts, even if it was skewed.