Reclaiming Insurgent Sexualities: Migrant Labor and Same-Sex Marriages on the South African Gold Mines

Abstract

In the search for the origins of exploitation and oppression, especially in trying to understand apartheid in South Africa through the perspective of postapartheid politics, contemporary historiography in South Africa, along with postcolonial studies on South Africa largely produced in the West, for the most part, have located same-sex desire within the normalizing structures of heteronormativity, reading it as a temporary aberration brought about by a regime of racial domination and the concomitant harshness of exploitative labor conditions. That is, while the critical attention of historians to colonialism, capitalism, and racism as intersecting and interrelated systems of power has helped to write the black working class into history, focusing on the lived experiences of black working people and their exploitation by the develo** market economy (Harries xv), historical work on same-sex bonds among indigenous Africans in southern Africa seems to have been overwritten by the politics of racial and class oppression without sufficiently challenging heteronormativity as a self-evident given.¹