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South African Gay Pages and the politics of whiteness

ABSTRACT In this article, I use Gay Pages as a local archive of cultural meaning to think about the relationship between race, sexuality, and identity in a post-apartheid context. Through an analysis of the quarterly magazine series, I focus on how an invisible and unacknowledged whiteness marks privileged ways of both speaking and being heard. I argue that whiteness continues to function as the custodian of the normative in much of South Africa’s public discourse – a post-apartheid racial politics with implications that exceed this particular cultural text. I focus on editions of the magazine published between 2012 and 2016 in order to identify the continuities in normative racial and gendered power. The analysis extends beyond a consideration of the magazine’s erasure of non-white bodies and takes the form of a close reading of the assumptions and racial histories that underpin a number of articles and editorials. My analysis of the magazine centres on several key themes including the interplay between local ideas and transnational cultural flows; the production and circulation of an assimilationist aesthetic; revisionist histories of the past; and representations of pride marches.