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Prosody for a Queer Alphabet: Contemporary Performance Art Practices in South Africa

Tottering in platform heels, subverting classical ballet’s ‘fifth position’ with his feather-tipped, scarletred gloves circling on high, the queer South African performance artist Steven Cohen (b. 1962) upstaged the Eiffel Tower on the Place du Trocadero in Paris in 2013 (Figure 1) with a rooster tied to his shmok — penis in East Yiddish. Barely noticing the fracas, a superfluity of nuns gently floated by without blinking an eye. Setting the tone of this text, the visual spectacle of Coq/Cock (2013) also echoed an earlier performance, Chandelier (2002), in which Cohen stumbled in high heels on uneven ground through an informal black urban settlement, deemed illegal by the government, before it was razed by government bulldozers, with a luminous chandelier strapped to his upper body. ‘You watch people with nothing losing what they don’t have . . . and I feel white and weird and I feel voyeuristic and I feel I don’t have the right to be there’, Cohen meditates on his intrusive presence. ‘And at the same time, I have to maintain a belief in the project which gives me the right to be there’ (O’Toole). Cohen has been pioneering suprasegmental prosody for future artistic transgression by inserting his socially critical practice into densely populated yet inhospitable heteronormative public spaces — such as taxi ranks, horse-racing arenas, national sports events and election voting queues, as well as black townships, since the waning days of apartheid in the late 1980s. Cohen had been agitating against authoritarian systems, state apparatuses and a variety of conservative audiences for a long time before he was found guilty of sexual exhibitionism and described as a ‘homosexual prostitute’ by a French court in 2014 (Dicker). His politics, expressed through a well-developed and personal visual language and subjecting camp and drag aesthetics in total service to his artistic purpose, has been most successfully activated in the form of public, time-based performance. The performance practice of every queer artist in South Africa who has come into their own since the so-called ‘end of apartheid’ in 1994 inescapably reverberates with the timbre of Cohen’s groundbreaking confrontations, however different the nature of these performances. Their actions collectively challenge the discursive production of the queer body within a heteronormative system of binaries that remains dependent on discourses of desire, disgust, denial, prohibition, exclusion or violent erasure (here the photographic practice of activist artist Zanele Muholi, testifying bleakly to this new history written on the black lesbian body by the violence of corrective rape, comes to mind). Such artistic practices furthermore attempt to expand and transform the discourse on sexuality and gender through their transgressive public enactments and engagements with a broad range of audiences, while resolutely refusing the binary codes of our society. A burgeoning queer world traverses, transfers and transacts across disciplines and forms of media as fluently as it navigates the expanding range of ways of understanding sexuality. ‘Queer’ has become less of a definitive identity, especially as shorthand for gay and lesbian identities, than an inclusive way to critique the politics of gender and sexuality by an ongoing refiguration of its nominative assignment. The queer art performance practices from South Africa that are the subject of this essay shape queerness as inherently performative and identifiable, yet unstable and, as such, non-essentialist. They can be discontinuous and Roelof Petrus van Wyk