The pink line: Journeys across the world’s queer frontiers
Mark Gevisser
Jonathan Ball Publishers
9781868426577
In the early 1990s, I was involved in discussions about what today would be called the “branding” of the still-new pride parade that took place in the streets of Johannesburg to agitate for gay and lesbian rights. There was argument about the use of the terms gay, lesbian and transgender, which were in the process of being consolidated into the acronym LGBT — now extended considerably, though not always consistently, to include I for “intersexed”, Q for “queer” (or “questioning”), A for “asexual” and even a plus sign at the end to cover any sexualities or orientations yet to be discovered or named. It is on its way to becoming the world’s longest acronym, except perhaps for those used by the United Nations and some South African trade unions.
Back then, amid this debate about what to call ourselves, and whether there was one unifying term, I suggested that we reappropriate the good old South Africanism moffie and use it to cover the widest possible range of those non-heterosexual and non-normative sexualities and identities that would be represented by the pride parade. I was disagreed with – vehemently.
It is pleasing to me, then, to see the open use of queer to perform that function, even if perhaps it does so rather loosely and sometimes uneasily. It appears on the cover of Mark Gevisser’s book, and he says upfront that he likes queer for its “convenience” and its capacity: “it can hold (well, most of) the Ls, the Bs, the Gs, the Ts and everyone else on the expanding alphabet”. He notes, though, that in some places, including Britain and South Africa, queer has not yet entirely lost its pejorative air, however enthusiastically some (like me) may embrace it.
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It represents the conflict between modernity (in the form of extended human rights and individual self-determination) and tradition...
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That in itself is a signifier of what Gevisser calls “the pink line”, and that it sits in different places in different societies. It is a line “between those places increasingly integrating queer people into their societies as full citizens [with full rights], and those finding new ways to shut them out now that they have come into the open”. It represents the conflict between modernity (in the form of extended human rights and individual self-determination) and tradition, or at least polities in which traditional norms and values can be mobilised to bolster the religious and patriarchal status quo – and, of course, those homophobic politicians’ power.
Hence the “political homophobia” seen in places such as Russia, Poland, Egypt and Uganda, where attacking LGBTI people has become a propagandistic tool for nationalist politicians resisting globalisation – a globalisation that includes the spread of these nontraditional gender identities, the extension of human rights discourse to include them, and the information technology that informs the world about them almost instantly. “In almost every country I visited while researching this book,” writes Gevisser, “I met some young person who called themselves Beyoncé.” Queer people “assemble their identities by drawing on a global digital wardrobe, which they layer with their local experiences and cultural references”. The international rainbow flag, he says, “is furled … around various agendas and subjectivities and histories”.
The “pink line” discerned by Gevisser falls not only between countries willing to extend rights to all their citizens, even those of non-normative genders and sexualities, and those who want to ostracise and punish such outlaws. It snakes through the middle of countries such as the United States, supposedly the freest society thus far devised: witness the battles over the legalisation of same-sex marriage, as well as the more recent war “to prevent transgender children from using the facilities [toilets, basically] consistent with their gender identities”.
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Gevisser traces the way these pink lines cut through different societies across the world, explaining their histories and politics, and summarising the state of the debate (or the war) there.
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Gevisser traces the way these pink lines cut through different societies across the world, explaining their histories and politics, and summarising the state of the debate (or the war) there. But he also personalises his account with the life stories of many people caught up in this trench warfare along these pink lines: people living – and fighting for their lives – in Uganda, Russia, Palestine/Israel, Nigeria, the US and elsewhere, from the lesbian moms agitating for marriage and parentage rights in Guadalajara, Mexico, to the temples and rituals of the goddess Angalamman in Devanampattinam, India. So wide is his compass that one feels as though, in the course of his research, he must have circumnavigated the globe several times.
He begins, and returns to, a life story anchored close to home: that of Tiwonge Chimbalanga, known as Aunty, who left Malawi after her traditional engagement ceremony led to her arrest and trial. Aunty identified as female and saw her engagement to a man as quite natural, but the authorities didn’t agree: she’d been assigned male at birth, so was male, and her engagement was not only unnatural but illegal. Their heavy-handed intervention in defence of traditional (Christian and allegedly African) values made a cause célèbre of her case. She was rescued by international human rights organisations and found a home in South Africa, where our progressive Constitution famously proscribes discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Legally, Aunty appears to be on safe ground now, but the realities of refugeeship and poverty, not to mention personal and social issues such as xenophobia, still inflect her existence.
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Sometimes, that line falls within a transgender community, as in India, where there is tension between people who see themselves as (in the Western parlance) gender-fluid – or are happy to have “a woman’s heart in a man’s body”, say – and those who, in the terms set by the long-standing hijra community, see the goal as definitive physical transition to womanhood.
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Gevisser is highly sensitive to the nuances and the contradictions inherent in the lives and milieux of his informants; in these often moving stories, he unpicks the detail of what people have been through to illuminate their personal battles along the pink line. Sometimes, that line falls within a transgender community, as in India, where there is tension between people who see themselves as (in the Western parlance) gender-fluid – or are happy to have “a woman’s heart in a man’s body”, say – and those who, in the terms set by the long-standing hijra community, see the goal as definitive physical transition to womanhood.
Similar issues arise in the US, where medical science has made gender reassignment relatively easily accessible – but has also reinvoked the male/female binary that the anti-essentialist tendency in gender theory has worked to dissolve. The Filipina writer Meredith Talusan, for instance, tells Gevisser: “If I had stayed in the Philippines, I don’t think I would have transitioned, because there’s space in the culture for gender-nonconforming people. But when I came to the US to study in the 1990s, I found only a binary. And, because I didn’t fit into the male, I chose the female.”
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The “gender divide” is being replaced by a “gender spectrum”.
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In this, Talusan echoes the comments of Palestinian academic Joseph Massad (unfortunately given as Mossad in the index) on how the Western gay/straight binary short-circuits “the fluid sexuality of Arab men”. Talusan’s own views and forms of self-identification have evolved over time, showing where such thinking about gender is going. The “gender divide” is being replaced by a “gender spectrum”. It’s clear, though, as Gevisser says, that “[i]n the early 21st century, this conversation became a new global human rights frontier, sometimes running alongside the Pink Line staked over homosexuality and sometimes traced directly over it, in societies where gender identity and sexual orientation were not separated out, the way they increasingly were in the West”.
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People’s lives are at stake.
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There are many issues here that are still in a process of (re)formulation, as Gevisser testifies. His bringing together of a swathe of these complex matters in one book, albeit a thick one, is a remarkable achievement – a vast amount of work done with considerable style. The pink line is always very readable, despite its density of content. His account of the twisting political issues is masterly, while the individual and collective stories he narrates and probes give human faces to issues often disputed in abstractly political and “moral” terms. People’s lives are at stake.