'African positionings': South African relationships with continental questions of lgbti justice and rights

Abstract

Researchers such as Hoad (2007), Ndashe (2010), Swarr (2012) and Matebeni (2014) have raised critical questions about the discursive and material positions through which 'South Africa', as a nation, negotiates a continental context of legal, economic, and social violences against diversely identified lesbian, gay, and transgendered people. This article seeks a critical exploration of some of these debates and positionings, in order to deepen conversation on how South African legal and political activism can, or should, engage the realities of blatant efforts to recriminalise l, g, and t knowledges, bodies, lives and relationships. The article includes a brief review of current legal battles in Uganda and Botswana in particular, and engages questions of South Africans' access to information and to political engagement with these battles and their implications. It concludes with an argument for national revisioning of ourselves as simply 'separate' and/or 'privileged', and calls for renewed strategic activism capable of pan-African perspectives.