Afro-Intimacies: Queer-Kinship Formations and African Rurality

This chapter examines the emergence of black/ened queer life forms in and alongside the death worlds of capital, the sugarcane plantations, and coal mines. This chapter analyzes Sabelo Mlangeni’s photoseries, At Home (2004–2009), Country Girls (2003–2009), and Men Only in relationship to Jordache A. Ellapen’s short film cane/cain (2011). Mlangeni and Ellapen return to small towns and rural South Africa to offer complex articulations of queer world-making  practices within these spaces. This chapter theorizes rural and small-town South Africa as feminized spaces where those who live in these spaces are still waiting for freedom. This chapter reads Mlangeni’s femme aesthetic of temporality alongside Ellapen’s aesthetic of sensuality. Both artists explore the entanglements between pain and pleasure as constitutive of queer world-making and consider how alternative queer life-forms and queer social worlds emerge when time slows down.