Afro-Transgressions: Queer Femininities and South African Sex Publics

This chapter focuses on the black queer anus and the Afro-Indian yoni, sites associated with female/feminized sexual excess and deviance. It examines the performance and aesthetic art practices of the duo FAKA (Desire Marea and Fela Gucci), in relation to Reshma Chhiba’s project, The Two Talking Yonis. Through the abject and blackened positionality of Kali, Chhiba creates an Afro-Indian aesthetic that unsettles nativist and (hetero)normative articulations of South African blackness and Indianness. This rubs against FAKA’s investment in a black radical project that emerges from the abject positionality of the bottom. FAKA’s radical femmeness rubs against Chhiba’s Afro-Indianness in a context where the black queer and the Afro-Indian are both abjected from the nation through performances of Afro-normativity. The artists disrupt the authentic parameters of postapartheid blackness to reveal the multiple contours of blackness as it is continuously made and unmade within the Indian Ocean world.