Soweto Pride as Pleasure Principle

In South Africa, a number of pride celebrations have emerged to challenge the capitalist, consumerist focus of Pride Celebrations in the major urban areas. Soweto Pride is one such event.  Developed by the women from the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (F.E.W) Soweto pride emerged from the endangered embodiment inhabited by black queer women in South African township spaces. Soweto pride organizers used the event to claim space for black queers (particularly black queer women) in township spaces, to commemorate the loss of black queer women’s lives, and to place pressure on governmental institutions to guarantee black queers their constitutional right to exist outside violence. In this paper, I explore the ways in which the politics of pride extend to the notion of pleasure for black queers in South Africa.  To do so, I examine both the space of Soweto pride and the spaces of the numerous after parties held after the formal event to imagine them as sites of pleasure.  The gathering of numerous black queer bodies in township space creates the possibility to broaden the conceptualization of black queer bodies beyond the limits of violence and precarity. My paper insists on the importance of these spaces (both commercial and non commercial) for the performance of pleasure, and the idea of pleasure as integral to the politics of (re)claiming space and challenging conscriptive definitions of black queer bodies in South Africa.