Abstract:
This article highlights the role of sexual orientation in the social transmutation of
space, thereby illustrating how certain landscapes, generally characterised by
heteronormativity, are queered by cultural phenomena such as the Pink Loerie Mardi
Gras (PLMG) in Knysna. It is, however, not the intent of this article to describe the
processes of producing queer space in a ‘celebratory’ tone only, but also to investigate
the manner in which hierarchies of race, class, gender and especially sexual
orientation are sometimes re-asserted in relation to such spatial practices. The powerladen
binaries initially disrupted by the queering of space can, in fact, revert when the
PLMG is employed as a mechanism that attempts to control, discipline or even
normalise queer bodies. It seems that capitalist role-players (such as corporate
sponsors and other stakeholders in the tourism industry) seek to manage the PLMG in
terms of ‘how much’ space it occupies, who is represented and therefore included or
excluded from this space. This leads one to critique the supposed ‘Otherness’ of the
PLMG, because if it is influenced by prejudiced ideologies of consumerism and
cosmopolitanism that ultimately operate in favour of heteronormativity and what it
considers to be ‘different enough’, then to what extent can the festival legitimately or
freely call itself ‘queer’?
