Case note: Same-sex Marriage in South Africa –the constitutional Court's Judgment

Late last year the Constitutional Court of South Africa decided that the exclusion of same-sex couples from the common law definition of marriage and the statutory marriage formula was unconstitutional as it violated the rights of such couples to equality. The Court suspended the declaration of invalidity for one year to allow Parliament to enact new legislation to correct the defects, failing which certain words would be read into the legislation to accommodate same-sex marriage. A single judge dissented on the issue of remedy, finding that the Court should have developed the common law to include same-sex couples within the definition of marriage and read the necessary wording into the legislation with immediate effect. The decision is the culmination of a legal struggle by gays and lesbians for recognition of their relationships and the protection of their rights. While the scope of the right to marry may have been extended, the rights of domestic partners lag behind, often to the detriment of women in these relationships.     

The agrarian question and class contradictions in South Africa: Some theoretical considerations

The article first considers two dominant approaches to black rural social formations in South Africa, those of neo‐classical populism and radical political economy, examining their ideology and politics as well as their theoretical inadequacies. The major part of the article then provides a general interpretation of the theory and politics of the agrarian question in Marxism, which has strategic implications for the current phase of national democratic struggle in South Africa, as for democratic and socialist struggles elsewhere. This discussion concentrates on issues concerning the land question, the agriculture/industry contradiction and the worker‐peasant alliance, petty commodity production and class differentiation vs. a homogenised rural mass ('the people'), and the centrality of the agrarian question to national democratic struggles and those for socialist transformation.     

Theorizing Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean

A central thesis of this paper is that the philosophical contradictions of liberal ideologies predispose states to institute unjust gender systems. I argue that postcolonial Caribbean states have inherited a complexity of social relations and structures from the Enlightenment discourses of Liberalism, yet they seem unaware that the discourses which created colonialism and Western expansion were themselves part of the Enlightenment project of modernity. In this paper I apply this theoretical framework to a historical analysis of gender systems in the twentieth-century Caribbean. The paper examines three distinct periods: 1900–37, 1937–50s and 1950s–90s, the transition from colonial to postcolonial modernizing societies, and attempts to generate a gendered analytical model which can be widely applied both within and outside of the region.     

Citation and Censorship: The Politics of Talking About the Sexual Politics of Israel

In response to critics’ claims that a discussion of sexuality and nationalism vis-à-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict bears no relation to the author’s previous work, or to such discussions within the US or European contexts, this paper details the complex interconnections between Israeli gay and lesbian rights and the continued oppression of Palestinians. The first section examines existing discourses of what the author has previously called “homonationalism,” or the process by which certain forms of gay and lesbian sexuality are folded into the national body as the Muslim/Arab Other is cast as perversely queer, within Israel and the diasporas. The operations of homonationalism ensure that no discussion of gay and lesbian rights in Israel is independent from the state’s actions toward Palestine/Palestinians. The second section contains a critique of Israel’s practices of “pinkwashing” in the US and Europe. In order to redirect focus away from critiques of its repressive actions toward Palestine, Israel has attempted to utilize its relative “gay-friendliness” as an example of its commitment to Western “democratic” ideals. Massive public relations campaigns such as “Brand Israel” work to establish Israel’s reputation within the US and Europe as cosmopolitan, progressive, Westernized and democratic as compared with the backward, repressive, homophobic Islamic nations, which, in turn, serves to solidify Israel’s aggression as a position of the “defense” of democracy and freedom. The final section looks at the ways in which accusations of “anti-Semitism” function in academic and activist contexts to suppress critiques of the implicit nationalism within Israeli sexual politics.