Moffies in the military: race/ethnicity, gender and (homo)sexuality in the South African Army during apartheid

Author(s)

Phillip Willians Leite

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2022-04-19

Examining board members

Laura Moutinho da Silva; Fernanda Pinto de Almeida; Piero de Camargo Leirner; Julio Assis Simoes

• Advisor: Laura Moutinho da Silva

Abstract

This master\'s thesis focuses on the ambiguities of the experience of homosexuality in the South African Defence Force (SADF), the denomination of the South African armed forces during apartheid. Starting from the idea that the management of race, gender, and sexuality were important elements in creating and sustaining the South African segregation regime, the research focuses on the period from 1967 to 1993, when a policy of compulsory military service for whites in South Africa was in effect. I show that the SADF was seen by the racially discriminatory regime not only as a tool to defend the segregated nation from internal and external threats, but also as a place for young whites to mature into adulthood and citizenship based on an institutional ethos that, besides being militarized and patriotic, exalted a certain conception of masculinity in which racial and gender ideals were mixed with the valorisation of heterosexuality and the rejection of anything that could contest it. I compare this normative heterosexuality in the army with the attempts to curb homosexuality and with the violence committed in the institution against homosexual and/or effeminate men, called in Afrikaans by the derogatory term moffies, and reflect on the threat that this figure brought to the army and the ideals of apartheid. Based on fieldwork conducted in Cape Town and Stellenbosch, South Africa, in 2021, I argue that homosexuality in the institution had more ambiguities than it seems at first glance. In our conversation, my interlocutors, besides talking about the violence against homosexuals in the SADF, also pointed to the time of military service as a period of discovery and experience of homosexuality and, in this sense, the SADF also seems to have been a space in which homosexual experiences could be lived, producing different subjectivities, beyond the one expected by the institution. From this South African case, I pose questions for ways of analysing the relationship between nation-building projects and (homos)sexuality (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 19/04296-8 - Moffies in the military: race/ethnicity, gender and (homo)sexuality in the South African Army during apartheid
• Grantee: Phillip Willians Leite
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master