Berkeley Undergraduate Journal

Miss Gay Western Cape is a beauty pageant that takes place once a year in Cape Town. Though the event began during apartheid, it is only recently that it has gained visibility and emerged as the largest (recognized) gay pageant in South Africa. This project considers the ways in which different queer communities in Cape Town strive to be seen in spaces that remain governed by the logics of racialized segregation. As evidenced with this event, queer communities in Cape Town bare the wounds of the colonial and apartheid mechanism of informing and controlling groups on the basis of race. “Queer” as a politics, aesthetic, and movement takes many shapes within different contemporary contexts and serves as a necessary axis of conflict in relation to the imported, Westernized gay rights discourse. By representing an imagined world—a haven for oppressed, queer individuals to bear tiaras and six-inch heels to freely express their sexualities through feminized gender identities—the pageant becomes a space in which queer practices supersede dominant gay rights discourse. It articulates an untold history through performance.  I thus understand the pageant as both an archive and an act of resistance, in which participants enact a fragmented freedom and declare their existence in the supposed rainbow nation.