Land Reform and Sustainable Ecology: Lessons from Lesbian Land Management in South Africa

This paper positions queer South Africans in the post-apartheid land reform process to glean what their experiences with land and land-based resources might expose. Relying on the experiences of 15 respondents from six South African provinces across rural, peri-urban, and urban spectra, the paper argues that the government’s reliance on a bimodal framework of land use focusing on subsistence farming or commercial land use neglects alternative approaches and is thus inherently heteronormative and anti-queer. Drawing on Cheryl Walker’s master narrative, I posit that there has been a concurrent construction of an equal but opposite secondary subject who is poor and female premised on a conventional gender framework. Land redistribution is currently structured around these two subjects: one belonging to a capitalist class of emerging black commercial farmers and the other to a class of land users who prioritise subsistence and livelihoods. This framing lends itself to heteronormativity and trans/homophobia. By introducing the queer subject into the land discourse, I present an alternative explanation for land reform’s limited success and tentatively introduce the notion of an alternative queer culture of land embedded in an anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist and ecologically sustainable framework.