Redistribution misses the mark. Heteronormative domination subsumes any revolutionary potential of the AFF.
Lyn Ossome 15 has recently completed her doctorate in Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), and currently holds a postdoctoral position at the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University (UHURU), South Africa. She is a researcher in feminist political economy and writes on land and agrarian issues, postcolonial queer feminist theory, labour sociology, social policy and political theory. Recent publications include ‘Democracy’s Subjections: Human Rights in Contexts of Scarcity’ in N. Dhawan (ed.) Decolonizing Enlightenment: Transitional Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World (2015), and ‘Feminist Organizing, Electoral Representation and Transformation in Africa’ in A. Ampofo, C. Rodriguez and D. Tsikata (eds) Transatlantic Feminisms: Women and Gender Studies in Africa and the African Diaspora (2015). (Global Justice and Desire | “Integrating sexual and economic justice: challenges for queer feminist activism against sexual violence in South Africa” | DOA: 5/29/2023 | SAoki)
Setting aside briefly the assumption that the law anticipates and is capable of satisfying the justice claims of queer groups, or indeed that it is its application that activism ought to focus upon,16 it is worth considering the mediating space between the dispensers of justice and those who receive it. This space problematically places those ostensibly with the power to ‘guarantee’ justice on one end and those in need of some form of redress, whether redistribution or recognition, on the other, and assumes that this distribution takes place through the allocation of particular goods or services. However, a distributive understanding of power as a possession of particular individuals or groups misses the supporting and mediating function of third parties (Young 1990), and misses the structural phenomena of domination (Hartsock 1983). Critiquing distributive paradigms, Young (1990: 16) displaces talk of justice that regards persons as primarily possessors and consumers of goods to a wider context that also includes action, decisions about action, and provision of the means to develop and exercise capacities. She formulates a concept of social justice that includes all aspects of institutional rules and relations insofar as they are subject to potential collective decision, arguing that concepts of domination and oppression, rather than the concept of distribution, should be the starting point of a conception of social justice. In the context of a queer feminist politics of resistance, this means, for example, paying regard to the ways in which power is reproduced (by the powerful) through discourses such as ‘corrective rape’. While queer feminists increasingly question the usefulness of this term, and insist on the need for an alternative term (Matebeni 2013) that describes the specific oppression being lived when black, economically marginalized lesbians are targeted on the basis of sexuality, this task in itself is impossible if it does not take into account the structure of oppression that is experienced not only by queer groups but by all the other social movements that are struggling at the margins of capitalism. These movements are densely spread across South Africa’s urban and rural settlements, protesting the failure of the state in dispensing services such as water, electricity, decent housing and sanitation, demonstrating against police brutality and insecurity, and demanding jobs and better schools. These are the groups recognized by the capitalist, ‘predatory’ state as the real threat, the ones the state identifies with claims for social justice and (often with brutality) responds to. This recognition is in part due to the fact that these groups are highly critical of the African National Congress (ANC) government, and reject as a façade the idea that the current government is concerned with the welfare of the economically oppressed. These groups are struggling to insert new codes into their justice claims, and through this process can provide a critical space out of which the voice of the queer subaltern can also re-emerge. Such a politics of coalition requires blurring the distinction between cultural and economic oppression, between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ oppression, but, most importantly, insisting, as Butler (2008) does, that difference remain constitutive of any struggle.