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Figure 6.4
A photo of Sandra Laing in 1991 at the age of thirty-six. She concludes an
interview with the New York Times by saying, "my life is over." |
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and freaks with the power of definition. When in doubt, define. Once defined, the enemy could be classified, registered and consigned to one of the official, separate racial groups which give this country its uniquely rich texture. 'White kaffir': the words have a ring to them. I came to be grateful for them. Up until then I hadn't any proper idea what I was. What the conductor gave me was an identity. Ever since, I've been an identity in search of a group. (1980, 28) |
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Those who live in the borderlands, as Sandy Stone argues about gender order in her "The Empire Strikes Back: A Transsexual Manifesto," illuminate a larger architecture of social order (1991). Transsexuals, those who cross over from male to female or vice-versa, become in her metaphor a blank piece of paper upon which may be written anyone's fantasy of what a perfect women (or man) should be. Stone herself, a male-to-female transsexual, was initially refused surgery for refusing to wear makeup and high heels and behave "like a woman." Emily Ignacio, writing about Filipino/a identity in diaspora, notes a similar struggle both with and against stereotypes of a "real Filipino" (1998). Wherever ethnic identity exists, such struggles for and against purity exist. South Africa's Nationalists tried to classify in a completely Aristotelian fashion to make racial borderlands and am- |
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