'We fumbled with buttons, we slung down our guns': Queer Masculinity in South African War Literature

This dissertation focuses on war literature from South Africa from World War II to the end of apartheid (1939-1989). In World War II, volunteers were invited to “Join the Army of Sportsmen” and be part of the “team” fighting fascism abroad. The increasing paranoia of the apartheid regime, which came to power after the war, shifted the role of the soldier from volunteer to conscript, and it shifted the idea of war from an adventure abroad to a “total onslaught” with threats coming from inside the borders of the country as well as from without. In this dissertation, I consider the way discourses of masculinity and the military intersect and constitute whiteness and heterosexuality in South Africa. I argue that the presence of same-sex desires in the military transforms it into a site of contradiction and ambiguity, what Cynthia Enloe calls “patriarchal confusion.” I examine the incoherence of a white South African soldier desiring another soldier through three novels – Tatamkhulu Afrika's Bitter Eden, Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples, and Damon Galgut's The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs. I use Jack Halberstam's theory of queer forgetting and queer failure and José Esteban Muñoz's theory of queer time to consider the ways such soldiers, through their performance in the military, render the military strange. Against the backdrop of racist and homophobic legislation seeking to construct whiteness as heteronormative and moral, I argue that soldiers desiring soldiers queerly fail their gender, their race, and ultimately their nation.