Danger, Deviancy, and Desire in Apartheid South Africa: Visualizing an Exchange of Transnational Homoerotic Commodities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis demonstrates that legislation introduced by the National Party of South Africa between 1950 and 1988 was ineffective in subduing the exchange of homoerotic commodities for three reasons.First, despite increased regulation and enforcement, networks of exchange continued to operate in South Africa.Second, as legislation became increasingly oppressive, dissent and debate entered public discourse ultimately fomenting reform.Third, the attempt to redefine heteronormative South African sexuality paradoxically intensified a transnational exchange of commodities that prompted the circulation and integration of homosexual culture.Methodologically, this thesis is a composite of macro-and micro-history.Its source base is a collection of homoerotic magazines, photographs, and other documents from the Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action (GALA) archive in Johannesburg, South Africa.Digitized and processed, the data from GALA is interpreted using mapping software to visualize two different commodity networks (http://dangerdeviancyanddesire.com).The first map illustrates a network between a vendor and consumers in South Africa in 1984.The second reveals an exchange of material connecting publishers to artistic contributors between 1954 and 1966 in South Africa, Europe, and the Americas, that defied legislation and a crackdown on morality.Associated correspondence, editorials, newspaper clippings, and oral histories are used to corroborate these visualizations.By doing so, this thesis navigates contentious issues with cultural history and simultaneously addresses some limitations of visualizing data in this manner.iii Ultimately, the quantitative and qualitative methodology used in this thesis reveals that despite increased regulation, some same-sex desiring men in South Africa had the means to participate in a transnational network of exchange.This transient network of commodities and images created a community beyond borders and boundaries that resisted regulation and created a space for like-minded individuals to communicate.Emboldened by both legal precedent and discourse in South Africa and abroad, they defied the threat of harsh punishment and established reform organizations to combat the prohibition of homoerotic commodities and homosexual relationships.I want to thank Dr. Aleksandra Bennett for her constant goodwill, positive energy, and encouragement.Mostly, thank you for persuading me to stay an extra week in South Africa "just-in-case" to complete my research: you were right.Joan White merits the utmost gratitude for keeping me (and the Carleton History Department) on-track.Thank you for having answers and solutions when I need them most.To all my family and friends, your support is inexhaustible, and my appreciation is unending.Thank you to my mother, Angela, and my brothers, Ryan and Brad, for being there at any hour of the day.My sister Jessica gets a special mention for taking care of the house, the dog, the cat, and my plants for nearly a
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".