'We fumbled with buttons, we slung down our guns': Queer Masculinity in South African War Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".