A l l that glitters is not gold: Cou nter penetrating in the name of Black ness and queerness, or, Athi-Patra Ruga’s camp act in the dirt

In this article I engage South African artist Athi-Patra Ruga’s artistic practice to flesh out the complexities that arise from the intersection of the terms Black and queer. Drawing on diverse historical, social and textual resources, I interpret Ruga’s dismantling of dominant post-apartheid and postcolonial narratives vis-à-vis a close reading of some of his provocative avatars. Ruga’s practices of staining, tainting and contaminating serve to expose the borders that produce conventional notions of race and gender. The article employs camp discourse in its allusion to performativity, displacement and artifice in order to 1) lay bare prevailing normative structures; and 2) dismantle conventional views of identity. To avoid being blindsided by camp’s flamboyance and ostentation, I propose a view that favours an intimate embroilment with dirt – a stance I argue may furnish camp acts with political intent and so help create a more sophisticated and comprehensive view on the juncture of Blackness and queerness. Relying on Ruga’s method of counter penetration as a way of fleshing out a hermeneutic view of Black queer subjectivity, I show how counter penetration in Ruga’s estimation is a subversive and transgressive act intent on contaminating and infecting conventional narratives of history, identity and politics. her theorisation of willful subjects’ engagement in deliberate acts of defiance and their will to ameliorate both their and others’ lives.

Limpopo province. The legends and myths of Azania as a pre-colonial and untainted nation were resurrected in the 1960s as part of South Africa's 'liberation rhetoric' (Corrigall 2014:89). Similarly suspended between ideals for a liberated (South) Africa and counterfeit cultural artefacts, Ruga reimages Azania as a paradox of sorts. Corrigall (2014:91) notes, [Ruga] offers a multiple reading of Azania as a utopian state hailing from the past, with references to the colonial or apartheid era, and a future place sustained by black consciousness ideology.
It is amidst the textuality and unclear margins in Ruga's Azania that the artist refracts the rainbow of post-apartheid through a prism of skepticism. There to aid him in his quest is a mob of no-nonsense protagonists -fabricated avatars through which I speculate about Black queer identity. I draw on historical, social and textual resources as a way to illuminate some of the issues that arise from the intersection of the terms "Black" and "queer". I filter an intertextual reading through Ruga's vivid characters, drawing on queer studies, cultural studies, identity politics, art history, anthropology and Black studies, to bring into focus complex and unabridged Black queer bodies.
I take cognisance of Ruga's reliance on the camp act -both its aesthetic repertoire of flamboyance, decoration and glamour, and its performative gesture that paraphrases, appropriates and displaces. I argue that to offer a view of camp as a critical and engaged mode of interrogation, Ruga's exploitation of the outrageously beautiful should be navigated as part of his commitment to the threateningly objectionable abject. This hybrid act, which he channels through his strategy of counter penetration, offers a reading of complex and problematic relations that puts forward a view of Black queerness as liminal, manifold and intricate. For Ruga (cited by Libsekal 2014:157), the term "counter penetration" is shorthand for his desire to (re)insert Blackness and queerness into spaces and narratives in a 'sexual' and 'transgressive' way. Inj'ibhabha, Ruga's avatar erected in Bern, is a shaggy concealed figure -both the 'black sheep and … the dainty flâneur' that both seduces and disrupts (Buys 2009:22). Inj'ibhabha is an isiXhosa word that refers to traction alopecia (gradual hair loss) that typically results from pulling owing to wearing braids.
Inj'ibhabha is a big bundle of synthetic afro-like hair -an 'afro-womble' -spotted in all the "right" Swiss places for all the "wrong" reasons. Inj'ibhabha is the 'figurative black sheep' that the xenophobic Swiss People's party attempted to expel at the time -'a hairline fracture -present, sharp and unrelenting' (Libsekal 2014:158).
The use of the term counter penetration first appeared in the title of a series of work, Even I exist in embo -jaundiced tales of counter penetration (2007) (Figure 2), which featured Inj'ibhabha. 2 Since Inj'ibhabha gave birth to counter penetration as an act of deliberate and stubborn insertion of the self into unexpected spaces, this tactic has evolved to become an emboldened approach by the artist to constrain and negate homogenous and reductionist narratives.
To unpack the artist's strategy first requires an understanding of what may be implied by the kind of penetration that the artist wishes to oppose or negate. In broad terms, penetration connotes the forceful insertion of whiteness through colonial and apartheid strategies; the "rape" of Africa, her history and her people. Penetration also extends to patriarchal probing and heteronormative diffusion in social and cultural psyches   Newton's (2000:103) label -makes it an ideal lens through which to consider Black queer subjects.
Postcolonial discourse markedly subordinates queerness to race as a way to offer a 'unified front of racialised blackness' (Johnson & Henderson 2005:4). The privileging of racialised bodies over sexualised and gendered bodies also appears to give credence to 'sexist and homophobic rhetoric' (Johnson & Henderson 2005:4 Sontag (1966:277) also dedicates her notes to Wilde, which anchors the camp gesture in 'homosexuality'. For her, 'homosexual' individuals are lovers of camp who 'appreciate vulgarity' -'an impoverished self-elected class, mainly homosexuals who constitute themselves as aristocrats of taste' (Sontag 1966:290). The long list of attributes suggests camp is 'good because it's awful' (Sontag 1966:292). Sontag (1966:277) describes it as an aesthetic mode that is often decorative while emphasising 'texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content'. It is this lack of content and seriousness that renders the camp gesture, according to Sontag (1966:277), 'disengaged, depoliticised -or at least apolitical'.
The politics and poetics of camp (1994) is perhaps the most comprehensive text aimed at refuting Sontag's claims of camp's frivolity and triviality. As the editor of the book, Moe Meyer (1994:1), writes in the introductory chapter, camp 'is a suppressed and denied oppositional critique embodied in the signifying practices that processually constitute queer identities'. In a fashion similar to Sontag's, Meyer (1994: Notes on (the dirty side of) camp, or towards the politics of "dark camp" Analyses blinded by camp's ostentatious and animated posture render primary, limited assumptions, or a form of 'failed seriousness' (Sontag 19 66:287  enter the dark side even further. Perhaps Ruga's sense of ease if not a reflection of his state of mind, but rather part of his counter strategy. I suggest that Miss Congo cosily inhabits dirt in the same way that non-heteronormative individuals reclaimed the derogatory term "queer" during the 1980s. Her purposefully provocative embrace of the very spaces to which colonial imaginations have condemned Blacknessspaces where "Black" is equated with evil, darkness and savagery (Fanon 1986:113) offers a politically evocative critique of racist thinking. It is in the gutter that Miss Congo's needlework contaminates whiteness and femininity; it is on the rubbish dump that her Black narrative unpicks the harmonious threads of the past and, instead, 'forges … history differently' (Freeman 2010:xi), or counter penetrates.
The notion of commingling the cherished and the filthy is not a new discursive exercise.
To mobilise camp as a critical inquiry with a political agenda, I scratch around in the   Douglas (1966:36) pursues the notion that dirt is abhorrent to us because it is 'matter out of place'. She argues that our beliefs regarding trash are fundamentally about order -objects and subjects associated with grime are avoided as these are anomalies and 'dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter' -they lie outside the (hetero)normative system (Douglas 1966:36 For us dirt is a kind of compendium category for all events which blur, smudge, contradict, or otherwise confuse accepted classifications. The underlying feeling is that a system of values which is habitually expressed in a given arrangement of things has been violated (Douglas 1975:51 Although camp is known for its juxtaposing of ideas or its embrace of duality and ambivalence, there are also no two distinct sides to camp. By choice, camp offers an entangled and indivisible 'totality of glam-and-dirt' that disrupts binary logicrationality pursued 'in the interest of a wider deconstruction that takes the boundary between the precious and the dirty itself as its target' (Hotz-Davies et al. 2018:6). In a similar vein, the French intellectual Georges Bataille (1985) casts a wider deconstructive net when he criticises sentimentality and nostalgia in his essay, 'The language of flowers'. Bataille (1985:11) asserts that beauty, cleanliness and purity cannot be viewed as absolutes, as they are necessarily embroiled in their own perversity. Bataille's dismantling of the glamour of flowers elucidates the glam-anddirt sum of the camp act that Hotz-Davies et al. recognise. Bataille (1985:10-12) decomposes flowers as rather unsavoury -a view past the prettiness of the petals exposes 'dirty traces of pollen' and 'hairy sexual organs'. The (short-lived) corolla rises from the 'stench of the manure pile' and 'relapse absurdly into its original squalor', thereby throwing nostalgia and sentiment into decline (Bataille 1985:12). In this way, camp offers dirt and preciousness simultaneously with the challenge to think 'the two together' rather than discerning either one or the other (Hotz-Davies et al. 2018:7).
The acknowledgement of dirt in camp, the act of truncating 'beautiful things' to 'a strange mise en scène', may thus serve to undermine the very notion of sentiment and nostalgia, Bataile (1985:14) notes. This sense of defilement, fundamental to counter penetration, promotes camp to a subversive political strategy. It is in the association with excess, the grotesque, or as Corrigall (2013) suggests, the ongoing reproduction of coveted fashion items that become 'living being[s]' that Ruga's alternative reality is produced. A political myth that hovers between fact and fiction; the promise of a rainbow and a corrupted, skewed post-apartheid South Africa.
Perhaps one of the most apparent texts concerning dirt and defilement is Julia Kristeva's psychoanalysis of the abject. Kristeva (1982:1) considers the 'violent, dark revolt of being' within us political, and even beguiling. Abjection is matter cast away, expelled or thrown out; belched or discharged from the self or exiled from a group.
As the lowest form of degradation, 'refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live' (emphasis added) (Kristeva 1982:3 et al. (2018:6), takes 'the boundary between the precious and the dirty itself as its target' in grimy camp. We are reminded: margins are dangerous. For Kristeva (1982:4), the abject 'disturbs identity, system, order' and 'does not respect borders, positions, rules'. Referring to Bataille, Kristeva (1982:65, emphasis in original) orientates the abject towards the political as a threat to 'one's own and clean self, which is the underpinning of any organisation constituted by exclusions and hierarchies'. To elaborate on the 'logic of exclusion that causes the abject to exist' (Kristeva 1982:69), she turns to Douglas' anthropological study. Kristeva (1982:69) notes that 'filth is not a quality in itself … but applies to what relates to a boundary'. More specifically, grime represents that expelled, excreted or eliminated 'out of that boundary, its other side, a margin' (Kristeva 1982:69). Perhaps the signification of death is the ultimate boundary marking filth. The body's crossing of this boundary would render it a corpse -'the most sickening of wastes' (Kristeva 1982:3). Death, as the most perverse form of dirt, infects life (Kristeva 1982:4). It is here where I wish to insert Ruga's strategy of counter penetration.
Of counter penetration, gift-giving and death drives  ductory chapter with an epigraph taken from Aimé Césaire (in Fanon [1967] 2008:1): 'I am talking of millions of men who have been skillfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement'. In short, it is the patriarchal, colonial and imperial penetration that Ruga wishes to counter.
Bugchasing is a practice, typically among gay men, of pursuing sex with an HIVpositive partner to contract the virus. This risqué behaviour bears 'resistance to dominant heterosexual norms' as a way to deny society's stigma and rejection towards HIV-positive individuals and gay folk (Crossley 2014:239). Bugchasing 'spit[s] in the eye of "dominant" culture' (Crossley 2014:239). For Beiruth, her "occupation" is one of 'empathy and courage', as Buys (2010:483)  embraces shame, dirt and abjection. Robert F. Reid-Pharr (2001:137) advocates that re-imagining Black identity necessarily regurgitates the debased history of the past. In his words, '[e]ven as we express the most positive articulations of Black and gay identity, we are nonetheless referencing the ugly historical and ideological realities out of which those identities have been formed'. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003:30) describes queer politics as a self-elected stigma -the act of an 'almost inconceivable willed assumption of stigma'. This stigma (the AIDS pandemic as a marker of both Africa -or Blackness -and queerness) taints the body as her heavy balloons bled and besmirched everything, including the artist himself, in their way.
Lee Edelman (2004:9) Grimm's (2011Grimm's ( [1884:420) short "fairy tale", The willful child, reads as follows, [o]nce upon a time, there was a child who was willful and would not do as her mother wished. For this reason, God had no pleasure in her, and let her become ill, and no doctor could do her any good, and in a short time she lay on her deathbed. When she had been lowered into her grave, and the earth was spread over her, all at once her arm came out again, and stretched upwards, and when they had put it in and spread fresh earth over it, it was all to no purpose, for the arm always came out again. Then the mother herself was obliged to go to the grave, and strike the arm with a rod, and when she had done that, it was drawn in, and then at last the child had rest beneath the ground.
Willfulness, as illustrated by the "grim tale", ultimately undermines a subject's survival (Ahmed 2014:470). To be willful is to antagonise, arrest and disrupt the flow of things standing of will as a 'straightening device' for subjects 'already bent'. To be deemed willful, Ahmed (2014:x) explains, 'is to become a killjoy of the future: the one who steals the possibility of happiness', thus aligning her purview to that of Edelman's. Perhaps this is what Ruga aims to achieve -a necessary confrontation with all that debases his Blackness and queerness. A branding of his body to mark its willed and willful act.
Notes 1. Intersectionality is widely attributed to the critical legal race scholar, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, who coined the term in 1989. However, the principal ideas of intersectionality are rooted in Black feminist, postcolonial and queer scholarship and activism that revealed the complexity and interconnectedness of experience and knowledge that shape our sense of self. Patrica Hill Collins (1990Collins ( ), bell hooks (1984 and Combahee River Collective (1977) are but a few of the early scholars who have drawn on intersectionality as a way to challenge inequities and promote equality. In continuing along this tradition, I intend to offer a reading of the intersection of Blackness and queerness in South Africa via Ruga's art practice that recognises identity as complex and shaped by the relationality of different social locations such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, age, religion and so forth. 3. After completing his secondary schooling, Ruga pursued an honours diploma in fashion history and design at the Gordon Flack Davison Design Academy in Johannesburg (Siegenthaler 2013:167).
4. For Sontag (1966:281), the 'vulgar use' of the word camp as a verb, 'to camp', suggests a 'mode of seduction' that operates through flamboyance suggestive of a double meaning.
5. The notion of the Rainbow Nation is a term coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu after the 1994 elections to represent an image of multiculturalism and the promise of a democratic future. Ideals associated with the rainbow are often seen as a myth and criticised for attempting to gloss over domestic and political issues within South Africa (Habib 1996:1). For Ruga, this promise is unrealised in terms of racial, social and gender equity.
6. For Dagmawi Woubshet (2003:34), the discourse of rainbowism 'reifies politics of innocence, where history is forgotten, criticism is stifled, critique of institutions is perceived as ad hominem attacks, and critical self-inventory turns into a political correctness contest'. It is this utopian ideal that Ruga critically interrogates in his practice, as it glances over political rhetoric to offer up an imagined future while ignoring how racism, sexism and violence thwart the daily existence of South African life. (1995) for a more elaborate account.

See Defiant desire: Gay and lesbian lives in South Africa
8. Despite my following of English spelling conventions, the employment of the American spelling of the word "willful" (versus "wilful" in English) is deliberate in its alignment with Ahmed's theorisation. Ahmed (2014:322) notes that the American version allows for a reading of the "will" in "willful" -an essential aspect of her theorisation of willful subjects' engagement in deliberate acts of defiance and their will to ameliorate both their and others' lives.