YUCK! (2020): a performative exploration of the white heterosexual self in South Africa as grotesque.

Abstract

This dissertation discusses how I used performance to explore my white-heterosexual-male identity within the context of contemporary South Africa from a grotesque perspective. The research joins the academic conversation around performance as a method of inquiry into antiprejudicial scholarship. It explores my experience as a white-heterosexual-male in South Africa as normative and privileged. I use the word normative in relation to my identity and the structural norms reinforced by white supremacy in colonial and apartheid South Africa. The research hypothesises that performing my identity from a grotesque perspective could aid in disrupting how I perform racial and or gendered prejudice within a contemporary South African context. I argue that this theory might be applicable to both my artistic practice as well as my lived experience. I find practical value in the above hypothesis due to both my prior artistic practice and lived experience having demonstrated a lack of understanding with regards to the socio-cultural and political effects of my whiteness.