South Africa has an ambivalent history with queer representation, being simultaneously one of the largest producers and consumers of queer media on the African continent, as well as often still exhibiting extreme homophobia and backlash when particular kinds of queer media are released in the country. Nowhere is the debate more heated than in the arena of visual media such as television and film, where access is easier, cultural impact is more direct, and the public nature of these media seem to provoke animated reactions. This backlash is often based around culture, a theme which is part of a highly contentious public discourse in a country which remains so racially divided politically, economically and in terms of social spaces. Xavier Livermon explains that particularly black queer visibilities are ‘policed’ in ‘black cultural and political spaces’ (‘Queer(y)ing Freedom: Black Queer Visibilities in Postapartheid South Africa’: 300). Additionally, consumption and production of media like queer South African films are largely still subject to racial and economic divisions. A mostlywhite and middle-class market and production apparatus surround these films, even when they represent black subjects, and many black queer visibilities are thus ostensibly produced through white perspectives and subject to the white gaze.

The debates around culture in queer film usually centre on two themes: firstly, the prevalent and confounding assertion by many conservative commenters and groups that homosexuality is ‘un- African’ and a Western import (Livermon: 301); and secondly, and more logically and convincingly, the films are criticised for the fact that the stories of queer black individuals are not told authentically by black directors, but rather the stories are impositions on ‘black culture’ by Western or white South African filmmakers. These conflicts of culture are disrupted, and indeed undercut, by the very filmmaking process, mainly through the cross-cultural collaborations which take place in the production of many of these films, as well as the ways that all of the most celebrated queer films in the country directly address questions of culture in ways that challenge heteropatriarchy, racism and cultural exploitation.

In response to the various conflicts of culture and widespread homophobia, it seems that queer films in South Africa have become liminal in nature as well as liminal in approach, playing with and crossing the cultural boundaries which might push against their very existence.