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The Gendered Sound of South Africa: Karen Zoid and the Performance of Nationalism in the New South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Nicol Hammond
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In 2002, less than a year after releasing her first album, Afrikaans rocker Karen Zoid gained a level of notoriety then unheard of among Afrikaans female musicians. She achieved this when she enacted the overtly masculine rock ritual that Aerosmith's Joe Perry has labelled “the ultimate statement of anarchy” (Perry, quoted in Christensen 2004): she smashed her guitar. While frequently interpreted as an attention-getting strategy (which it undeniably was), Karen Zoid's performance was also an act of political positioning, locating her within the already passé tropes of international rock, but also on the margins of the Afrikaans music industry. It also, ironically, allowed her to appropriate some of the rock “authenticity” connected with this display of overt masculinity, despite the fact that her performance can be read as a deliberate (perhaps even camp) parody of this masculinity. This is because, as I will argue in this article, Zoid's legitimacy as the “voice of her generation” and a vocalizing representative of New South African identity has hung precariously off her performed masculinity, despite her destabilization of this image through a variety of queer performances. In this article, I will examine the interlinked history of South African music (with a focus on Afrikaans rock) and national identification that has created a normative masculinity in post-apartheid South Africa (1994-present). I will present Karen Zoid's performance style as an example of resistance to this norm, paying particular attention to the vocal characteristics of gendered South African sound as a site of normativity and resistance. Finally, I will consider the extent to which, in order to enact this resistance, Zoid has been obliged to perform the gendered national norm or has been interpreted in normative terms in order that audiences are able to comprehend her national identifications. By these means I aim to make visible the normally hidden gender bias that undermines South Africa's apparently representative post-apartheid nationalism.

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 42 , 2010 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 By The International Council for Traditional Music

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