Mark Gevisser

One of the Financial Times and Guardian Books to Look Forward to in 2020 A groundbreaking look at how the issues of sexuality and gender identity divide and unite the world today More than five years in the making, Mark Gevisser’s The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers is a globetrotting exploration of how the human rights frontier around sexual orientation and gender identity has come to divide—and describe—the world in an entirely new way over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. No social movement has brought change so quickly and with such dramatically mixed results. While same-sex marriage and gender transition is celebrated in some parts of the world, laws are being strengthened to criminalize homosexuality and gender nonconformity in others. A new Pink Line, Gevisser argues, has been drawn across the world, and he takes readers to its frontiers. In between sharp analytical chapters about culture wars, folklore, gender ideology, and geopolitics, Gevisser provides sensitive and sometimes startling profiles of the queer folk he’s encountered on the Pink Line’s front lines across nine countries. They include a trans Malawian refugee granted asylum in South Africa and a gay Ugandan refugee stuck in Nairobi; a lesbian couple who started a gay café in Cairo after the Arab Spring, a trans woman fighting for custody of her child in Moscow, and a community of kothis—“women’s hearts in men’s bodies”—who run a temple in an Indian fishing village. Eye-opening, moving, and crafted with expert research, compelling narrative, and unprecedented scope, The Pink Line is a monumental—and vital—journey through the border posts of the world’s new LGBTQ+ frontiers.

Journeys Across the World's Queer Frontiers

The Pink Line

Różowa linia. Jak miłość i płeć dzielą świat

A Memoir

Lost and Found in Johannesburg

Weltweite Kämpfe um sexuelle Selbstbestimmung und Geschlechteridentität

Die pinke Linie

Ellah Wakatama Allfrey

Email received from margaret'''' Illuminating African narratives for readers both inside and outside the continent. Representing the very best of African creative nonfiction, Safe House brings together works from Africa's contemporary literary greats. In a collection that ranges from travel writing and memoir to reportage and meditative essays, editor Ellah Wakatama Allfrey has brought together some of the most talented writers of creative nonfiction from across Africa. This creative nonfiction single from Safe House anthology by Mark Gevisser chronicles the travails of a young gay Ugandan man living as a refugee in Kenya.

Safe House Short Story Singles

Walking Girly in Nairobi

Kofi Akpabli

Hawa Jande Golakai

Kevin Eze

Isaac Otidi Amuke

Illuminating African narratives for readers both inside and outside the continent. Representing the very best of African creative nonfiction, Safe House brings together works from Africa's contemporary literary greats. In a collection that ranges from travel writing and memoir to reportage and meditative essays, editor Ellah Wakatama Allfrey has brought together some of the most talented writers of creative nonfiction from across Africa. This collection of the first five singles from the Safe House anthology gathers work from the very best of contemporary African writers. Includes: Fugee by Hawa Jande Golakai Made in Nima by Kofi Akpabli Eating Bitter by Kevin Eze Safe House by Isaac Otidi Amuke Walking Girly in Nairobi by Mark Gevisser

Safe House Short Story Singles Bundle

At Home and Away

What happens to a dream deferred? This question, from one of Thabo Mbeki's favourite poems by Langston Hughes, provides the thread for this magisterial biography of the second president of a democratic South Africa. In the long shadow of Nelson Mandela, Mbeki attempted to forge an identity for himself as the symbol of modern Africa. Mark Gevisser brings to life the voices and places that made Thabo Mbeki: the frontier of the Eastern Cape; 'Swinging' Britain and neo-Stalinist Moscow in the 1960s; the fraught world of African exile; the confusion of the transition. He examines the meaning of home and exile; of fatherhood and family. He tells the story of South Africa's black elite over a turbulent century - from 'black Englishman' to revolutionaries to heads of state - and Mbeki's own transition from doctrinaire communism to economic liberalism. Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred is a work of deep scholarship and a gripping, highly readable story. By tracing the path of Mbeki's life, it sheds new light on his political personality and provides unprecedented insight into the dramatic role he has played in South African history.

The Dream Deferred

Thabo Mbeki

An inner life of Johannesburg that turns on the author's fascination with maps, boundaries, and transgressions Lost and Found in Johannesburg begins with a transgression—the armed invasion of a private home in the South African city of Mark Gevisser's birth. But far more than the riveting account of a break-in, this is a daring exploration of place and the boundaries upon which identities are mapped. As a child growing up in apartheid South Africa, Gevisser becomes obsessed with a street guide called Holmden's Register of Johannesburg, which literally erases entire black townships. Johannesburg, he realizes, is full of divisions between black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight; a place that "draws its energy precisely from its atomization and its edge, its stacking of boundaries against one another." Here, Gevisser embarks on a quest to understand the inner life of his city. Gevisser uses maps, family photographs, shards of memory, newspaper clippings, and courtroom testimony to chart his intimate history of Johannesburg. He begins by tracing his family's journey from the Orthodox world of a Lithuanian shtetl to the white suburban neighborhoods where separate servants' quarters were legally required at every house. Gevisser, who eventually marries a black man, tells stories of others who have learned to define themselves "within, and across, and against," the city's boundaries. He recalls the double lives of gay men like Phil and Edgar, the ever-present housekeepers and gardeners, and the private swimming pools where blacks and whites could be discreetly intimate, even though the laws of apartheid strictly prohibited sex between people of different races. And he explores physical barriers like The Wilds, a large park that divides Johannesburg's affluent Northern Suburbs from two of its poorest neighborhoods. It is this park that the three men who held Gevisser at gunpoint crossed the night of their crime. An ode to both the marked and unmarked landscape of Gevisser's past, Lost and Found in Johannesburg is an existential guide to one of the most complex cities on earth. As Gevisser writes, "Maps would have no purchase on us, no currency at all, if we were not in danger of running aground, of getting lost, of dislocation and even death without them. All maps awaken in me a desire to be lost and to be found . . . [They force] me to remember something I must never allow myself to forget: Johannesburg, my hometown, is not the city I think I know."

Edwin Cameron

Defiant Desire records the lives of lesbian and gay South Africans of all races as they have lived in the face of censure, denial and oppression. The history of gay identity in South Africa is here in its past and present aspects: from a drag salon in Woodstock to a gay "shebeen" in kwaThema; from a church in a Pretoria nightclub to Johannesburg's lesbian and gay pride march; from Afrikaans love poetry to new activism. The book is a document of lesbian and gay struggle, and indispensable for those interested in the sexual politics coursing beneath the country's troubled passage to democracy.

Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa

Defiant Desire

As a boy growing up in 1970s Johannesburg Mark Gevisser would play 'Dispatcher', a game that involved sitting in his father's parked car (or in the study) and sending imaginary couriers on routes across the city, mapped out from Holmden's Register of Johannesburg. As the imaginary fleet made its way across the troubled city and its tightly bound geographies, so too did the young dispatcher begin to figure out his own place in the world. At the centre of Lost and Found in Johannesburg is the account of a young boy who is obsessed with maps and books, and other boys. Mark Gevisser's account of growing up as the gay son of Jewish immigrants, in a society deeply affected - on a daily basis - by apartheid and its legacy, provides a uniquely layered understanding of place and history. It explores a young man's maturation into a fully engaged and self-aware citizen, first of his city, then of his country and the world beyond. This is a story of memory, identity and an intensely personal relationship with the City of Gold. It is also the story of a violent home invasion and its aftermath, and of a man's determination to reclaim his home town.

The Pink Line tells the story of how 'LGBT Rights' became one of the world's new human rights frontiers in the second decade of the twenty-first century. From refugees in South Africa to activists in Egypt, transgender women in Russia and transitioning teens in the American Mid-West, The Pink Line folds intimate and deeply affecting stories of individuals, families and communities into a definitive account of how the world has changed, so dramatically, in just a decade. And in doing so he reveals a troubling new equation that has come in to play: while same-sex marriage and gender transition are now celebrated in some parts of the world, laws to criminalize homosexuality and gender non-conformity have been strengthened in others. In a work of great scope and wonderful storytelling, this is the groundbreaking, definitive account of how issues of sexuality and gender identity divide and unite the world today.

The Pink Line The: Journeys Across the World's Queer Frontiers

In deze bundel zijn de volgende artikelen opgenomen over lesbische vrouwen in Zuid-Afrika: A different fight for freedom : a history of South African lesbian and gay organisation from the 1950s to the 1990s /Mark Gevisser ; "Unapprehended felons" : gays and lesbians and the law in South Africa / Edwin Cameron ; Lesbian gangster / Dhianaraj Chetty , Moffies en manvroue : gay and lesbian life histories in comtemporary cape Town ; Five women : black lesbian life on the Reef / Tanya Chan Sam ; Climbing on her shoulders : an interview with Umtata's 'first lesbian' ; Wearing the pants : Butch/femme roleplaying in lesbian relationships / Julia Beffon ; The Arista sisters, september 1984 : a personal account of army drag / Matthew Krouse ; From Ada to Zelda : notes on gays and language in South Africa / Gerrit Olivier ; Exit : gay publishing in South Africa / Gerry Davidson en Ron Nerio ; A thousand forms of love : representations of homosexuality in South African literature / Shaun de Waal ; The lavender lobby : working for lesbian and gay rights within the liberation movement / Derrick Fine en Julia Nicol ; Pride of protest : drag queens, comrades, and the Lesbian and Gay Pride March / Mark Gevisser en Graeme Reid ; 'White rapists made coloureds (and homosexuals)' : the Winnie Mandela Trial and the politics of race and sexuality / Rachel holmes ; 'Lesbians in love and compromising situations' : lesbian feminist organising in the Western Cape / Mary Armour and Sheila Lapinsky ; Of gay rights and the pitfalls of the 'PC' : a polemic / Digby Ricci.

Mark Gevisser

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