Prophetic Drag: Belinda Qaqamba Kafassie's Performative African Queer Worldmaking

Megan Robertson and Adriann van Klinken are talking about the work of Belinda Qaqamba Kafassie at the University of Leeds on Tuesday 27 October. The seminar is titled Prophetic Drag: Belinda Qaqamba Kafassie's Performative African Queer Worldmaking, and it runs from 16:30 to 18:00 in Newlyn Seminar LG.01, Newlyn Building, 24 Mount Preston Street.

Kafassie is a South African trans-identifying drag artivist, and the talk looks at her work through the idea of 'prophetic drag' as a way of African queer worldmaking. Robertson, from Sociology, and van Klinken, from PRHS, draw on collaborative life-history research and collective writing to argue that Kafassie doesn't just use drag to challenge gender norms. She also uses it to (re)claim Christianity, Black Consciousness, and Xhosa cultural traditions as resources for queer life in South Africa.

Most scholarship has understood drag in terms of parody, gender performativity, and subversion. Robertson and van Klinken contend that Kafassie's performances go further, functioning as forms of religio-cultural knowledge production and prophetic witness. They frame the talk around four themes — performance, healing, liberation, and reclamation — and present drag as a spiritual practice, a political intervention, a cultural critique, and a form of community-making. The overarching point is how Black queer artists generate theory through embodied performance.

It's a free seminar, so you can just turn up. It runs from 16:30 to 18:00 on Tuesday 27 October at Newlyn Seminar LG.01, Newlyn Building, 24 Mount Preston Street, University of Leeds.