Abstract

Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010) is a central edifice in the ever-growing genre of South African crime fiction. A decidedly post-apartheid literary trend (though not exclusive to it), crime fiction contributes to commentary on South African futurity, which is often portrayed as violent and almost always disappointing. Understanding the ways in which South African literature has been beleaguered with anxieties about the future, this article employs the figure of the queer child as an analytic to explore the generative politics of failure. Taking up queer theory’s anti-social thesis, recently considered in Andrew van der Vlies’s Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), and the concept of the queer child, put forward in Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), I argue that while the queer child may disrupt a narrative of reproductive futurism, it offers an alternative to both a failed future and a rainbow one. I consider the role of two types of queer children in the novel: the child queered by innocence and the child queered by degeneracy. By examining the exchange of and relationships between these children, I argue that the child queered by degeneracy hitches South African futurity to a queer celebration of state failure.

摘要

劳伦·比克斯（Lauren Beukes）的《动物园城市》（动物园城市）（约翰内斯堡：贾卡纳媒体公司，2010年）是南非犯罪小说种类日益增多的中心大厦。犯罪小说是断然种族隔离的文学潮流（尽管不是排他性的），它有助于评论南非的未来，而南非的未来常常被描述为暴力，几乎总是令人失望。理解南非文学对未来的忧虑困扰的方法，本文将酷儿的形象作为一种分析来探索失败的产生政治。采纳了古德理论的反社会论点，最近在安德鲁·范德弗利斯的《当代不完美：当代南非写作》中进行了探讨（牛津大学：牛津大学出版社，2017年），以及凯瑟琳·邦德·斯托克顿（Kathryn Bond Stockton）的《酷儿》（Queer Child，或20世纪的横向增长）中提出的``酷儿''概念（达勒姆，北卡罗来纳州：杜克大学出版社，2009年），我认为虽然这个奇怪的孩子可能会破坏生殖未来主义的叙述，但它为失败的未来和彩虹的未来提供了另一种选择。我考虑了小说中两种类型的酷儿的角色：因纯真而被迷惑的孩子和因堕落而被迷惑的孩子。通过研究这些孩子之间的交流和关系，我认为，由于堕落而被酷儿迷惑的孩子将南非的未来视为对国家失败的酷似庆祝。