Papers by Gabeba Baderoon
The host was the Nordic Africa Institute (NAI) research programme "Cultural Images in and of Afri... more The host was the Nordic Africa Institute (NAI) research programme "Cultural Images in and of Africa", which since its inception in 1995 has brought together researchers, writers and artists. Papers were presented on all genres of contemporary culture, from different parts of Africa, united by an interest in themes that can be summarised in the words 'meaning', 'representation', and 'voice'.
Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa, 2021
Surfacing’, especially in this book, has many meanings. In the most immediate sense, it may mean ... more Surfacing’, especially in this book, has many meanings. In the most immediate sense, it may mean that those who have not spoken in public spaces now do. But black South African feminists have always spoken - through action, creativity and words. Many came to prominence during the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1970s, but others were visible before then. Several constellations of black feminist South African writing flourished in different regions and cultural forms. The significance of these constellations, as well as iconic figures such as Sara Baartman, Winnie Mandela and Miriam Tlali, has been severely neglected in the archiving of South African cultural and political traditions.
This book starts to address these omissions. It acknowledges the depth of a body of black feminist thought while also recognising the limitations of surveying the terrain. No collection is definitive. Nor can it be representative of a given topic or of a single group: there are always fractures, omissions and silences. Bringing together this group of black women writers conveys some of the key connections and dialogues among perspectives and voices that continue to be sidelined in publishing, scholarship and public debates in South Africa.
This book starts to address these omissions. It acknowledges the depth of a body of black feminist thought while also recognising the limitations of surveying the terrain. No collection is definitive. Nor can it be representative of a given topic or of a single group: there are always fractures, omissions and silences. Bringing together this group of black women writers conveys some of the key connections and dialogues among perspectives and voices that continue to be sidelined in publishing, scholarship and public debates in South Africa.
The Conversation, 2021
Surfacing traces a path within black South African feminist thought in 20 chapters. The collectio... more Surfacing traces a path within black South African feminist thought in 20 chapters. The collection shows how radical black South African women have been part of several traditions of undocumented intellectual and artistic legacies. The rich descriptions and interpretations of local realities in Surfacing refine the categories of transnational and black feminism, and bring the breadth of black feminist engagement in the south of the continent into fuller view.
Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000-2018, 2019
This book tells the story of a remarkable achievement -- how poetry written by Black women in Sou... more This book tells the story of a remarkable achievement -- how poetry written by Black women in South Africa came to remake public space. It is the account of a profound transformation in national culture that emerged because Black women were exiled from the official worlds of poetry in academia and the dominant publishing world and even from places that they expected to be inclusive, such as post-apartheid writing conferences and workshops. From the margins, Black South African women forged a new infrastructure for poetic expression, through which they nurtured broad participation by those who longed to write but had no avenues to publication and reached audiences hungry for the vitality of poetry to articulate their realities. Such audiences would consequently follow these writers into arenas that official poetry did not touch.
Slavery in the Islamic World: Its Characteristics and Commonality, 2019
Islam poses a paradox in South Africa. Today, Muslims form an integral part of the post-apartheid... more Islam poses a paradox in South Africa. Today, Muslims form an integral part of the post-apartheid nation and are visibly represented in politics, education, business, the media and the arts, even though they make up less than two per cent of the country’s population (Tayob 2002: 20). Despite this significant public profile, the history of Islam in the country is not widely known, and Muslims are often portrayed in circumscribed ways in South African popular culture. The paradox of being disproportionately visible yet strangely overlooked gives Islam an ambiguous visibility. The form of such visibility is also distinctive. In images of weddings, feasts, funerals and pilgrimage, Muslims have been staged since the eighteenth century as marginal and exotic, yet paradoxically also necessary figures in the colonial and, later, the national imaginary. South African cookbooks, popular histories, cartoons, travel materials and news stories often feature picturesque and tranquil Muslim figures. However, Islam is also associated with anxieties around coded and occult practices, reflected in long-held beliefs in Muslim women’s ability to “gool” (use magic powers), and the tendency of Muslim men toward sudden violence, or running “amok”. This conception of Muslims as alternately benign and threatening resonates in some ways with international conventions for portraying Islam, but the pattern in South Africa has distinctive features.
In this chapter I show how the portrayal of Muslims as placid and marginal has served a crucial rhetorical function and argue that it is not possible to fully understand enduring concepts of race, sexuality and belonging in the country today without attending to the crucible of colonialism, slavery and Islam in which they were formed.
In this chapter I show how the portrayal of Muslims as placid and marginal has served a crucial rhetorical function and argue that it is not possible to fully understand enduring concepts of race, sexuality and belonging in the country today without attending to the crucible of colonialism, slavery and Islam in which they were formed.
Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 2018
In 1981 Filomina Chioma Steady boldly proclaimed that black women, particularly those from the Af... more In 1981 Filomina Chioma Steady boldly proclaimed that black women, particularly those from the African continent, were the original feminists. In her now classic anthology, The Black Woman Cross-Culturally, Steady argued that “true feminism” stemmed from “an actual experience of oppression, a lack of the socially prescribed means of ensuring one’s wellbeing, and a true lack of access to resources for survival” (36). In her mind, feminism was simply a reaction to oppression, one that resulted in “the development of greater resourcefulness for survival and greater self-reliance.” Two years later the budding Sierra Leonean anthropologist delivered a powerful keynote address on African feminism at a research conference at Howard University organized by the Association of Black Women Historians (Terborg-Penn 1996, xix).
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
AFRICAN FEMINISMS
Cartographies for the Twenty-First Century
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION Ginetta E. B. Candelario 215
GUEST EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
African Feminisms: Cartographies for the Twenty-First Century
Alicia C. Decker and Gabeba Baderoon 219
POETRY
And They Didn’t Die
Tsitsi Jaji 232
MEMOIR
Creating the Archive of African Women’s Writing: Reflecting
on Feminism, Epistemology, and the Women Writing Africa Project
Abena P. A. Busia 233
ESSAY
Beyond the Spectacular: Contextualizing Gender Relations in the Wake of the Boko Haram Insurgency
Charmaine Pereira 246
INTERVIEW
Reflecting on Feminisms in Africa: A Conversation from Morocco
Fatima Sadiqi and Aziza Ouguir 269
ESSAY
“We Fit in the Society by Force”: Sex Work and Feminism in Africa
Ntokozo Yingwana 279
IN THE ARCHIVES
Decade for Women Information Resources #5: Images of Nairobi, Reflections and Follow-Up, International Women’s Tribune Center
Callan Swaim-Fox 296
MEDIA MATTERS
Saving Nigerian Girls: A Critical Reflection on Girl-Saving Campaigns in the Colonial and Neoliberal Eras
Abosede George 309
IN THE TRENCHES
Smoke Is Everywhere, but No One Is Running: A Kenyan Activist Speaks Out
Anne Moraa 325
CULTUREWORK
Re-collections: Matter, Meaning, Memory
Wambui Mwangi 331
ESSAY
Gender and (Militarized) Secessionist Movements in Africa: An African Feminist’s Reflections
Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué 338
POETRY
Three Women
Makhosazana Xaba 359
REFLECTION
Contested Encounters: Toward a Twenty-First-Century African Feminist Ethnography
Selina Makana 361
IN THE TRENCHES
Finding Women in the Zimbabwean Transition
Chipo Dendere 376
POETRY
my mother’s trousseau
Toni Stuart 382
ESSAY
Feminisms in African Hip Hop
Msia Kibona Clark 383
COUNTERPOINT
Homing with My Mother / How Women in My Family Married Women
Neo Sinoxolo Musangi 401
TESTIMONIO
Contemporarity: Sufficiency in a Radical African Feminist Life
Patricia McFadden 415
ABOUT THE COVER ARTIST
Gulshan Khan 432
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
AFRICAN FEMINISMS
Cartographies for the Twenty-First Century
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION Ginetta E. B. Candelario 215
GUEST EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
African Feminisms: Cartographies for the Twenty-First Century
Alicia C. Decker and Gabeba Baderoon 219
POETRY
And They Didn’t Die
Tsitsi Jaji 232
MEMOIR
Creating the Archive of African Women’s Writing: Reflecting
on Feminism, Epistemology, and the Women Writing Africa Project
Abena P. A. Busia 233
ESSAY
Beyond the Spectacular: Contextualizing Gender Relations in the Wake of the Boko Haram Insurgency
Charmaine Pereira 246
INTERVIEW
Reflecting on Feminisms in Africa: A Conversation from Morocco
Fatima Sadiqi and Aziza Ouguir 269
ESSAY
“We Fit in the Society by Force”: Sex Work and Feminism in Africa
Ntokozo Yingwana 279
IN THE ARCHIVES
Decade for Women Information Resources #5: Images of Nairobi, Reflections and Follow-Up, International Women’s Tribune Center
Callan Swaim-Fox 296
MEDIA MATTERS
Saving Nigerian Girls: A Critical Reflection on Girl-Saving Campaigns in the Colonial and Neoliberal Eras
Abosede George 309
IN THE TRENCHES
Smoke Is Everywhere, but No One Is Running: A Kenyan Activist Speaks Out
Anne Moraa 325
CULTUREWORK
Re-collections: Matter, Meaning, Memory
Wambui Mwangi 331
ESSAY
Gender and (Militarized) Secessionist Movements in Africa: An African Feminist’s Reflections
Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué 338
POETRY
Three Women
Makhosazana Xaba 359
REFLECTION
Contested Encounters: Toward a Twenty-First-Century African Feminist Ethnography
Selina Makana 361
IN THE TRENCHES
Finding Women in the Zimbabwean Transition
Chipo Dendere 376
POETRY
my mother’s trousseau
Toni Stuart 382
ESSAY
Feminisms in African Hip Hop
Msia Kibona Clark 383
COUNTERPOINT
Homing with My Mother / How Women in My Family Married Women
Neo Sinoxolo Musangi 401
TESTIMONIO
Contemporarity: Sufficiency in a Radical African Feminist Life
Patricia McFadden 415
ABOUT THE COVER ARTIST
Gulshan Khan 432
Stitching a Whirlwind An Anthology of Southern African Poems and Translations, 2018
A foreword to a collection of South African poetry in six languages, both in the original and tra... more A foreword to a collection of South African poetry in six languages, both in the original and translations. The collection's poems engage in an imaginative exchange across barriers of language, author and period, overcoming decades of riven conversations.
South Africans live in multilingual worlds, countering a limiting focus on English.
The translations reveal a tradition of virtuoso linguistic experimentation.
South Africans live in multilingual worlds, countering a limiting focus on English.
The translations reveal a tradition of virtuoso linguistic experimentation.
Social Dynamics, 2018
Centuries before apartheid, South Africa was fundamentally shaped by 176 years of slavery, a peri... more Centuries before apartheid, South Africa was fundamentally shaped by 176 years of slavery, a period of racialised and gendered brutality that lasted from 1658 to 1834. Enslaved people were brought to the Cape by the Dutch East India Company from African and Asian territories around the Indian Ocean, and eventually came to constitute the majority of the population of the Colony. Françoise Vergès (2005) asserts that slavery in South Africa generated “processes of disposability” that transformed enslaved people and indigenous Africans, the majority of the population, into “surplus” and expendable objects. The scale of this expendability is difficult to discern today because of the invisibility of slavery in conceptions of the country’s history. In this article, I use the lens of “dirt” to render such “processes of disposability” visible. I do so by analysing two texts in which African bodies are portrayed as filthy, menacing and contaminating – the novel Unconfessed and a television advertisement titled “Papa Wag Vir Jou” (“Daddy’s Waiting for You”) – which I situate within a discussion of South Africa’s extraordinarily high rates of incarceration and sexual violence. I point to the seamless continuity in industrial levels of imprisonment employed by the colonial and the modern South African state.
KEYWORDS: Slavery, South Africa, incarceration, Unconfessed, sexual slavery, disposability, colouredness, dirt
KEYWORDS: Slavery, South Africa, incarceration, Unconfessed, sexual slavery, disposability, colouredness, dirt
Promised Land, a poem, in Johannesburg Review of Books, 2018
Moses and ...
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2015
Roundtable on LGBTIQ Persons in Africa:
In this article, I reflect on the complex history of self... more Roundtable on LGBTIQ Persons in Africa:
In this article, I reflect on the complex history of self-writing by Black women in South Africa as a context for reading contemporary autobiographical literature by Muslim lesbians in the country. To theorize the innovative practices in such literature, I draw on the concept of “crafting” devised by the Zimbabwean feminist Patricia McFadden, a practice of particular value in the postcolonial moment. I also consider debates on the complexities of the politics of visibility in sexuality rights activism in postcolonial contexts. After reviewing theories of autobiography, race, and sexuality, I analyze six autobiographical narratives by lesbian Muslims that appear in the ground-breaking 2009 South African collection Hijab: Unveiling Queer Muslim Lives.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2015)
doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lfv075
First published online: October 9, 2015
In this article, I reflect on the complex history of self-writing by Black women in South Africa as a context for reading contemporary autobiographical literature by Muslim lesbians in the country. To theorize the innovative practices in such literature, I draw on the concept of “crafting” devised by the Zimbabwean feminist Patricia McFadden, a practice of particular value in the postcolonial moment. I also consider debates on the complexities of the politics of visibility in sexuality rights activism in postcolonial contexts. After reviewing theories of autobiography, race, and sexuality, I analyze six autobiographical narratives by lesbian Muslims that appear in the ground-breaking 2009 South African collection Hijab: Unveiling Queer Muslim Lives.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2015)
doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lfv075
First published online: October 9, 2015
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Jun 17, 2014
In South Africa, the house is a haunted place. Apartheid’s separate publics also required separat... more In South Africa, the house is a haunted place. Apartheid’s separate publics also required separate private lives and separate leisures in which to practice ways of living apartheid’s ideological differences into reality. This essay analyzes the compulsive interest in Black domesticity that has characterized South Africa since the colonial period, and shows that domestic labor in white homes has historically shaped the entry of Black black women into public space in South Africa. In fact, so strong is the latter association that the Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles reveals that in South African English the word “maid” denotes both “Black woman” and “servant.” This conflation has generated fraught relations of domesticity, race, and subjectivity in South Africa. Contemporary artwork about domestic labor by the Black black women artists Zanele Muholi and Mary Sibande engages with this history. In these artworks, the house is a place of silences, ghosts, and secrets. Precursors to these recent works can be found in fiction by Sindiwe Magona’s short stories about domestic workers in her collection Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night (1994) and Zoë Wicomb’s novel Playing in the Light, in which a woman passing for white allows her mother into her house only under the pretense that she is a family servant. Muholi and Sibande have engaged the legacy of Black black women in white households by revisiting the ghosts of the house through performance, sculpture, and photography. Both were inspired by the intimate reality of their mothers’ experiences as domestic servants, and in both cases the artist’s body is central to the pieces, through installations based on body casts, performance, embodied memories, and the themes of haunted absences, abandonment, and longing.
Relocations: Reading Culture in South Africa, 2015
An analysis of one page of Neel Mukherjee's _A Life Apart_ in _Relocations: Reading Culture in So... more An analysis of one page of Neel Mukherjee's _A Life Apart_ in _Relocations: Reading Culture in South Africa_, edited by Imraan Coovadia, Cóilín Parsons and Alexandra Dodd, Claremont: University of Cape Town Press, 2015
Hidden Geographies of the Cape: : Shifting Representations of Slavery and Sexuality in South African Art and Fiction
Sex, Power, and Slavery, 2014
The chapter argues that nearly the two centuries of slavery in the Cape Colony from 1658 - 1834 h... more The chapter argues that nearly the two centuries of slavery in the Cape Colony from 1658 - 1834 had a foundational influence on concepts of race and sex in South Africa. It discusses the anxieties around racial purity and sexual transgression in the Cape and shows how these were manifested in the laws, landscape, and the art of the period. The chapter ends by analyzing representations of slavery in South Africa from the colonial to the contemporary period, tracing a shift from portrayals of Cape slave-holding society as benign and its practices "mild" to the engagement in contemporary art and fiction with the systemic levels of sexual and physical violence that characterized the period.
Composing Selves: Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases as an Archive of Collective Being
Zanele Muholi: Faces and Phases, 2014
Gabeba Baderoon: Poems
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 09502386 2013 769153, Apr 29, 2013
Journal for Islamic Studies, 2013
Like many feminist initiatives, this special issue has its origins in long and nourishing convers... more Like many feminist initiatives, this special issue has its origins in long and nourishing conversations about abundance and absence, convergences and missed connections and the possibilities we dreamed of amid the complex terrain of feminist debates and Religious Studies in South Africa. In 2010-2011, the three co-editors of this issue were colleagues in a space that was most hospitable to such discussions, the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town. In the course of the year, our talks often centred on the rich history of gender theory in our disciplines of African literature and Religious Studies, yet we also noted the absence of a truly fertile exchange between two areas in which the country had produced much-lauded and influential scholarship: feminist theorising and Islamic Studies. In our discussions, we imagined a space that could generate such an exchange and thus emerged a collaborative feminist research project on "Theorising Experience, Subjectivity and Narrative in Studies of Gender and Islam".
Journal for Islamic Studies, Vol 33, 2013, 2013
In this essay, I consider apartheid’s racialised exclusions as
well as the gendered and sexualis... more In this essay, I consider apartheid’s racialised exclusions as
well as the gendered and sexualised silences in certain forms
of national belonging articulated by the anti-apartheid
struggle and the post-apartheid nation. In particular, I
theorise the role of autobiography about sexuality and
religion in countering the regulation of political belonging
in contemporary South Africa. I argue that life narratives
can engage in a complex and dissident relationship to public
discourses on national belonging. Black South Africans have
produced an impressive record of autobiographical writing
since the 19th Century, generating an intricate local history
of private life. In this trajectory, I explore what Muslim
self-writing can contribute to South African conceptions of
the private by analysing the collection of autobiographical
writings published in Hijab: Unveiling Queer Muslim Lives.
I argue that the forms of self-making in these narratives
illustrate some of the social uses to which a confl uence
of religion, sexuality and national identity is being put in
contemporary South Africa. I suggest that the intersection
of religion and sexuality forms a complex engagement with
questions of cultural authenticity and national belonging,
potentially unsettling conventional exclusions and
generating new forms of identity and affi liation.
well as the gendered and sexualised silences in certain forms
of national belonging articulated by the anti-apartheid
struggle and the post-apartheid nation. In particular, I
theorise the role of autobiography about sexuality and
religion in countering the regulation of political belonging
in contemporary South Africa. I argue that life narratives
can engage in a complex and dissident relationship to public
discourses on national belonging. Black South Africans have
produced an impressive record of autobiographical writing
since the 19th Century, generating an intricate local history
of private life. In this trajectory, I explore what Muslim
self-writing can contribute to South African conceptions of
the private by analysing the collection of autobiographical
writings published in Hijab: Unveiling Queer Muslim Lives.
I argue that the forms of self-making in these narratives
illustrate some of the social uses to which a confl uence
of religion, sexuality and national identity is being put in
contemporary South Africa. I suggest that the intersection
of religion and sexuality forms a complex engagement with
questions of cultural authenticity and national belonging,
potentially unsettling conventional exclusions and
generating new forms of identity and affi liation.
Social Dynamics, 38.2, 163-171, 2012
Introduction: Small differences
- Gabeba Baderoon and Louise Green
This special section bri... more Introduction: Small differences
- Gabeba Baderoon and Louise Green
This special section brings together a group of papers that in very different ways approach the question of Islam and the everyday. The travels, lives, stories, political struggles, and physical structures described in these articles and essays are all in some ways touched, formed, enlivened, troubled or textured by Islam, though they are not all directly involved in the practice of the religion itself. In our conception of the pieces gathered together in this special issue, we wanted to attend to the complex and often untidy realm of the everyday – a space that destabilises the neat boundaries between politics, religion and culture. We chose to include, along with scholarly articles on a range of topics, creative essays that offer oblique entry points into the way Islam might be written and rewritten in South Africa today. All the pieces reveal a set of demotic cultural expressions of great inventiveness and deeply integrated into the South African everyday, and work against the view – historically powerful and still not entirely superseded – of Islam as an exotic and picturesque addition to contemporary South African life. They also challenge the contemporary international tendency to view Islam as a threatening and incomprehensible force of fundamentalist fanaticism.
- Gabeba Baderoon and Louise Green
This special section brings together a group of papers that in very different ways approach the question of Islam and the everyday. The travels, lives, stories, political struggles, and physical structures described in these articles and essays are all in some ways touched, formed, enlivened, troubled or textured by Islam, though they are not all directly involved in the practice of the religion itself. In our conception of the pieces gathered together in this special issue, we wanted to attend to the complex and often untidy realm of the everyday – a space that destabilises the neat boundaries between politics, religion and culture. We chose to include, along with scholarly articles on a range of topics, creative essays that offer oblique entry points into the way Islam might be written and rewritten in South Africa today. All the pieces reveal a set of demotic cultural expressions of great inventiveness and deeply integrated into the South African everyday, and work against the view – historically powerful and still not entirely superseded – of Islam as an exotic and picturesque addition to contemporary South African life. They also challenge the contemporary international tendency to view Islam as a threatening and incomprehensible force of fundamentalist fanaticism.
Social Dynamics, 2012
"How do Muslims in South Africa recount the experience of pilgrimage? This paper considers the ge... more "How do Muslims in South Africa recount the experience of pilgrimage? This paper considers the genre of oral and written South African hajj narratives and reflects on the insights they hold about Muslim subjectivity and history in South Africa. Pilgrimage is a complex theme, or, as Barbara Cooper (1999) phrases it, ‘the hajj presents an immensely complex “ethnoscope” of human movement of tremendous historical depth’ (p. 103). In this article, I take a literary and historical rather than sociological or quantitative approach to the topic of the hajj and examine one of the earliest published accounts of the hajj from the Cape – that of Hajji Mahmoud Mobarek Churchward, who performed the hajj in 1910, along with oral testimonies about pilgrimage by ship in the 1950s and recently published accounts of pilgrimage by Na’eem Jeenah and Shamima Shaikh (2000), Rayda Jacobs (2005) and Rashid Begg (2011). In my analysis I consider the nature of the self and the voice, the relation of the spiritual to the quotidian, and the place of South Africa and South Africanness in these accounts. The article reveals that South African pilgrimage narratives are deeply compelling as an autobiographical practice and as an historical archive. They relate the universality of Islamic religious observance with the particularity of South Africa’s political and social realities in a seamless and illuminating nexus. I therefore argue that the hajj narrative as literary form offers new insights about the relation of the sacred and the profane, nation and religion, and gender and authenticity in South African Muslim life.
Keywords: Muslim; pilgrimage; hajj; Mecca; identity; Indian Ocean; Qur’an; memoir"
Keywords: Muslim; pilgrimage; hajj; Mecca; identity; Indian Ocean; Qur’an; memoir"
Feminist Studies, 37(2), 390-416, 2011
Before I knew about transgender, I called it gender within gender.
–Zanele Muholi, 2011.
In her... more Before I knew about transgender, I called it gender within gender.
–Zanele Muholi, 2011.
In her keynote address to the “African Same-Sex Sexualities and Gender Diversity” conference in Pretoria, South Africa, in February 2011, Desiree Lewis pointed to Zanele Muholi’s photograph Ms. D’vine I as exemplifying the utopian possibilities of queer liberation. With Lewis, we observe the complex and playful textures of Ms. D’vine’s self-possessed performance of gender in the photograph, her waist draped in beads woven in the colors of the South African flag, a brightly decorative yet slightly stiff necklace around her neck, and the sole of one of her bright red shoes worn through. The setting of long grass marked by discarded plastic bags in which Ms. D’vine poses at first recalls then unsettles an image of rural Africa by testifying to the continent’s urban realities. Lewis notes that this vivid and “emphatically queer” image “blurs markers of tradition and modernity . . . and defies the usual emphasis on violence, on health, on statistics” that reduces African sexuality to an instrumental litany of deficits and disease. Instead, in Muholi’s photograph Ms. D’vine observes no requirements of authenticity and no strictures on self-expression and, therefore, to Lewis, appears “entirely free, dethron[ing] normality, heteronormativity, and homonormativity.”[1] In her camp persona, Ms. D’vine consciously inhabits a marginal and original space, rather than a pragmatic and respectable one, and thereby embodies the promise of freely imagined possibilities for the self.
–Zanele Muholi, 2011.
In her keynote address to the “African Same-Sex Sexualities and Gender Diversity” conference in Pretoria, South Africa, in February 2011, Desiree Lewis pointed to Zanele Muholi’s photograph Ms. D’vine I as exemplifying the utopian possibilities of queer liberation. With Lewis, we observe the complex and playful textures of Ms. D’vine’s self-possessed performance of gender in the photograph, her waist draped in beads woven in the colors of the South African flag, a brightly decorative yet slightly stiff necklace around her neck, and the sole of one of her bright red shoes worn through. The setting of long grass marked by discarded plastic bags in which Ms. D’vine poses at first recalls then unsettles an image of rural Africa by testifying to the continent’s urban realities. Lewis notes that this vivid and “emphatically queer” image “blurs markers of tradition and modernity . . . and defies the usual emphasis on violence, on health, on statistics” that reduces African sexuality to an instrumental litany of deficits and disease. Instead, in Muholi’s photograph Ms. D’vine observes no requirements of authenticity and no strictures on self-expression and, therefore, to Lewis, appears “entirely free, dethron[ing] normality, heteronormativity, and homonormativity.”[1] In her camp persona, Ms. D’vine consciously inhabits a marginal and original space, rather than a pragmatic and respectable one, and thereby embodies the promise of freely imagined possibilities for the self.