Zanele Muholi and Sabine Neidhardt
Forum for the Empowerment of Women ( South Africa )
York University ( Canada )
zmuholi@yahoo.ca or sabine@yorku.ca
Abstract
Our conference presentation is both a textual and a visual analysis of the making of radical black female subjectivity in post-apartheid South Africa . We explore how photography has been employed by socially, culturally, and economically marginalized black women as a site of resistance to not only return the gaze of the colonizers, but to develop what bell hooks has called a ‘critical gaze' into dominant heteropatriarchal and imperialist constructions of black women's bodies and their sexualities.
Addressing the explosion of academic and social interest in gender rights and ‘African women' in the last decade, we argue that this attention on black women (primarily from foreign and domestic academics and researchers, foreign and domestic NGOs and funding agencies, and government sponsored ‘gender desks') is shaped by the global hierarchy of knowledge which is organized to privilege white, western, heterocentric knowledges and liberal discourses of ‘rights'. Ultimately, we argue that these actors simply provide liberal progressive shades to the imperialist gaze, while still continuing within a long colonial history of defining and redefining the ‘Other'. The ideological projection in this historical moment is to mask the general organization of global social relations between those who have the socio-cultural power to speak, represent, define and those who oppose this power.
In the post-apartheid South African context, the gaze works to fix ‘African women' into static, passive, victimized subjects who consume rather than produce knowledge about themselves and their agency. Moreover, through its influence over public and state discourses, the gaze is able to a) exclude the diversity of the everyday/every night lived experiences of black South African women; b) depoliticize sexual and gender difference between ‘African' women; and c) reposition black women's subjectivities as commodities in the global academic and funding market.
However, as the gaze creates the “Other” in black ‘African' women, the existence of the “Other” lives in her own localized set of complex social, cultural and economic experiences. Our presentation will draw on Muholi's work from her collection entitled Only Half the Picture to demonstrate how the privileged gaze is, in fact, both critically reflected upon and then returned by the “Other” in the photographs—in this case lesbian-identified women. These women stare back, resist, challenge the idea that their bodies and psyches can be researched, understood, displayed for consumers within the free market. In this way, we conclude that these radical black female subjectivities create discursive space for black South African women to look at themselves, into themselves, thereby contributing centrally to a making of a more radical democratic gender and sexual politics of representation.