Review Essay on Oliver Hermanus’ Shirley Adams

abstract

Oliver Hermanus' Shirley Adams (2009) is a South African film focused on the intimate relationship between a mother and her disabled son - a survivor of a shooting - caught in the cross-fire of gang violence in the community where he lives. Filmed in Mitchell's Plain, part of what is termed the ‘Cape Flats’ and located on the urban peripheries of Cape Town, the story works as an intense portrayal of the daily reality of Shirley Adams, specifically how she manages her life, and the life of her son. My commentary on the film is premised on feminist intersectional theory which sees power as working in multiple and complex ways. This perspective will prioritise the links and mediations between various interconnected subjectivities - gender, ‘class’, ‘race’, sexuality, and non-human animal ethics1 within a specific space and at a particular moment in the current South African context. Recognising that there are multiple ways in which to read film narratives, my intention is to explore Shirley Adams through engaging the many intersecting dynamics revealed through the narrative, and what these potentially invoke. The commentary will therefore be framed by an approach that considers the ways in which constructions of gender, class, and race - often mediated by ideas of sexuality - enable or disable certain ways of being in the world. In view of this, I reflect on how the female-mother body (signified through the main character) is commodified and valued through labour, and how this labour is gendered and classed; how a certain kind of heteromasculinity is revealed through Donovan's (partially paralysed) body, and finally, how ‘class’, gender, ‘race’ and human-animal relationships intersect through discourses of food in the film.

Keywords:

• Gendered bodies
• intersecting subjectivities
• structural violence
• close-up framing
• Cape Flats

Notes

1. I draw on Dekha's (2008) notion of intersectionality here, particularly in her reference to how ‘race’ and gender intersect in our relationships to non-human others. She notes:

“Our identities and experiences are not just gendered or racialised, but are also determined by our species status and the fact that we are culturally marked as human. More importantly - and this is the point I wish to stress - experiences of gender, race, sexuality, ability, etc, are often based on and take shape through speciesist ideas of humanness vis-à-vis animality” (2008:249).

2. Based on Farmer's description of structural violence, Swartz et al., (2012 in press) explain that

“the technologies and legacies of Apartheid are examples of structural violence. Structural violence is the institutionalisation of social processes that differentially cause suffering though organising unequal access to social resources, such as rights, security, capital and bodily and mental integrity, based on markers of difference.”

3. In the Western Cape of South Africa, apartheid policies (the Group Areas Act, in this instance) ensured that ‘coloured’ people were physically removed from their homes to spaces on the urban peripheries, away from people racialised as ‘white’ and ‘black’ in the South African coloniser imagination. This is an example of structural violence and its effects (gang violence, in this instance) remain deeply entrenched in communities like Mitchell's Plain, and similar spaces.

4. I move from the premise that all living beings possess subjectivity and personhood. In other words, it should be assumed in this review that each non-human animal is a subject-of-a-life that has inherent value, and a life that matters to it, as articulated by Tom Regan (2001).

5. Racial categories are socially constructed. However, for ease of reference, ‘black’, where used in this review, refers to the generic racial construction in the South African context, and includes ‘coloured’ and ‘Indian’. However, popular discourse in South Africa reveals that there is often a differentiation made between ‘black’, ‘coloured’ and ‘Indian’ South Africans. Where I wish to make a differentiation, the relevant terms will be used.