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Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the National Research Foundation and of the Ford Foundation. I would like to thank Natasha Distiller, Carolyn Hamilton, Joan Hambidge, John Higgins and Coìlín Parsons, all of whom read this paper at very short notice and offered me suggestions and encouragement; the participants in the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative quarterly workshops and reading group; and Mona Hakimi, who provided research assistance at a critical time. The insights of the anonymous reviewers were both critical and generous. Andrew van der Vlies invited the paper into being. As always, Louise Green helped me to conceptualize and write this. Alastair Douglas makes it all possible. This is for Sophie Douglas, my brave wolf-child.
Notes
1Pratt, Crime Against Nature, 114.
2Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26.
3Van Wyk, “Xingwana.” For the media statement issued by Xingwana, see her “Statement” online. It is also instructive to read the Minister's statements on art that does promote nation-building. See, for instance, her address at the launch of the “Moral Regeneration Month” in July 2009: Xingwana, “Address by the Minister of Arts and Culture.”
4I employ the term “queer” to open a way of thinking about sexuality and subjectivity that crosses and seeks to undo the bounds between categories of identification such as “gay,” “lesbian,” “straight,” “bisexual,” and “intersex.”
5I draw the phrase “structures of recognition” from psychoanalytic theorist Parveen Adams. The term implies socially constructed ways of seeing and modes by which one becomes recognizable as a subject, as well as the psychic dimension of the operations of the gaze. See Adams, Emptiness of the Image.
6See Lewis, “Against the Grain”; Gqola, “Through Zanele Muholi's Eyes”; and Ngcobo, “Introduction.”
7Pollock, Encounters, 13. See also Pollock, Differencing the Canon.
8Pollock, Encounters, 13.
9Ibid., 12.
10Van Wyk, “Xingwana.”
11A selection of photographs by the participants at the workshop, a description of the project and some of Jean Brundrit's own very interesting photographic work—which, like Muholi's, engages with lesbian experience, (in)visibility and the archive—is collected in Brundrit, “A Lesbian Story.”
12For more information about Muholi's visual activism, see her projects on her website www.zanelemuholi.com.
13See the critiques leveled at Muholi's early work by reviewers such as Smith, and reprinted in Muholi's Only Half the Picture, 2006, 90–1; and Hogg, cited in Lewis, “Against the Grain,” 17.
14Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 31.
15Xingwana, “Statement.”
16Ibid.
17Sontag, On Photography, 161.
18Ibid., 64–5.
19Ibid., 6–7.
20Ibid., 112.
21Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 16–18.
22Ibid., 18–19.
23Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26.
24Ibid., 43.
25The image can be viewed online. See Muholi, “Faces and Phases.”
26The image can be seen on the Michael Stevenson Gallery website; see Muholi, “Only Half the Picture: 29 March—29 April 2006.”
27See this and other images at Muholi, “Only Half the Picture: 29 March—29 April 2006.”
28Muholi, “Mapping Our Histories,” 19.
29For other readings of this photograph see Lewis, “Against the Grain,” and Gunkel, Cultural Politics.
30The key text for thinking gender as performative remains Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, which asks, among other things, how “language itself produce[s] the fictive construction of ‘sex’” (xi).
31Della Grace is now Del LaGrace Volcano, a gender-variant visual artist. See www.dellagracevolcano.com.
32Adams, Emptiness of the Image, 123.
33Ibid., 138.
34Pollock, Encounters, 12 (my italics).
35Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 145.
36See Chambers, Untimely Interventions, 29. See also Chambers, Facing It (1998), for an excellent study of how writing the experience of living with and dying of AIDS tests the boundaries of autobiographical writing.
37Natasha Distiller's essay “Another Story” offers a critical reflection on the limits of and for lesbian experience within representation. Interestingly, Muholi refers to Distiller's argument in her discussion of her motivation for producing “Faces and Phases” and states: “I wanted to resist the heterosexual representation of lesbians through portraits” (Muholi, “Mapping Our Histories,” 26).
38Barthes, Camera Lucida, 38.
39Ibid., 96.
40Ibid.
41Muholi, “Faces and Phases.”
42Muholi, “Mapping Our Histories,” 27.
43Carolyn Hamilton discusses how art opens a space for what has been deemed unspeakable; see Hamilton, “Uncertain Citizenship,” 368.
44Muholi, “Faces and Phases.”
45For a representative selection of images, see Muholi, “Faces and Phases: 9 July to 8 August 2009” (Brodie/Stevenson Gallery), and Muholi, “Faces and Phases” (Michael Stevenson Gallery).
46Adams, Emptiness of the Image, 138.
47See for example the recent incident at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, where South Africa's representative Jerry Matjila objected to the inclusion of sexual orientation in a report on racism as to do so would be to “demean[s] the legitimate plight of the victims of racism” (Fabricius, “SA Fails to Back Efforts at UN to Protect Gays,” 3).
