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Abstract
In a discussion of selected works by Mary Sibande, the author explores how the artist visually locates a persona, “Sophie Ntombikayise,” she has created within the realm of theatrical fantasy through use of exaggerated poses, dramatic gestures, and extravagant dress. Sibande’s theatrical quotations of the language of dress and use of dramatic poses may be related to photographic representations of the Victorian female hysteric in various stages of a hysterical attack, in that they both evoke a sense of excess. It is suggested that, in works on the exhibition The Purple Shall Govern (2013), Sibande moves from the language of quotation of photographic representations of hysteria traceable in earlier works, into the realm of parody. Drawing on feminist writers who posit that hysteria may be regarded as a form of non-verbal, bodily communication for otherwise “voiceless” Victorian women, and relating this to the silencing and invisibility of the black domestic worker in the South African home under apartheid, the author argues that hysteria may be construed as an empowering form of self-expression.
Notes
1. Furthermore, my use of feminist re-readings of psychoanalytic theories, and application of these in relation to Sibande’s work raises questions around whether psychoanalysis is an appropriate theoretical framework within which to position the work of a black female South African artist. These questions, however, point to a more extensive conversation, which is beyond the scope of this discussion.
2. In speaking about myself as a white woman, I refer to myself as a person positioned through racialized power, which in the context of modernity, is usually understood through ideas of privileged whiteness and the unequal power relations this implicates.
3. In my discussion of hysteria, I focus on the period 1862 to 1893, when the disorder was at its height. This corresponds with the time in which the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), famed (and infamous) for his treatment of hysterical patients, worked at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris.
4. In his examination of the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century, Didi-Huberman (Citation2003) argues the category of hysteria was “invented” by photography. Under Charcot’s direction, patients were methodically photographed to provide visual proof of hysteria’s specific form.
5. The Introduction from Logan’s book, including this passage, is available at
http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft5d5nb38x;chunk.id=introduction;doc.view=print
6. Colloquial Afrikaans word for “headscarf.”
7. Mary Corrigall, “Interview with Mary Sibande”. Incorrigible Corrigall, July, 2010. Accessed September 4 2014. http://corrigall.blogspot.com/2010/07/interview-with-mary-sibande.html
This statement finds support in John Carl Flügel’s (Citation1950, 34) observation that, “Clothing … gives us an increased sense of power, a sense of extension of the bodily self.” Thus, Sophie’s sense of personal power is literally indicated by the amount of space that she occupies.
8. Mary Corrigall, “Mary Sibande: Domestic Fantasy.” Incorrigible Corrigall, August 5 2009. Accessed September 20 2014 http://corrigall.blogspot.com/2009/08/mary-sibande-domestic-fantasy.html
9. Sibande comes from a lineage of domestic workers that dates back to her great grandmother (Mary Corrigall, “Interview with Mary Sibande”. Incorrigible Corrigall, July 2010. Accessed September 4 2014. http://corrigall.blogspot.com/2010/07/interview-with-mary-sibande.html). Her work pre-2013 might be seen as an acknowledgment and homage to her maternal lineage, particularly in her assuming the role of domestic worker through her alter-ego Sophie, and stripping away the privileges that she has enjoyed as an educated black woman. However, the works on The Purple Shall Govern display significant differences which suggest that Sibande herself might, through Sophie’s liberation from the position of domestic worker, be in a process of discarding her own outworn personal identities. Thembinkosi Goniwe (Citation2013, 4) notes that there are three aspects that point to this possibility:
First, it is about Sibande’s creative quest in taking Sophie to another level and while doing so returning to an earlier work that is representative of Sibande herself dressed in a purple outfit. The colour purple is a visual emblem of this shift from one phase to another, as it supplants the blue colour which dominates most of Sophie’s dresses. Second is the importance of this return to a work on which the next chapter of Sophie is established, by exploring ideas of fear and anxiety arising as a result of a transition from something known to the unknown. It is an exploration carried out from Sibande’s personal perspective to confront the apprehensive experience of surrendering things that are part of her identity, experience and history. … Third is that the new artworks are about Sibande’s me-time and crafting of her-self. Implied here is that she is privileging/prioritising her own desires and experiences without accounting for the three generations of women in her family as she does in her established narrative about Sophie’s identity and history, which both trace their roots to her maternal great grandmother, her grandmother and her mother. Having relinquished her concern for others and focusing on her and focusing on her own preoccupations … Sibande has established two phases of her alterego: the old Sophie and the new Sophie.
10. The idea of an “inviolate female space” and its associations with hysteria, may be related to what Freud and Breuer (Citation1955, 166) term “hypnoid states.” In their clinical studies, they proposed that the origins of hysteria lay in the repetitious domestic duties (such as needlework, knitting, playing scales, and sickbed nursing) to which upper-class Victorian women were confined (Evans Citation1991, 158). As Freud and Breuer saw it, repetitive routine tasks made women prone to daydreaming without an interlocutor, which rendered them “vulnerable” to hypnoid states, in which their repressed imaginative, creative and emotional energies and drives came to the fore (Evans Citation1991, 158). Consequently, Freud and Breuer considered repetitive domestic tasks as dangerous to women’s health because they “led to states of mind where women experienced their ‘selves’ creating and enacting narratives in a private theater to which men had no access” (Przybysz Citation1993, 180). Given their ability to prompt hypnoid states, such repetitive activities were deemed to be potentially destructive, in that they allowed women to access the “excesses” of femininity and, by association, the semiotic, which, in turn, would give way to pathogenic associations that engender hysterical symptoms (De Mijolla Citation2005).
11. This psychoanalytic conception of selfhood and otherness differs from the Self/Other binary of colonial discourse. In the psychoanalytic conception, the emergence of the individual self or the “I” inscribes an “other.” In Lacanian readings, the subconscious is the discourse of the other, formed at the moment of the child’s constitution via entry into the symbolic order (Barker Citation2004, 140). The Other of postcolonial discourse refers to the dialogical relation between Self and Other; the “I” and that which is “not I,” or “You.” As feminists such as Irigaray, Kristeva and Cixous (among others) have shown, historically—in colonial and patriarchal, phallogocentric discourses—the “I” of the pairing is positioned as the rational, unitary, self-present, autonomous Cartesian subject. These binaries that inscribe difference usually involve a relationship of power, wherein “Self” is empowered with positive attributes and “Other” is positioned as subordinate (Barker Citation2004, 139).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Leora Farber
Leora Farber is Associate Professor and Director of the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.