This special issue of Agenda arises from the exhibition intervention queer & trans Art-iculations featuring Zanele Muholi's Mo(u)rning and Gabrielle Le Roux's Proudly African & Transgender and Proudly Trans in Turkey coordinated by the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies (29 January - 30 March 2014). A colloquium held alongside the exhibition, drew out the importance of art activism as a means to engage the need for locally situated knowledge and action around issues of sexual orientation and gender identity. Both Muholi's and Le Roux's art collections raise critical questions of how sexual and gender categories operate in relation to other socially constructed axes such as class, race and citizen status.
queer & trans Art-iculations provided opportunities to engage the South African public in ways that challenge dominant binary thinking about gender and heteronormativity in light of South Africa's constitutional commitment to promote equality. In publishing this issue, the intention is to extend and expand public awareness of the significance of the art activist intervention of the exhibition and to give it wider exposure and further, elicit feminist and queer theorising that engages with the (re)-situation of gender in the de-/post colonial African context. Concomitant with this concern is the policing of the heteronormative gender binary and the silence around the consequences of transgressing it: issues increasingly identified at the heart of social and gender injustices in Africa.
The guest editors of the issue, Haley McEwen and Tommaso M Milani, highlight the importance of this intervention in the Introduction, writing: “Going against the proverbial grain of the gender binary, however, may come with material consequences – life threatening ones at that – as one can see from the reported rate of violence directed at people who transgress gender and sexual normativities throughout the world. The (South) African context is no exception in this regard.”
The call for papers for the issue invited both academic and creative writing. It hoped to attract papers that “do not speak for, but speak with” in a practice of deep listening to people who speak from lived experience (and are most often spoken for) as a basis to engage in further dialogue and action. The visual essays by Zanele Muholi and Gabrielle Le Roux are positioned at the centre of the issue. The issue's written contributions are presented in two broad themes: Articles which interface with theoretical engagement with the work of Muholi and Le Roux and that situate queer and trans art activist collaboration within intercultural and international activism and articles that engage with art activism as a politicised practice by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) activists and educators, and the importance of counter publics in offering an alternative discourse in the repositioning and representation of black queer identities.
As McEwen and Milani write, “…the visual work of Muholi and Le Roux is a prime example of the nexus of art, activism and academic engagement that seeks to confront the myth of the gender binary through powerful representations and narratives.” In the collaborative work of Le Roux, each live-drawn portrait is inscribed by the activist featured and accompanied by a narrative that provides insight into the social injustices enabled by the gender binary. Through Muholi's memorialisation of the lost lives of murdered lesbians, one is confronted with how necessary the work of drawing social attention to the horrific violations and crimes is – and the need to expose the brutal violence of coerced and forced sexual and gender conformity.
While the Agenda issue ‘Gender and human rights: Biology and bodies’ (98/27.4 2013) strongly highlighted the epistemic violence and empirical falseness of the construction of the gender binary and the complicity of medico-legal institutions in perpetuating these myths, this issue has strongly taken forward critique and interrogation of the binary and the repositioning of gender and sexualities in Africa. It has powerfully illuminated through engaging across multiple platforms of dialogue which include the affective and the consciousness raising elements of artistic representation by feminist and queer women artists whose work subverts the dominant heteropatriarchal gender order.
In conclusion Agenda expresses gratitude to Haley McEwen and Tommaso M Milani, the guest editors, in producing this issue of Agenda. It is hoped that it lays the ground for further conversations by LGBTI activists and communities, art activists and feminist/queer scholarship in Africa and elsewhere in the global South.
Lou Haysom
Consulting Editor