Gender and Popular Imaginaries in Africa

If we accept that many Africans’ social perceptions on a range of questions, including gender, are shaped by popular cultural productions which retain a keen pulse on the everyday, then it is important to reflect on the interface between gender and popular imaginaries. The debate on the definition of the ‘popular’ remains an open one with multiple interpretations and categories. This contestation in itself gestures towards popular culture’s inclination for ambiguity and slipperiness. As Karin Barber (2018:13) reminds us, the popular constitutes “expressive forms that are constantly emergent, ephemeral, embedded in daily life, given to extraordinary bursts of activity and rapid transformation”. For George Ogola, popular cultural forms “engage with and subject the polity to constant critique through informal but widely recognised forms of censure” (2017:2). In this special issue, we use popular imaginaries to mean the range of cultural productions, platforms, and interactions between consumers and producers - which are often interchangeable - that capture the material, the affective, as inflected and refracted in different texts, contexts and platforms. As such, it is a dynamic culture that speaks to ordinary people’s concerns, desires, challenges and triumphs. Given the prominent place popular cultural productions occupy in the shaping of people’s thoughts, values and expectations, it is imperative to pay attention to how questions of gender are staged in African popular cultural imaginaries.

Over the years, different disciplines of African studies have turned their attention to African popular arts and cultural productions as important sites of meaning-making (Barber, 1987; Newell, 2002; Ogude and Nyairo, 2007). Although much of this scholarship has focused on different artistic genres, platforms and questions, there is broad consensus that popular cultural art forms convene valuable platforms for working through questions of everyday life, as well as imaginative future mapping of desires and aspirations. Yet, despite the wide recognition of popular art forms as invaluable sources of insights into societies, these cultural productions remain haunted by scholarly anxieties about their indiscipline; their transgressiveness; their contradictory impulses and general refusal to cohere with canonised perspectives and modes of thought.

A productive entry point into making sense of these forms’ rejection of legibility through canonised lenses is to ask the question: What does popular culture in Africa enable? In his most recent publication, Ogola argues that the popular creates order in disorder; it provides “a window through which to witness change differently, to learn about alternative narrations and histories and to revise some of the problematic generic frames that characterise the reading of the African state” (Ogola, 2017:v), and by extension, African societies. He adds, quite correctly, that this idea of the popular signals a field that while inclusive, is “less linear, undisciplined and quite difficult to frame” (2017: v). If we are to think of the popular as an informal way of accessing and understanding culture and society, then this special issue introduces us to the link between that which is popular (public, accessible), and gendered identity. Specifically, the special issue invites us to think through ways in which gender and sexuality are narrated, represented, analysed and researched across different platforms, genres and audiences.

Although they address themselves to different case studies and respond to different questions relating to gender and sexuality, the various popular cultural practices explored in the papers featured point towards certain elements that are inherent to contemporary African popular cultural production and consumption. These elements are worth flagging for their potential in shaping public thought on gender and sexuality in Africa. Firstly, the papers and case studies in this collection signal experimental methodologies that have been used to undo ways of reading terrains of gender and sexuality that remain stuck in archaic formulations or that cannot escape the rigid frameworks within which they have always been placed. The idea of experimentation signals movement. The popular, as it has been theorised by Barber (2018), is about change, born out of a need to engage with the reality of everyday life. In Barber’s work, this change is also about how creatively everyday life is navigated among particular classes of people. Barber is concerned with the working-class Africans, who have enough basic education to navigate the complicated contexts of urbanity, cosmopolitanism and modernity. Looking at a range of examples drawn from contemporary Global South locations, the articles in this special issue prod, question and attempt to translate the manifestations of change and continuity in gender scripts articulated through different genres and platforms. In effect, the articles focus on the multi-layered ways in which contemporary cultural productions point to alternative ways to re-imagine gender within popular imaginaries in Africa.

the articles in this special issue prod, question and attempt to translate the manifestations of change and continuity in gender scripts articulated through different genres and platforms

Secondly, the articles revisit the thorny issue of agency and forms of exclusion from dominant platforms of representation. In many respects, the perspectives offered here resonate with Onookome Okome and Stephanie Newell's (2012) observation that the episteme of the everyday in popular culture opens up spaces for marginalised voices to interrogate gender issues in ways that are transgressive, unruly, untidy, risk taking but also life affirming and pleasurable. In doing so, there is often a contradictory blend of attempts to resist dominant readings of gender while sometimes simultaneously reiterating conservative gender logics. Yet these case studies also caution that while popular art forms often appear on the surface to be conservative and unsophisticated - often featuring gender-stereotypical or stock figures for instance - consumers of these cultural forms go beyond the stereotyping to use the storylines and insights they offer to interpret and make sense of social situations. It is from this perspective that popular forms such as soap operas and romance novels stage topical dialogues in affective registers that resonate with their target audiences and effectively - sometimes inadvertently - push subversive thought on gendered experiences and interactions, at the moment of consumption by audiences.

Thirdly, and related to the polysemic inclination of popular cultural forms, is the question of communities of engagement, convened by popular art forms. In part because of the tendency towards performativity, coupled with their often provocative invitation of responses from their audiences, popular cultural forms convene communities of dialogue around the issues they grapple with. Nowhere is this sense of community more evident than in social media forms, and broadly, online texts, as the various papers featured here demonstrate. Through creative forms of self-making using textual and visual media, different constituencies craft gendered versions of themselves that project their desired identities, while others create space for themselves in hegemonic nationalist scripts that preclude them on the basis of their sexual identities. Still others use these same online platforms for fierce contestations over questions of cultural appropriation and hegemonic gender scripts. In an era where African futures will soon be defined by what Teju Cole terms “the ephemeral city of Twitter” run by “digital natives” (2017:43) - in reference to generations born into the world of internet, cellphone and computer technologies - paying attention to African digital worlds and their impact in articulating different forms of gender freedoms is imperative, even as these platforms simultaneously resist our most optimistic attempts to project on them a progressive gender politics by often surprising us with deeply conservative gender politics.

The papers collected here heed Isabel Hofmeyr’s reminder that popular art forms must be read not so much as literal reflections of social reality; but with an attentive eye in the genre conventions and aesthetic choices they make (Hofmeyr, 2004:128). Equally resonant here is a reminder that popular texts often resist our attempts to impose a dichotomy of oppression and resistance, by opting for slippery and ambivalent layers of perspectives which sometimes appear contradictory (Hofmeyr, 2004). This observation is particularly productive in making sense of the popular imaginaries produced and mediated by social media. The advent of social media and digital platforms has expanded the scope for debate, play, creativity and the generation of affect, all of which have implications for gender debates. Social media is central to conversations about the self, about publicness, about consumerism, conspicuous consumption, visibility and resistance. The bulk of the papers speak about how bodies are beginning to mean through informal avenues, particularly in terrains where the institution (power) makes such meaning impossible. Perhaps the most visible and powerful category in this regard is hashtag activism, with the #MeToo movement staging an unprecedented platform for activism against sexual violence with a global reach. In the southern African context, the student activists turned to social media to air their frustrations with the way in which universities handle sexual violence on campuses. For example, at Rhodes University, students initiated the #RUreferenceList through which they named alleged sexual offenders in the student community. This is a powerful illustration of both the potential and dangers of social media activism. This hashtag received both enthusiastic support from people disillusioned by universities’ sexual harassment policies which were deemed too conciliatory; but it also raised serious concerns about witch-hunting and the risks of digital mob justice.

The students’ hashtag aside, perhaps two of the most widely known social media conversations in South Africa relate to the reality TV show Date My Family and a recent film on Xhosa initiation rites, Inxeba. Two of the papers here examine these two texts and the spill-over of debates that took place on social media via the hashtags #DMF and #Inxeba. Melusi Mntungwa and Luthando Ngema focus on depictions of gay men looking for love in the TV series Date My Family as demonstrating contestations of Black gay men’s dating conventions and reconfiguring gender debates in the South African public sphere. While the authors laud the show as convening urgent debates about gender, sexuality and contestations of masculinity through onscreen articulations of identity politics as well as the online debates among viewers; they simultaneously tease out manifestations of internalised homophobia as performed by queer men’s desire to assimilate into hetero-masculinity. Ngema and Mntungwa’s discussions caution us against surface readings of popular genres and art forms as transgressive and space-opening by reminding us that these same forms can simultaneously open up space and perpetuate conservative discourses that negate the space of possibility proffered. Ultimately though, the paper’s reflections on Date My Family, a show billed as entertainment, cohere with Barber’s sentiments that contrary to prevalent perceptions of popular art forms as carefree, “genres billed as entertainment usually talk of matters of deep interest and concern to the people who produce them” (Barber, 1987:29).

Ngema and Mntungwa’s discussions caution us against surface readings of popular genres and art forms as transgressive and space-opening

This seriousness of ‘playful’ forms is further demonstrated by TL McCormick’s profile on leathermen cultures in South Africa. In her profile, McCormick traces the history of leathermen cultures back to white middle-class gay World War II veterans who took exception to the feminisation of gay masculinities, and started making sartorial choices that emphasised their hypermasculinity. In time, a distinct sartorial culture based on leather clothing items and accessories with particular semiotic codes emerged and went global. Through a study of the SA Leathermen community as depicted on their Facebook page, McCormick teases out the subculture’s self-inscription in South Africa, where it has attracted perceptions of transgressiveness within the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) community for its alignment with Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, Masochism (BDSM).

Elsewhere Francis Nyamnjoh (2005) argues that the internet provides marginalised voices with alternative possibilities for engagement. Miranda Young-Jahangeer and Princess Sibanda powerfully demonstrate these possibilities, through an exploration of Zimbabwean public discourse on LGBTI issues, which marginalises sexual minorities. They look at how a group of six LGBTI Zimbabweans who have been marginalised, successfully used popular theatre to insert their concerns into political debates on Zimbabwean nationalism. The authors argue that the Nhanho (meaning Strides) project was a way for sexual minorities to “write themselves back” into the nation. Subsequently, one of the members Tatelicious Karigambe, who identifies as a transwoman, started a social media campaign ‘the Tatelicious movement’ in the hope of changing transphobic perceptions in Zimbabwe. For Tatelicious, these online spaces provide a platform to negotiate a space for transwomen as well as fight for the rights of minority groups, refugees, sex workers and people living with HIV/AIDS. However, even as she tries to articulate trans issues, Tatelicious occupies an ambivalent position which exposes how she has internalised patriarchal attitudes. In a love song to her husband “she romanticises the domestic/private sphere and expresses a desire to fill traditional gender roles around labour and motherhood” (p 48).

the Nhanho (meaning Strides) project was a way for sexual minorities to “write themselves back” into the nation

But perhaps the most robust social media conversations on sexuality and culture in South Africa were convened by the film Inxeba - The Wound. With a narrative anchored on the Xhosa male circumcision ritual but integrating questions of queer desire playing out in the space of seclusion of the initiates, this film’s exploration of the interface between tradition and queer desire was bound to spark controversy. Anele Siswana and Peace Kiguwa’s focus article in the issue analyses social media responses to the film through #TheWoundMustFall with keen interest in constructions of Xhosa masculinity and tradition. Siswana and Kiguwa offer a compelling argument on what they term impossible masculinities produced by rigid perspectives on sexuality, culture and sacrilege. In these social media commentaries, emerged strong investments in binary understandings of masculinity and ethnicity which demonstrated equally unequivocal boundaries of hegemonic masculinities that deemed queer Xhosa masculinity as impossible in the realms of the initiation rite (ulwaluko). The writers’ reflections bring to mind Dina Ligaga’s observation that the internet and cyberspace is not just an alternative site for producing popular “unofficial” cultures, but it is an enabler in understanding users’ social and political lives and representative of muted, underrepresented or misrepresented media cultures (2012:2).

What emerges from the papers exploring online texts is that the advent of social media has declosetted hitherto closetted perspectives, ideas, aspirations and prejudices through the democratisation of access, anonymity and the sense of community and collective dialogues and exchanges. Attentive readings of social media genres and platforms compel us to reflect on the micro-conversations, textures of quotidian practices, ideas of self, self-making, experimentation and imaginative play with ideas and modes of self-understandings that mediate contemporary conversations on gender and sexuality in Africa. In the process, popular cultural practices and genres dismantle large narratives about gender in Africa by showcasing the specificities of people’s ways of doing gender.

Mlotshwa’s article examines the ways in which ethnicity and gender are played out in print media by focussing on a cartoon that appeared in The Chronicle, one of Zimbabwe’s weekly newspapers. This cartoon, he argues, is extremely problematic in its portrayal of Ndebele women. He links this ethnicised and gendered view to issues of nationalism in Zimbabwe. On the one hand, Ndebele women’s issues and concerns tend to be marginalised, rendering them invisible. On the other, when they are represented in public spaces they are hyper-visible, but this representation tends to be stereotyped: “In the context of this cartoon, and at every level, the Ndebele woman subject is being represented, spoken of and for whether by the cartoonist or the opinion leaders, who are ‘reading’ the cartoon, most of whom are males” (p 94). In other words, when these images appear in the public domain, the space becomes a contested site in which ordinary people are able to provide meaning and interpretation on issues of gender and ethnicity. This cartoon sparked debate on social media. However, the main narrative tended to focus on issues of ethnicity, at the expense of gender. Mlotshwa surmises that for “Ndebele women, representation silences through a double play of invisibility and hyper-visibility where they are either absent in the public space or made present through “stereotyped and commodified” representations (Mowatt et al, 2013:644 cited in Mlotshwa p 88).

The papers collected here also introduce new permutations of the popular. In Polo Moji’s article, chick-lit stands next to the novel form, and a Hip-hop aesthetic peppers the narratives of survival, self and belonging. The article renegotiates the meaning of deviance and diva-hood within the Hip-hop aesthetic, with particular reference to public representations of femininity. Through a reading of Lauren Ekue’s Icone Urbaine (2006), it plays with the possibility of using chick-lit which is a popular form to negotiate meanings of black identity and black femininity. Nedine Moonsamy and Lynda Gichanda Spencer (2017:437-8) define chick-lit as:

literature written by, for, or about contemporary women who navigate the complex reality of late-capitalism. The plot tends to reflect the life of a twenty or thirty-year-old protagonist struggling with everyday challenges in relation to her romantic relationships with her boyfriend, parents, friends, sexuality, her body image and consumerism.

Through its analysis of the novel’s hyperbolic style of narration, the article shows how the popular novel can remain malleable to change, porous, while at the same time, retaining its inherent power to speak to its location. The realness of the novel relates to its constant reference to context. This context is visual and public. In many ways, the article shows how popular cultural forms function as hyperreal forms - working at symbolic levels of meaning that demand an intertextual reading.

Moji’s paper inspires a number of readings of popular culture that point to exciting modes of engaging this form. For example, Moji points to popular culture as a transnational object. This is of particular interest in the context of African popular culture, where it has often been defined within rather than around its context. To read African popular culture as transnational is to link it to a globalised blackness, from the African-American Hip-hop culture, to Afro-European reality, and to Africa. That which is popular travels beyond national borders, traverses stereotypical reading, and encourages a haziness of borders. The looseness of this form encourages us to loosen how we approach the novel form.

Thematically, the idea of blackness and consumer culture is instructive. The article lingers on visuality and conspicuous consumption, as a way of understanding black subjectivity in a foreign land. The very translatability of brands and conspicuous objects, and ways in which the lead character formulates an identity around these objects draws attention to the permeability of popular culture outside of the loci of class and race. Indeed, this translatability encourages the author to ponder on the linguistic fluidity with which the author crosses between the French language and American Hip-hop culture. Perhaps interesting too, is the engagement with the idea of the diva and deviance. The article disrupts the easy association of deviance with black creativity by reading against the grain, and pointing towards the very core of learned interpretation.

On its part, Monique van Vuuren’s article is a highly experimental paper that explores the idea of body-talk to signal ways in which bodies visibly resist power. Important in this paper is the methodology and the link between gender, transgression and method. It is clear that popular culture is taken to refer to that which exists outside of the formal (educational institutions, other institutions). The popular is linked with the ordinary, everyday forms of resistance. Central to this paper is the idea of the self and the kinds of experimentations that are made possible with the increasingly visual culture of social media.

The popular is linked with the ordinary, everyday forms of resistance.

Like Moji’s paper, the visual is key to understanding how popular culture intersects with ideas of consumerism and visuality today. The consumption of the self, through performance of self, or as Moji terms it, the narcissistic gaze, is crucial in understanding the direction that the popular is taking. Indeed, the visual becomes the central location through which meaning is made and circulated. Van Vuuren’s article explores the idea of resistance and performance as conduits into citizenship. It points towards how young women who are opposed to the heteronormative translatability of culture, ensure their senses of belonging through performance, and not just any performance, but visual performance. The very publicness of this performance is the core of consumer culture, in which we are told how to consume bodies. However, these young women also take advantage of the hyperreality to communicate their refusal to belong within the confines of the ordinary frames of reference.

The popular becomes a strategy for survival. Like the lead character in the novel that Moji looks at, the young women in Van Vuuren’s research want to survive. At the same time, they want to share how they enjoy themselves as members of society, albeit through a refusal to conform. The hyper-visible bodies, or the bodyhood that Van Vuuren theorises here indicates the use of the body to speak, to communicate knowledges that might escape one if the materiality of the body is absent. Similar to Moji’s article, Van Vuuren looks at the ability of the popular to create new forms. Where Moji speaks of a Hip-hop aesthetic, Van Vuuren theorises the vernacular feminism of bodyhood. Both encourage us to see what Barber addresses as one of the essential aspects of popular culture – synchronicity.

Erin de Kock’s perspective piece offers another take on visuality, resistance and the reconstitution of the self. Based on an experiential look at the self, the paper explores what it means to see through the eyes of privilege, while seriously engaging with what survivability means in the lives of those who do not share that privilege. Like Moji and Van Vuuren’s papers, it is about the body and visibility and the sea of meaning that accompanies them. The writer thinks about the mediation of the self through visuality. What does seeing really mean? How do bodies that are marginalised occupy space? How are black women circulated in public? Once again, it navigates the terrain of the object and materiality to engage methodologically with the aspects of affect, those elusive things that resist theorisation. It thinks through how artist Mary Sibande’s Sophie occupies the public imagination of the maid, who is black and female, and who is resigned to her servitude. The most interesting aspect that this paper adds to the conversation is the point of view. How does whiteness see blackness, more generally speaking?

Lastly, “Thinking Through, Talking Back: Creative Theorisation as Sites of Praxis-Theory” showcases a dialogue between Sharlene Khan and four feminists of colour at the African feminisms conference which was held at Rhodes University in 2017. This forum is reminiscent of traditional cultures of public deliberation, where people congregated in public spaces to debate various issues. In this case the author focused on how black women’s creativity which is embedded in everyday lived experiences can be understood as a site of knowledge production. The discussion shifts between abstract and personal conversations on “black feminist epistemological strategies: black women as agents of knowledge; lived experience as ‘useful embodied interrogation’ and ‘situated critiques’; creativities as sites from which black-African feminist critiques and theorisations emerge; and the role of imagination in our lives as a critical, political force” (p 109). More importantly, this discussion in its entirety was uploaded onto the Art on our Mind website making it widely accessible in an attempt to bridge the gap between academic spheres and popular platforms.

Overall, the papers collected here gesture to the unruliness of popular cultural productions and modes of consumption as a double-edged sword that mirrors the polysemic ambiguities that popular cultural forms often court. In this unruliness, lies the elasticity and openness to experimentation necessary to shift gender regimes for the better; even as it also contains the seeds of patriarchal refusals of change. Ultimately, the papers pay tribute to these genres and platforms for convening important debates on gender, whatever directions these debates take.

ORCID

Lynda Gichanda Spencer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9504-5919

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lynda Gichanda Spencer

LYNDA GICHANDA SPENCER is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University. Email: [email protected]

Dina Ligaga

DINA LIGAGA is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. Email: [email protected]

Grace A Musila

GRACE A MUSILA is an Associate Professor in the African Literature Department at the University of the Witwatersrand. Email: [email protected]