Gendered implications of new technologies and posthuman subjectivities: perspectives from the global South

This issue is conceptualised within a posthumanist framework. The posthuman condition prompts critical engagements of the human through an analysis of “the shifting grounds on which new, diverse and even contradictory understandings of the human are currently being generated, from a variety of sources, cultures and traditions” (Braidotti 2019, pp. 33-34). At its core, posthumanism provides a critical view of the assumptions made by liberal Humanism, particularly an over reliance on binary thinking and so-called rational scientific control over others. Be that as it may, posthumanism is a heterogeneous field that draws from multiple epistimological and ideological roots − post-colonial, post-anthropocentric, antiracism, and material feminisms (Braidotti et al. 2018). Our interests in this issue lie at the nexus of contemporary technologies and human embodiments.

In an era of advanced postmodernity characterised by technological advancements and increasingly mediatised lifestyles, conventional (Eurocentric) definitions of the human are called into question and “thrown open to contradictory redefinitions of what exactly counts as human” (Braidotti 2006, p. 197). Subsequently, conventional notions of embodiment become destabilised, ruptured even – opening spaces for an engagement broadly, with posthuman identity politics and their often uneasy and contradictory articulations with and within global “techno-cultures” (Fuller 2005).

Donna Haraway (1991, p. 66) in her iconic work, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, indicates that her essay is “an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction” (emphasis in the original text). It is this confusion and responsibility that we sought to locate in this issue of Agenda. Situated within broad frameworks of posthuman subjectivities, our aim is to relish in contemporary confusions of what it means and might come to mean to be human. We looked at the potentials of posthuman and posthuman feminist scholarship and their capacities to revisit and revise contemporary (notions of) humanness in Africa. We considered too, the impacts of narrow definitions of humanness on contemporary living and the potentials of posthuman thinking in challenging the linearity and limitations of historical boundaries and binaries.

Further, we contextualised our curiosities and questions around the usefulness of a posthuman framework in relation to our geographical location – the global South. Ours is a context where posthuman studies have been scrutinised as Eurocentric and bourgeois, often framed as attempts “to reduce the most human problems to comfortable, hollow notions” (Césaire 2000, p. 62). In this context too, posthuman studies are often aligned with “the death of identity” (MacCormack 2012, p. 142), which is often aligned with the “hollow notions” that Césaire refers to in his discourse. We argue here that perhaps “the death of identity” does not necessarily signal a field that is post-political or post-power-politics. Rather, we posit that − and as can be seen in the submissions for this issue − it enables multiple, plural, and often contradictory reflections, refractions and re-definitions around what it means (or might mean) to be human. The posthuman is complex, relational, affective and embodied. It resists and subverts strict categorisation, as posthuman theorist and feminist Rosi Braidotti aptly puts it, by not “being framed by the ineluctable powers of signification, [and] is consequently not condemned to seek adequate representation of its existence within a system that is constitutionally incapable of granting due recognition” (Braidotti 2013, p. 188).

Our contention is that posthuman studies, with its impulses to open up and engage the contradictions of contemporary life and its refusal to buy into historical binary oppositions, offers a space where voices from the global South are able to challenge, trouble, push back and speak back. Beyond that, to reimagine, reinvision and recuperate wounded conceptualisations of humanness. In their collaborative A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities (2018), Cecelia Åsberg and Rosi Braidotti acknowledge posthuman studies within broad frameworks of post-conventional research. Such research, as Åsberg and Braidotti (2018) discern, already exists and thrives outside, and on the fringes of conventional scholarly comfort zones. This is a space that African Feminists and decolonial scholars from the global South have, and continue to occupy.

Betty Govinden’s focus piece titled ‘In search of reciprocity: feminist challenges in Posthumanist thinking – an intellectual meditation’ provides rich points of departure, both personal and political, in its critique of anthropocentrism and humanism/s towards a posthuman theoretical turn. Govinden’s mapping of her own journey within posthuman terrains reminds us of the ways in which we perceive and inhabit the world in the context of dualisms. But also, how the posthuman turn offers us the opportunity to pause and envisage potentials for rediscovery. Drawing from Braidotti’s (2019) strategic alternative discourse that situates human and non-human in a coalescence or convergence, Govinden highlights the potential for posthumanism to drastically reshape our world and our places in it, in a connected and non-binary way. Her call is one for reciprocity that de-centres the human.

Mari Peté’s ‘Thinging Teachers: gleaning nearness in dis/embodied eLearning through poetic inquiry’ is a gentle and lucid provocation situated in techno-feminist discourses, focusing on technologies that affect most aspects of everyday life. Her inquiry, firmly located in the global South, prioritises technological encounters of four women academics from southern Africa. Using Heidegger’s preoccupation with “when the thing things”, Peté weaves a reflection that disrupts cultural stereotypes of women as invisible in technical spheres. “Nearness” and intimacy are central to the reflections provided around the human-tech nexus explored through her personal visceral-virtual world. Likewise, intimacy is the core of Lliane Loots’s conversation with Hannah Ma in this issue titled ‘Who are the mythological and hybrid mermaids in our digital and analogue world of contemporary performance narratives? – a conversation across oceans between two dance makers’. The conversation between two contemporary dance makers opens up a rethinking around contemporary embodiments. Drawing on Foucault’s (2006) idea of the body as the zero point of the world the choreographers open up possibilities to rethink, reimagine and revise embodiments of freedom in our contemporary world. As dance makers and scholars, the two women provide rich insights into shifting notions of embodiment in theory and practice.

In ‘Nasi istocko! Forging contemporary feminist imaginaries of liberation’, Mbali Mazibuku explores through an African feminist lens, the sexuality and sensuality of Black women and potentials for transcending biological materiality through digital life-worlds. Mazibuku hinges her analysis in relation to Patricia Clough’s (2008) exploration of the “New Body” and its transgressive potentials. Locating her analysis with reference to the ‘Vula iGate’ dance challenge that trended on social media platforms, most predominantly on Twitter, in late 2020, Mazibuku opens up potentials for the body to transcend its neurological limitations and increase its affective potential.

Phiwokazi Qoza’s book review of Tanja Bosch’s Social Media and Everyday Life in South Africa, focusses on the conceptualisation of the South African virtual class. It also provides a solid foundation for the use of Bosch’s book for social media research and practice as well as for the potential related studies that it prompts, including research into ethics in a digital age, virtual extensions of patriarchy as well as the signifying of “algorithms of oppression” evident in contemporary mediatised living. ‘Bits of Bytes and Bites of Bits: Instagram and the gendered performance of food production in the South African Indian community’ explores interactions with social media, feminine identity, technology and food. Using a techno-feminist approach, author Vidhya Sana applies posthuman theory to address an interface between technology and human beings in the context of contemporary social media. Sana argues that the Instagram “content creators” who occupy the centre of the paper represent their online/ offline lives through Instagram – thus enabling them to embody a multidimensional space that does not hinge only on human dualisms. She draws links here to Donna Haraway’s seminal ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985/1991) in terms of the creation of digital and algorithmic patterns in common with Haraway’s world of cyborgs.

Viraj Suparsad’s review, ‘Posthuman subjectivities: Bollywood Nollywood film Namaste Wahala and the transnational transferability of post-colonial contemporary urban femininities’, centres storytelling from the global South. Suparsad uses a posthuman lens to enable revised readings and reinterpretations of cultural texts. Through the analysis of contemporary urban femininity in a transnational context, including India and Nigeria, the author makes a compelling case for postfeminist transnationality and its global mobility through class.

Makeresemese Rosy Qhosola and Mahlomaholo Sechaba Mahlomaholo in the article titled ‘Creating sustainable Posthuman Adaptive Learning environments for pregnant teenagers’ provide insights into potentials of Adaptive Learning for vulnerable learners. Working around concepts related to sustainable learning environments and Adaptive Learning as a form of Artificial Intelligence they provide a gendered analysis of the possibilities for social justice, freedom and equality through Adaptive Learning. Adopting a relational perspective that is central to posthuman studies the authors delve into Adaptive Learning in contexts where learners are often excluded on the basis of their race, class and gender.

In ‘Teenage girls and the entanglement with online porn: a new feminist materialist perspective’, authors Deevia Bhana and Shreya Nathwani explore assumptions around the negative effects of Sexually Explicit Material (SEM)/ porn, using new feminist materialist perspectives to challenge binary logics around young girls’ sexuality. Using Barad’s (2007) concept of entanglement the authors situate their analysis as one that centres teenage girls’ interpretations of SEM/ porn, and how their embodied experiences in this context are connected with human and more-than-human forms including print media, online music videos, bodies and body parts, gendered discourses as well as matter, thought, ideas and feelings.

Bibi Burger’s article ‘The nonhuman object in Ama Ata Aidoo’s ‘Nowhere cool’ (1990): A black feminist critique of Object-oriented Ontology’ brings Aidoo’s ‘Nowhere cool’ into dialogue with Graham Harman’s Object-oriented Ontology. Burger argues through her critical analysis of Aidoo’s short story that posthuman ontologies and literary theories should build on insights of black feminism in order not to replicate the reductive inaccuracies that often exclude others from being human.

The review roundtable of Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist, a recently published book edited by Desiree Lewis and Gabeba Baderoon, offers three responses by Peace Kiguwa, Dina Ligaga and Jude Clark. Peace Kiguwa sets off from the personal to critically appreciate the broader engagements and values of feminist work in pursuing an agenda of care. She brings to the fore how various feminist works espouse ethics of care that transcend gender and sexuality boundaries. Albeit these ethics are yet to be fully acknowledged or recognised and Kiguwa situates this within trajectories of erasure. Dina Ligaga picks the conversation up and redirects us to the notions of erasure and invisibility of Black South African feminism within the global black feminist firmament. She also acknowledges and recognises how the book Surfacing (as with this journal) have provided Black (South)African feminists space to recover and revitalise their archive which is all too often treated as non-existent. The roundtable closes with Jude Clark engaging further with the surfacing of Southern African Black feminist thought. Especially how this journey, this surfacing is characterised by notions of love, joy, healing, pleasure, care and community.

Cumulatively, the issue includes a diversity of approaches which draw from the posthuman and feminist materialist discourse and language. Authors also speak to posthumanism’s potential for reproducing new and old forms of othering, exclusion and exploitation of women, the revisioning of techno-feminist and cyberfeminist thought and its relevance for Africa’s narratives of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Articles engage the posthuman subject in an assemblage that includes research, analysis, discourse and narrative in relation to education, girl’s sexuality, performance and dance, the environment, post-colonial writing, food production and its online consumption, popular culture, media and the embeddedness of the techno-sphere in our life-worlds.

While our issue focuses largely on the interface(s) between technology and human embodiments, we emphasise here again that posthuman thinking is not limited to this scope. There is immense potential and multiple avenues to explore in future issues that tackle the vast range of posthuman subjectivities that continue to evolve. We see this as a starting point. One of contestations and potentials for future dialogue and debate in our continued endeavours of trying to make sense of ourselves in the world and the worlds within us.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clare Craighead

CLARE CRAIGHEAD is a lecturer, and current Acting HoD in the Drama and Production Studies Department at The Durban University of Technology. She holds an MA in Drama and Performance Studies from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), and has published in Critical Arts, South African Theatre Journal, South African Dance Journal and Agenda. She is currently reading towards her PhD at UKZN, in Performance Studies with a focus on posthuman subjectivities. As company manager to Flatfoot Dance Company, she has been involved in various dance-related activities and exchanges in KwaZulu-Natal and, with the company’s strong dance-education focus, Craighead has also been involved in various of the company’s schools workshop programmes. She is also facilitator/organiser of the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience’s graduate writing residency programme “JOMBA! KHULUMA” which is an intensive platform that takes graduate students through the rigours of reviewing dance under festival conditions. Email: [email protected]

Princess Sibanda

PRINCESS SIBANDA is an activist, artist and academic. Through a marriage of intellect, activism and art, she fights for social justice with a strong bias towards gender, sexuality, gender fluid identities and an increasing interest in the evolving discussions around the Transhuman being. Currently she is reading for her Doctoral Degree in Drama and Performance at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She holds a Master of Art in Drama and Performance summa cum laude from the same institution and an Honours degree in Theatre Arts from the University of Zimbabwe. Email: [email protected]