All the things you could be by now if Pinky Pinky wasn’t your Madam: Black gender, Human subjectivity and the terror of solidarity

abstract

The South African legend of Pinky Pinky presents a striking opportunity to think with Hortense J. Spillers’ theorising of incubus in Harriet Jacobs’ Life of a Slave Girl (Brent 1973). These demons of urban legend enable my theoretical intervention on the question of Black gender which breaks with Human gender subjectivity, and which implies that there can be no solidarity between Human women and Black wxmxn. I utilise Spillers’ historical materialist, theoretical and psychoanalytic inspired formulation of Black Flesh to think the structuring relation of the Black wxmxn in modern South Africa’s political ontology in order to consider our emancipation dreams within the confines of the modern Enlightenment's Human and their ontological struggle for difference against a quintessential Other, the Black. This critical intervention concerning feminist solidarity and hindrances to Black intramural unity strives to reframe and constitute afresh the organising sentiment and politics of any ideological outlook which considers itself. That is that Black Feminism has been structurally excommunicated from the community of the Human and its gender-forming terms, which demarcate the domestic spaces wherein gendering processes are possible. I conclude that shared experiences of violence between Humans and Black wxmxn do not preclude the Madam from her Master function as phallic potentiality for the violent sexual gatekeeping required to secure the Human, nor should this be conflated with the ontological violence necessary to produce the Black for the Human. Blackness’ constitutive social death structures the Black wxmxn/slave as always and already coerced under the Human’s political prerogative, under a parasitic relation with no worldly emancipation path.

keywords:

• Pinky Pinky
• Madam
• onticide
• wxmxn
• slavery and social death

Notes

1 Two examples of popularised women’s protests against physical and political violence. SlutWalks represent a more global movement against sexual violence and policing while pussy protests have emerged globally following the first in the United States after the inauguration of Donald Trump as president.

2 The x has been used in redress of the term woman to express a gender expansiveness that disrupts the gender binary ‘womxn’. My use of the x in woman to spell wxmxn here is solely for the purpose of entailing nonbeing. My use and method is not a challenge to its progressive utility in gender and queer studies to reflect the plasticity of gendered identification.

3 I must add that some current modalities of popular culture have strayed from this early theoretical description of the Historical traditional urban legend. Where Pinky Pinky is represented through pink skin and as intersexed in early accounts by Black wxmxn and girls, more recent representations, specifically movies such as Pinky Pinky on Showmax, figure the tormentor as a Black mxn, or artworks such as the conceptual imagery project collaboration of Lutendo Malatji, Thapelo Motsumi and Livhuwani Masindi Muthubi who is the Pinky Pinky model as a Black wxmxn in a pink wig. These representations are counter to the historic myth and experiments I read as curious in light of their representation through Blackness, and I am particularly struck by the ease of this slippage from a white intersexed predator to the readily available stereotype/trope of the sexually insatiable Black amazon/wild Black wxmxn and the rapacious Black penis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Athinangamso Esther Nkopo

ATHINANGAMSO ESTHER NKOPO holds a PhD in African Studies from the University of Cape Town, an MSc in African Studies from Oxford University and a BA Honours in Political Studies and International Relations from the University of the Witwatersrand. She is a contributing co-editor of the book Rhodes Must Fall: The Struggle to Decolonise the Racist Heart of Empire and formed part of the organising membership of Black Wash, the September National Imbizo, Manyano Women, Decolonise Wits, the #FeesMustFall movements at Wits and the #RhodesMustFall movement in Oxford and at the University of Cape Town. She is an international speaker, Curator, BP international University debating champion and intellectual activist and writer. Email: [email protected]