Zanele Muholi's Affective Appeal to Act
ABSTRACT This article provides a theoretical framing for Zanele Muholi's visual activism in South Africa. Despite colonial, heteronormative, and patriarchal ideologies that have imaged her community of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex people as invisible citizens of a larger society and hypervisible deviant outsiders of that same collective, Muholi's photographs attempt to shift the conventions of the gaze. Drawing on Ariella Azoulay's photography theory and Jill Bennett's affect theory for art, I argue that Muholi's photographs bring forth an affective appeal to act. Azoulay's notions of “citizenship” and the “civil contract of photography” call on photography's responsibility to act on behalf of those depicted in images of atrocities. Bennett's “empathic vision” describes a relational perception of art, where one is affectively struck by the visual imagery. Reading Azoulay's political, ethical vision and Bennett's embodied methodology for visual culture together, I suggest that Muholi's practice moves her audience to see differently—where seeing the photographed in and of itself becomes an act of political restoration.
Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men, and Ancestral Wives: Female Same-Sex Practices in Africa
This unique book documents same sexuality in East and southern Africa. Eight of the chapters have been co-authored by women activists spanning six different countries. They have collected personal narratives on a range of issues related to sex and secrecy. This is an incredibly difficult area to research as many African leaders declare it taboo on the basis that these practices are alien to African culture and an import from the depraved west. The book demonstrates that there are silenced, traditional, institutionalised ways in which African women contracted same-sex relations. Second, it proclaims the right of African women engaged in same-sex practices or relations to their identities as Africans, as several intervieweesâ state: we, lesbian women, are born here in Africa, we belong here. Who can say we are un-African? Third it gives a vivid portrait of the lives of African women engaged in same-sex relations and practices, portraying the joys of having found love as well as the pains of betrayal and the hatred encountered in their communities, as well as the many shades of emotions in between. This book eloquently testifies that although silence isolates and protects these women, some are beginning to speak out.
The Lay of the Land: English Landscape Themes in Early Modern Painting in England
The Lay of the Land: English Landscape Themes in Early Modern Painting in England