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.
Zanele Muholi: Only Half the Picture
A photographer and an activist, Zanele Muholi offers us the chance to journey across our own boundaries - to think differently about blackness, female forms, skins, bodies and sexualities in a way that is unprecedented in South Africa. Her images offer frank and intimate portrayals of black lesbian lives, the scars of hate crimes, the bonds between lovers, the life lines of women living on the margins. Muholi's subjects are never silent or inactive in front of her lens, and never less than complex human beings.
Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation
This paper seeks to think of location from the perspective of belonging to rethink a "politics of location" as a "politics of relation." I draw upon literature from third world and antiracist feminisms and cultural studies in order to ask: what gets left out when the conditions and effects of belonging to a "location" are assumed as a starting point for our theorizing? To map out and interrogate such conditions create new possibilities for theorizing collective subjectivity. And by extension, a politics of relation asks us to interrogate how we may hold ourselves accountable for who we are (becoming, as a function of belonging), and the collective conditions out of which our agency, experience, and consciousness emerge. I propose "differential belonging"—a tactical maneuvering across resistive communities—as a vehicle for feminist subjects to rewrite/reverse processes of interpellation.