Gender and South African Art - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Gender and South African Art
Zanele Muholi’s Elements
of Survival

Raél Jero Salley

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South African Zanele Muholi’s photographs directly

address resistance and tension between individual
and community. Specifically, Muholi refers to the
lives and loves of people who are black and lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI),
aiming her project toward establishing and pre-
serving “black queer visibility.” In the process, Muholi produces
photographic images that refer to—and critically reconsider—
longstanding visual traditions, while at the same time respond-
ing to acts of violence and dehumanization. The result is an
expanding archive that visualizes various complexities of com-
munity and nation.

One precedent for Muholi’s use of photography in relation to
black community appeared over a century ago. Deborah Wil-
lis (2003) notes that W.E.B. DuBois, then a sociology professor
at Atlanta University, had a fascination with photography. For
DuBois, photography played a critical role in reconstructing and
shaping American visual culture at the turn of the 20th century.
When assembling materials for the “American Negro” exhibit
at the 1900 Paris Exposition, DuBois turned to black photogra-
phers to mount challenges to blatantly racist and stereotypical
images that pictured people of color as inferior, unattractive, E
unintelligent. Collected several years prior to DuBois’s famous
postulation of black racial identity as “double consciousness,” the
photographs displayed in Paris were meant to serve as an archive
of visual evidence that would prove black people were as multi-
faceted as everyone else.

Unlike other exoticized collections and displays of the time,
DuBois’s archive of images expresses possibility through visual
self-presentation. Black photographers and their black subjects
defined themselves and their beauty through photography, believ-
ing it was a significant step in the fight against violently negative

imagery (Harris 2003). In a time when the deliberate distortion
of black images in popular culture was common, DuBois’s archive
offered a different view of the global black subject against a socio-
political backdrop that made violent efforts to classify and control.
Dubois’s exhibit ran counter to popular de-humanizing displays
by visualizing black folk as an inextricable part of the fabric of
society; it was a successful effort to overturn many common ideas
about black life (Willis 2003:52). These photographs of a diverse
range of black people played a role in shaping ideas about iden-
tity and a sense of self. Dubois’s collection of images motivated
black folks, but they also informed the broader American social
consciousness. Beyond racial concerns, black photographers were
interested in locating and reproducing the beauty and fragility of
people close to them, the humor of everyday life, and the dreams
of a people (Enwezor 2006, Firstenberg 2001). The visualization
of educated, working, and dreaming black people formed a visual
archive that documented a diverse nation of dignified, proud, suc-
cessful, and beautiful humans.

The pictures were radical because, through them, the African
American community was presented as a group of spiritually,
socially, and economically diverse individuals. The insistence on
defining one’s own identity and beauty is what Willis has termed
“subversive resistance.” Subversive resistance is a metaphor
for strategies that produce visual images to counter dominant
meanings or stereotypes (Willis 2003). It operates by offering
alternative views, and its force often comes through nuanced
presentation of one’s self and community. Contemporary photo-
graphs may also enable the viewer to imagine how people con-
nect with, and belong to, their communities and nations.

I use DuBois’s show as a point of departure for this essay on
South African artist Zanele Muholi because in the course of my
research I happened upon a reproduction of a striking archi-

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val photograph from DuBois’ exhibit—an African American
woman, half-length portrait, facing slightly right. The composi-
zione, subject matter, and context of that untitled portrait from
1900 (Fig. 1) gave me a way of thinking about Muholi’s recent
photographic forms—looking at the composition and con-
text of that century-old photograph made me look differently
at Zukiswa (Fig. 2), one of Muholi’s black-and-white portraits
made in 2010. Zukiswa is a head-and-shoulders portrait of a
young, black African woman against a black backdrop. Zukiswa’s
contemporaneity is evident from short, curly, bleached locks and
collared sportcoat. In her three-quarters stance, she gazes back
at the viewer with an expression of confidence, intention, E
determination. I am struck by the way the portrait from DuBois’s
American archive successfully subverted dominant paradigms
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by visualiz-
ing people in ways that destroyed dominant framings. I am also
impressed by how “looking again” may add conceptual complex-
ity to that narrative. I see both impulses in Muholi’s work of self-
definition by means of an archive of photographic images.

Zanele Muholi describes herself as a “visual-activist.”1 Born in
Umlazi, Durban in 1972, she completed an Advanced Photogra-
phy course at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown and held
her first solo exhibit at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2004.
Muholi cofounded and worked as a community relations officer
for the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW), a black
lesbian organization based in Gauteng, and as a photographer
and reporter for Behind the Mask, an online magazine on lesbian
and gay issues in Africa. Muholi explains her artistic approach
is “a journey to ensure there is black queer visibility [because]
it is important to mark, map, and preserve our mo(ve)menti

1 African American woman, half-length portrait,
facing slightly right; African American Photographs
Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition, Prints & Pho-
tographs Division
Photo: CourtEsy LibrAry of CongrEss, LC-usZ62-124631

2 Zanele Muholi
Zukiswa (2010)
silver gelatin print; 86.5 cm x 60.5 cm
Photo: CourtEsy thE Artist

through visual histories for reference and posterity so that future
generations will note that we were here” (Muholi 2012, Sullivan
2003). Muholi’s intent is to leave a history that is tangible to the
people of the future. She observes that black lesbian women are
part of bigger sociopolitical structures, but in the specific context
of South Africa, the open portrayal of black women displaying
same-sex practices has been met with controversy and dismissal
from top government officials. Muholi’s work provides a per-
sonal take on these issues (Fig. 3). Her approach is “to try and
capture that reality without looking too much to the negative,
without entertaining that violence, without letting the perpetra-
tor know that we are [IL] losers [in this scenario]" (Muholi in
Garb 2011:287). For Muholi, visual material helps people become
aware of and begin to understand the complexity of a commu-
nity.2 Her photographic portraits record and show the aesthetics
of a small nation of people.

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(this page)
3 Zanele Muholi
Zanele (Self portrait) (2010)
silver gelatin print; 86.5 cm x 60.5 cm
Photo: CourtEsy thE Artist

(opposite)
4 Zanele Muholi
Betesta Mogale (2010)
silver gelatin print; 86.5 cm x 60.5 cm
Photo: CourtEsy thE Artist

5 Zanele Muholi
Ziyanda (2010)
silver gelatin print; 86.5 cm x 60.5 cm
Photo: CourtEsy thE Artist

Muholi’s pictures have been described as sensuous and tac-
tile, and critics have noted the artworks offer new understand-
ings of beauty and subjectivity. Muholi’s photographs, writes
Okwui Enwezor, “often capture the subtle tensions in bodies
at rest; at other times her subjects appear proud, directly con-
front the camera’s gaze, and are gathered into poses redolent
of earlier portraiture” (2006:376). Muholi’s efforts to image the
existence, resistance, and struggles of LGBTI groups in South
Africa exhibit these tensions. The way in which the tensions play
through the images and the means by which they appear is what
animates this analysis. But the production of a visual archive that
collects, assembles, and displays diverse black lesbian women is
only part of Muholi’s interest.

I identify in Muholi’s work subversive resistance, a useful meta-
phor for thinking about this expanding visual archive. I suggest
the artworks display a dynamic process of archive production—
one that visually documents the challenges of black LGBTIs in
South Africa, while being equally concerned with locating and
reproducing the beauty and fragility of a community, the constit-
uent’s experience of everyday life, and the dreams of a developing
nation (Foster 1996). The “visual activism” of Muholi’s images
outlines twin impulses of negotiation: a desire for assimilation
into mainstream society and internal diversification within
LGBTI communities. There is a conflicting relationship between
the impulses of assimilation and diversification—assimilation
can mute identity, while identity often requires difference (Gha-
ziani 2011). A conceptual framework based on conflict seems to
offer an irreconcilable oscillation between sameness and differ-
ence, but as a “visual activist,” Muholi tends not to be exclusively
oppositional in how she constructs collective identity. Invece,
she makes strategic selections about emphasizing either the “cel-
ebration” or “suppression” of black LGBTI distinctiveness vis-à-
vis mainstream audiences (Bernstein in Ghaziani 2011:100).

Critics have noted that Muholi’s work is thereby able to pro-
duce compelling political meanings and also be aesthetically pro-
vocative (Gqola 2006, Enwezor 2006, Garb 2011). But the means
by which those meanings and provocations occur have rarely
been articulated as part of a strategic theoretical framework. IO
hope to show that Muholi’s use of subversive resistance is part
of a strategy that requires neither obsessive victimization nor

60 | african arts Winter 2012 vol. 45, no.4

iconic rebellion in order to expose and neutralize a dominant
way of seeing. Invece, Muholi’s images reveal ways in which one
might use visual means to assert an inclusive logic of belonging.
Muholi’s creative endeavors tell stories about how people con-
nect with, and belong to, their communities and nations. I was
drawn to Muholi’s artworks because of the sense of belonging
they evoke. Historical, sociopolitical, and cultural conditions in
South Africa have conspired to alienate the women pictured in
Muholi’s photographic images, and while these conditions are
essential to Muholi’s imagery, I have become fascinated by the
way Muholi’s series reveal a dynamic process of visualizing yet-
to-be fulfilled possibilities in human relations. The images work
in ways that are as nuanced and varied as the many individuals
that appear in the photographs.

The signature of Muholi’s work is to specify ways of seeing.
She observes that of the publications that chronicled South Afri-
ca’s sociopolitical history, few have included LGBTI people who
contributed to the struggles for freedom and democracy. Che cosa
is more, before 1994, black lesbian voices were excluded from
the making of a formal queer movement (Muholi 2012). IL
mainstream archive and the women’s canon thereby lack visual,
oral, and textual materials that include black lesbians. Paradoxi-
cally, black women’s bodies, black lesbian women’s bodies, are
hypervisible as they appear in popular visual culture—as man-
ifestations of the undesirable. Regimes of visibility (whiteness,

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patriarchy, heteronormativity) react to the undesirable visibil-
ity of black lesbians in the form of “curative” rapes, expulsions
from families, and murderous attacks on black lesbians. Conse-
quently, black lesbians are targets of brutal oppression in South
African townships and surrounding areas. Pumla Dineo Gqola
recognizes Muholi’s endeavor is thereby less about making black
lesbians visible and more about engaging with those regimes
that have used black lesbian’s hypervisibility as a way to violate
them (Gqola in Muholi 2006:84). Muholi’s visualization of black
LGBTI people as a group of spiritually, socially, and economi-
cally diverse individuals is an effort to resist violence. Violent
acts of attack, rape, and murder against black lesbian women
occur in high volume in South Africa today (Rowe 2005, Moffett
2006). Muholi notes black lesbians require spaces of refuge from
the rise of violent homophobia in Africa. Such spaces of refuge
depend on access to education, funds, and resources, but also
access to a sense of belonging and citizenship.

In an effort to produce this space of refuge at home, she aims
to “project real lives and also present how people look at them-
selves differently.” Photographs by Muholi evidence these spatial
negotiations—at once, they revision archives, challenge expec-
tations about black lesbian women, and review a supposedly
familiar visual reality.

This essay takes three of Muholi’s recent photographic proj-
ects as case studies: Faces and Phases (begun in 2006 and ongo-

ing), Difficult Love (2010), and Isilumo Siyaluma (2011). In form,
each project responds to dominant modes of South African pho-
tographic representation, including ethnographic, portrait and
documentary imagery (Garb 2011, Hayes 2007, Richards 2008).
While other of Muholi’s series may have also fit this discussion, Esso
seems to me these three are formally distinct, yet clearly relate to
each other because of how they critically reformulate the aims of
the representational modes through which they appear.

I begin with a sample of black and white photographic por-
traits from the series Faces and Phases. These lesbian women
from her own community are made visible through portrai-
ture directly engaging with a history of colonial, taxonomic,
and contemporary visual culture. They thereby address racial-
ized discourses of difference that offer generalized representa-
tions of what are thought to be typical characteristics, for despite
similarities in pose, no two figures look the same. I then turn
to Muholi’s film Difficult Love. Produced in response to violent
hate crime, the film is a documentary work intended to stand as
a record of a declining community under violent attack because
its existence is perceived as a threat to mainstream South Afri-
can society. Subversive resistance is evident here too, though the
techniques employed herein foreground Muholi’s personal rela-
tionship to the participants she pictures. Difficult Love positions
Muholi as narrator, the one who actually looks, chooses, edits,
and creates stories as an insider of the community. I next elabo-

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rate on subversive resistance in Isilumo Siyaluma. In this proj-
ect involving installation artwork and community engagement,
menstrual blood is used as both medium and subject matter.
Digitally constructed photographic prints stage a critical devi-
ation through motifs about what constitutes acceptable female
sexuality, but also work to normalize a view of black lesbians as
mainstream women.

Portraiture in Faces and Phases
The black-and-white portraits comprising Muholi’s Faces and
Phases series are marked as art objects by their sharp focus and
fine tonal range (Figs. 3–5).3 Each silver gelatin print (86.5 cm x
60.5 cm) is produced in an edition of eight, plus two artist’s proofs.
When exhibited, they are matted, framed, and displayed in long
lines or grids (Fig. 6). The images offer the appearance, pose, dress,
and gaze of historical portraiture as a background. Per esempio,
Ziyanda (2010; Fig. 5) shows Ziyanda standing in front of a wall,
head tilted, Mohawk hairstyle prominent. The dark-skinned per-
son in this photograph meets the viewer’s gaze while standing in
an open, frontal pose. The arrangement allows her to proudly dis-
play her black T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Poker” and a sil-
houette of a figure in white that appears in a graphic style popular
in truck mud-flaps. The graphic form makes a triangle as it bends

62 | african arts Winter 2012 vol. 45, no.4

6 Zanele Muholi
Faces and Phases (2010)
installation view
Photo: CourtEsy thE Artist

forward, legs spread, hair falling, and reaching to touch high-
heeled toes. The backdrop is plain, diffuse, with little recession.
Overall, the composition focuses attention on the young person
at center, her facial expression, the image on the shirt she wears.
This picture seems to adhere to conventions of the portrait mode:
it conveys some information about the subject through details of
dress or styling, the body expression may communicate some-
thing about Ziyanda’s emotional state at the moment of shooting,
and the picture brings together processes of selection and narra-
tive conventions to weave a story. But a key feature of this image
is the way in which it allows its viewer to reconsider any unearned
sense of familiarity with the person viewed. We have limited infor-
mation about Ziyanda from this image, which opens space for
fantasy—the interpretive space necessary for reimagining humans
previously defined and fixed by representational spaces of race,
genere, or sexuality.

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(counterclockwise from top left)
7 Duggin-Cronin shangaan n.d.
iMAgE CourtEsy thE CEntEr for CurA ting thE ArChivE,

uCt AnD robbiE hArt, thE MCgrEgor MusEuM, KiMbErLEy

8 santu Mofokeng (B. 1956)
Mosuets and Maria Letisipa with their daughter,
Minkie Letsipa
silver bromide print, photographer: scholtz studio,
Lindley. orage river Colony c.1900s
from The Black Photo Album/Look at Me: 1890–1950,
black and white slide projection, installation edition 5
iMAgE CourtEsy LunEtt A bArtZ, MAKEr, JohAnnEsburg;

9 Zanele Muholi
Skipper Mogape (2010)
silver gelatin print; 86.5 cm x 60.5 cm
Photo: CourtEsy thE Artist

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vol. 45, NO. 4 Inverno 2012 african arts | 63

10 scene from Difficult Love: Virginity Testers.
Zanele Muholi and Peter goldsmid Difficult Love
(2010), south Africa/DvD 47:33 min./sound/color.

11 scene from Difficult Love: Petra and Pra-line.
Zanele Muholi and Peter goldsmid Difficult Love
(2010), south Africa/DvD 47:33 min./sound/color.

In writing about representational modes in South African
photography, Tamar Garb underscores a negotiation of past and
present in the work of contemporary artists. The massive archive
of South African imagery offers time-bound traditions of depic-
zione, and the sociohistorical circumstances in which photog-
raphy appears in Africa are inherited from complex systems of
colonialism and postcolonialism. In its earliest forms, photog-
raphy in South Africa depicted people in terms of three domi-
nant categories of representation—ethnography, portraiture, E
documentary—each with its own institutional and cultural asso-
ciations. Consequently, in early examples from South Africa’s
vexed and controversial visual archive, it is through anthropo-
logical and ethnographic frameworks that people appear. Contro-
temporary photographers invoke, refuse, or embrace traditions
of depiction “in order to position themselves in relation to the
ever-pressing exigencies of the present” (Garb 2011:11; see also
Auslander 2005, Mugnaio 2005, Richards 2011, Van der Watt 2005).
Muholi confronts the legacy of the camera’s gaze and responds to
the frameworks constructed by apartheid’s rule of law and racial
essentialism (Fig. 6).

The work of South African photographer Santu Mofokeng
offers a precedent for confronting a legacy of photographic por-
traiture. Mofokeng’s project The Black Photo Album/Look at
Me: 1890–1950 (2000) mines an archive from the early to mid-
dle twentieth century. The images are drawn from a vast body
of photographs produced by Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin,
who assembled ethnographic-style pictures of idealized types
(Fig. 7).4 Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album offers a collection
of family photographs that the artist sourced, copied, scanned,
retouched, and presented as an alternative to Duggan-Cronin’s
archive. In ways similar to DuBois’s exhibit nearly a century
earlier, Mofokeng’s counter-archive is populated with modern
and urban black people in the Victorian conventions of posture,
dress, maniera, and costume. Mofokeng’s found portraits had
been overlooked and unseen for decades (Fig. 8). They convey
a sense of black pride and agency in an era when the archival
purpose was to order information according to typological grids
and tenets of social Darwinism (Enwezor 2010). The historical
specificity of Mofokeng’s project, Okwui Enwezor observes, È
crucial for understanding how the emergence of photography is
entwined with a dehumanizing colonial enterprise. During this
period, the archives produced by the South African state were

64 | african arts Winter 2012 vol. 45, no.4

mobilized as instruments of power over black Africans, based on
pseudoscientific race theories. In contrasto, Mofokeng’s archive
visualizes a different history of the era by bringing to light a
group of portrait subjects who commissioned and posed for
their own photographs. Mofokeng’s images emerge from the pri-
vate realm to form a community of people linked by an ongoing
history of oppression.

The South African visual archive exhibits a legacy of race
thinking, but Muholi also sets her sights on other points of
marginality, including queerness. “Queer” has sometimes been
defined as transgressive difference from what are perceived
as heterosexist norms. It has also been taken to encompass a
range of desires, experiences, and identities, including those
of black lesbians.5 Muholi identifies as a black lesbian woman,
but her endeavor pictures constituents of the LBGTI commu-
nity broadly. She refers to black queers, and black lesbians espe-
cially but not exclusively, and refers explicitly to African lesbians,
transmen, women, and females. Muholi’s ongoing series of por-
traits offer information and evidence of ways of life. Most images
appear to be young black people of African descent, healthy,
clothed in everyday attire. The individuals look squarely into the
camera lens with unwavering and certain gazes, a feature that
results from their active involvement in the project, including
their choice of how to be photographed.

The photographs originate in specific human relationships
within her geographical locale, and Muholi pictures herself—both
literally and metaphorically—through her interactions with each
modello (Figs. 4–5). She maintains relationships with her collabora-
tors in, outside of, and beyond the production of the photograph.
Muholi explains the importance of having understanding of peo-
ple and dynamics within a community she is photographing:

It’s very important to know the people that I photograph. In the work
that I do, I go and travel to different spaces, and I just freeze when I
come across a community that I don’t know. So it means I’m delayed
for a week or two weeks just trying to understand who these people are
before I take photographs of them, because then it makes life easier.6

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12 Zanele Muholi
Isilumo siyaluma (2006–2011)
installation detail, blank Projects, Cape town 2011
Photo: rAéL JEro sALLEy

13 Zanele Muholi
Isilumo siyaluma (2006–2011)
Wallpaper installation view, blank Projects, Cape
town 2011
Photo: rAéL JEro sALLEy

I believe Muholi’s insistence on developing relationships human-
izes the photographic encounter. Because her visual selection is
informed by personal contact, she is able to tell people’s stories
in an intimate way.

While the works comprising Faces and Phases may be appre-
hended in terms of the values and traditions of portraiture, Essi
are also part of Muholi’s developing archive of black lesbian exis-
tence. This archive is not constituted in an attempt to assimi-
late individuals to normative social values or traditions. Piuttosto,
Faces and Phases envisions black lesbians involved in struggles
for equality and against established traditions. In this sense
parallels may be drawn with DuBois’s and Mofokeng’s visual
archives of black people, images that have served as one of the
primary modes through which fights for social equality come to
be understood (Willis 2003).

In fights for social equality, photographs are mobilized in
battles over visual representation and ideology. In the process,
singular images are selected to represent a multitude of pic-
tures—they become iconic pictures of struggle. The term icon
refers to an image, representation, symbol, someone or some-
thing famous. Charles Sanders Peirce defined the icon within
semiotics as a diagrammatic sign that exhibits a similarity or
analogy to the subject of discourse, while more recently cul-
tural theorists have used the term more broadly to refer to “an
Immagine (or person) that refers to something beyond its individual
components, something (or someone) that acquires symbolic
significance” (Fleetwood 2011:33). Icons are often perceived to
represent universal concepts, emozioni, and meanings. A pho-
tographic icon may become a form of public art that generates
civic performance, the crucial function of which is to call forth a

notion of the public and collective affect. (Lucates and Hariman
quoted in Fleetwood 2011:33–34). Iconicity, as Nicole Fleetwood
uses it, borrows from both definitions, “an analogic or relational
sign that produces affective responses in audiences by ‘sticking’
the thing or person signified to normative codes, meaning and
value” (Fleetwood 2011:33–34). In an analysis of black visual cul-
ture, Nicole Fleetwood observes iconic images may be incorpo-
rated into the social imaginary as evidence of overcoming social
and political injustice. Such narratives of inclusivity serve active
political agendas meant to manage legacies of race, genere, E
sexuality based subjugation as they operate in the present.7 The
danger is that, in the process, both the power of multiplicity and
the force of particularity may be neutralized for easy incorpora-
tion into an existing social imaginary. The images in Faces and
Phases resist assimilation by means of non-iconicity.

The portraits in Faces and Phases render their subject in inten-
tionally non-iconic modes. Muholi’s artworks mobilize against
iconicity because if any singular image in Faces and Phases were
to be appropriated as a definitive representation of black lesbian
existence, the project would be misunderstood as a typology
of black lesbian sexuality. In response, Muholi favors local col-
laborators and everyday scenes, an emphasis that allows alterna-
tive modes for visual engagement. Such visual alternatives are
less bound by normative values or regimes of looking (Mirzoeff
2011:473–96). Muholi’s descriptive images are not aimed at pro-
ducing a fixed or conventional type, but rather a sense and view
of a multitude (Smith 2011:67). Just as Mofokeng’s images are far
removed from a compendium of idealized exotic types, Faces
and Phases resists the iconization of black lesbians, and thereby
resists political endeavors that name, tame and classify.

The archival nature of the series does not suppress the individ-
ual specificity of human beings. Per esempio, Betesta identifies as
a transgender person and thereby exists outside a fixed, defined
sexual or gender identity. As such, Muholi describes Betesta’s
experience as one of societal isolation and continual process of
“coming out.” Likewise, the challenge of transgender existence
for Skipper (Fig. 9) goes beyond subjecting one’s body to surgical
adjustments and extends to teaching the viewer—indeed forcing
upon the viewer—an uneasy change or reinvention of concep-
tual syntax (Blessing 1997, Cottingham 1996, Wilson 1997:148).

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(this page)
14 Zanele Muholi
Isilumo siyaluma (2006–2011)
installation view, blank Projects, Cape town 2011
Photo: rAéL JEro sALLEy

(opposite)
15 Zanele Muholi
Masks from Isilumo siyaluma (2006–2011)
Digital ink-Jet print; 90 cm x 60 cm
Photo: CourtEsy thE Artist

Skipper’s inclusion in Faces and Phases contributes to the archive
without over-determining his/her personhood through photo-
graphic iconicity. Through the portrait, the photograph displays
local, everyday, lived experience, and in so doing, it questions
the possibility of a stable classificatory system for sex or gender
identity. These self-presentations use subversive resistance to
articulate beauty, but also tell stories of community that would,
otherwise, be unimaginable.

diFFicult love
Faces and Phases offers portraits that challenge the exclusion
of a people denied of free expression. Difficult Love (Zanele
Muholi and Peter Goldsmid 2010) uses autobiography and the
documentary form to show not only violence but also resilience.
The individuals in Muholi’s artworks are the targets of unre-
lenting murders and “curative rapes” in South Africa. Sondaggi
of violence against women in South Africa show higher lev-
els of rape of women and children than any other country in
the world not at war or embroiled in civil conflict. The statis-
tics are staggering: at least one in three women will be raped
in her lifetime; one in four will be beaten by her domestic
partner (Moffett 2006:129–63). Since 2001, thirty-one lesbians
have been reported dead, victims of targeted attacks (Fihlani
2011). In 2007 Salome Masooa and Sizakele Sigasa were raped
and killed in Soweto; In 2008 Eudy Simelane was gang-raped,
stabbed, and murdered in KwaThema, near Johannesburg; In
2010 Millicent Gaika was strangled, tortured, and raped by a
man who told her he wanted to “turn her into a woman.” In
Cape Town alone, more than ten lesbians per week are raped
or gang-raped but many of the cases are not reported because
victims are afraid of police ridicule, repeat offenses, or public
censure. As a consequence, many lesbians just suffer in silence
(Fihlani 2011, Sanger 2011). Muholi’s subversive resistance cri-
tiques and works to transform this present reality.

Directed by Muholi and Peter Goldsmid, Difficult Love uses
a documentary mode to present the reality of violence, E
directly links Muholi’s autobiography to her visual activism and
art making. This is another mode of envisioning, recording, E
preserving black lesbian history, lives, and realities. The film
responds to the violence of heteronormative culture from Muho-
li’s personal viewpoint and experience.8 Muholi explains:

The project is about me, the community that I’m part of. I was born
in the township: I grew up in that space … you have to be made to
become a straight woman and work according to the heteronorma-
tive culture that is there. If you refuse, and say, “I am not what you
think I am,” you are more likely to experience “curative” rape, where a
woman is raped in order for her to be changed and put in her place.9

The realities of gender-based violence in South Africa are the
flash points for Muholi’s work. But the visual projects have
impact beyond discourses on violence. The images illuminate a
wide range of lived human experience, because their subversive
strategies provoke visual relationships that may reconfigure how
one sees being-black, being-queer, as well as how one under-
stands gender identities.

Early in the film, the artist documents an encounter in a town-
ship, on the street. Muholi is showing her artwork to a group of
female virginity testers. After viewing images of women loving
women, one of the group responds:

I would never allow my child to take such photographs. You see
something like this gives a bad picture, to us as virginity testers and
black people. Our image has been dented by this thing. This whole
thing is for whites, because it causes people to become gay.

This encounter uncovers the active rendering of blackness and
sexuality through cultural and social conventions (Fig. 10). IL
viewer is offered a reaction to nonnormative gender and sexuali-
ties. The interviewee explicitly links her occupation as a virginity

66 | african arts Winter 2012 vol. 45, no.4

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tester in South Africa to her views on homosexuality, blackness,
and white supremacy. The interviewee’s concern is with what
she calls “our” image as black Africans and a perceived danger
to blackness that comes from same-sex relations. The practice
of virginity testing made a comeback in South Africa in the late
1990S, after the democratic elections of 1994 (Leclerc-Madlala
2003, Vincent 2006). The resurgence coincided with the period
when the HIV/AIDS pandemic began to take hold and, as Vin-
cent (2006) points out, the testing was consequently defended
as a “culturally appropriate” strategy for managing the disease.
As the interviewee suggests, the practice maintains sociocul-
tural divisions and transcribes them onto physical bodies. In
this example, blackness is indirectly framed as the repository of
“white” Western cultural fears and desires.

Muholi’s photographs catalyze a complex range of reactions
because they push the viewer to contemplate the meanings and rela-
tionships between blackness, sexuality, and power (Cooper 1996,
Cohen 2005, Sobopha 2011). In the film, Muholi speaks further
about her life, explaining her experience of heteronormative space:

When I came out, I did not see, or did not have access to images that
spoke to me because the spaces in which we come they are infested
by heterosexist mindsets. And there is too much heterosexualism in
place. We grew up in those spaces, in traditional nuclear families,
[che è] the first image you see in magazines.

Muholi describes the South African space of imagination as cir-
cumscribed by dominant norms of the traditional nuclear fam-
ily and its imaging in popular culture. She points to these cultural
conventions as the deficits that animate violent homophobia, E
personally works as a witness to and vocalist against the violence.
Difficult Love does not elect representative figures for black
lesbian woman. Invece, the film probes the means by which
limiting categories shape possibilities in everyday life. Muho-
li’s observation that negotiating a space of refuge depends on
access—to education, funds, and resources—resonates here. In
Difficult Love, Petra and Praline appear in Mowbray, Cape Town,
in an informal shelter, under a bridge (Fig. 11). The pair made the
bridge their home after being ejected from a homeless shelter for
identifying as lesbian. Praline recounts:

At fourteen years I was a tomboy. I played games. Five months later
I found I had feelings for women. I actually struggled against that, IO
couldn’t believe I was attracted to the same sex. I didn’t talk to anyone
about it, I tried to hide it, but I couldn’t hold it in for too long. Six
months later I came out.

Rather than “package alterity,” Difficult Love confronts het-
eronormativity by focusing on the human love in this couple’s
everyday life—they are filmed telling stories, singing together,
and embracing. This is a mode of social portraiture that reveals
injustice, but also documents lived experience.

By documenting her own lesbian experience in relation to the
social spaces of South Africa, Muholi mobilizes autobiography
and social documentary modes for subversive resistance. Al
same time, she imagines less desperate situations for herself and
others. The interlocutors who appear in Difficult Love are visu-
alized exhibiting the human qualities of intimacy, tenderness,
respect, and love.

isilumo siyaluma
Through visual projects Muholi attempts to cope with the pain
and loss she hears and feels as she bears witness to human suf-
fering. Faces and Phases forms community and offers beauty by
means of noniconicity. Difficult Love resists by shifting spaces of
heteronormativity while proposing new horizons of possibility.
Isilumo Siyaluma (2011) deviates from what constitutes accept-
able female sexuality in mainstream South Africa. As it appeared
in Cape Town in 2011, this project involved digital photographic
prints, installation artwork, and community engagement.

Isilumo Siyaluma’s installation is anchored by a newspa-
per headline and article from April 2011. The headline reads:
“Another ‘Lesbian’ Raped and Murdered.” The report chron-
icles Noxolo Nogwaza, who was found lying in an alley in the
Kwa-Thema Township (Fig. 12). Nogwaza’s violated body was
deformed beyond recognition: eyes out of sockets, brain split,
teeth scattered, beer bottle and used condom lodged in her geni-
tals, and the brick used as a weapon next to her body. Alongside
the news article is a poem, accompanied by two medium format
abstract motifs on paper. The adjoining wall is plastered from
floor to ceiling with digitally printed, patterned wallpaper tiles
(Fig. 13). Each square has rows of a repeating, circular pattern,
and each row offers three rows of four designs. The designs are
dark, brown-red in color and repeat on a white background (Fig.
14). From a distance, the designs may be taken as circular drips,
dotted cross the surface. On a third wall hang three prints, bright
red forms emanate from a central axis in complexly layered pat-
terns in these digitally rendered, kaleidoscopic images (Fig. 15).

Throughout Isilumo Siyaluma, menstrual blood is used as
medium and subject matter. It is Muholi’s own, photographed
and digitally manipulated. Isilumo Siyaluma is a Zulu expres-
sion can be loosely translated as “period pains/periods pain.”

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The phrase has an added element of secrecy—there is something
secretive in and about this blood and temporal period. The artist
explains the blood symbolizes the physical and spiritual blood
that was shed from the bodies of survivors and victims, but it
is combined with symbols of strength and bravery. In the kalei-
doscopic images, menstrual blood appears in a stylized manner.
Muholi describes each pattern piece as representative of an act of
violence against women, a rape survivor or the victim of a hate
crime. She explains her purpose is to express the pain and loss
she feels as she witnesses the pain of “curative rapes” carried out
on girls and women in her community. Some of the complex
shapes refer to floral arrangements or animals. Others refer to
masks, masking, and shields—objects and symbols that feature
as elements in traditional Zulu culture.

It is not the first time Muholi uses blood, menstrual blood in
particular, as a central motif. Menstruation is “registered closely
and fully” in the photographic series and exhibition Period
(2006), which includes photographic images of menstrual blood
on a pad, in a bath, and a soiled pad on a plate (Ngcobo 2006,
Baderoon 2011). In tackling the taboo of menstruation, Muholi
forces a confrontation with the limited perimeters of what con-
stitutes acceptable female sexuality (Smith in Muholi 2011:67).
Isilumo Siyaluma extends Muholi’s engagement with menstru-
ation by questioning the ways in which menstruation is repre-
sented and articulated in the public realm.

On November 4, 2011 in Cape Town, Muholi gathered a group
of women for a discussion on the topic. The conversation cen-
tered on South African society, violence against women, IL
exhibition, and periods/pain. The gathering included women of
various ages and positions in society and afforded an opportu-
nity for each woman to relate her own relationship with blood,
menstruation, fears or survivals of sexual assault, and the func-
tions of “female bodied beings” (Muholi 2010:287). For many of
the women present, it was the first opportunity to speak openly
about these issues.

In Isilumo Siyaluma blood becomes the social representative
of violence and taboo. The viewer becomes active in completing
the work by responding to the blood as medium. This may be the
point—if the response appears in a public exchange of disgust
toward the person or thing which deviates from acceptable social
behavior, it makes apparent, negatively, the normativity of vio-
lent masculinity. The images evoke conflicting reactions, includ-
ing pleasure and applause, fear and violence, and thereby become
vehicles for making looking reflexive (Mitchell 2009, Scott 2010).
The kaleidoscopes of Isilumo Siyaluma provide an analogous
way of glimpsing the right to subjectivity denied by violence. Isi-
lumo Siyaluma endeavors to “articulate ways in which the visual
can be used as a ‘site of resistance’ by producing moments of intro-
spection and the capacity to look at one’s own thoughts, feelings
and mental condition” (Muholi 2011:45). Introspective thought
yields knowledge of one’s own current mental states, and more

than one type of process fits this activity. When a viewer peers
into a kaleidoscope, that observer has a type of privileged perspec-
tive on the shapes and colors it presents (Schwitzgebel 2010). IL
kaleidoscopic form suggests certain aspects of mental life are dif-
ferent for each individual. The images therefore suggest deviant,
introspective space, through which the artists ponders her own
mental states and the viewer observes the normative framework
that marginalizes Muholi and her interlocutors.

The kaleidoscope of realities to which Muholi refers is framed
in ways that are public and private, punishing and reassuring,
physical and violent. It is as if Isilumo Siyaluma functions to offer
the information in stages—there is immediate sensory attraction
to complex design, kaleidoscopic pattern, recognition and reac-
tion to the medium, which gives way to a deeper “privilege” of
sharing the artist’s detection process. Isilumo Siyaluma counters
a world in which gender is a univocal signifier, making images
and situations generate spaces in which gender constitution is
destabilized and depolarized, where self-analysis is connected
and communicated with fluency.

ConClusion
In this essay, I have tried to point to Muholi’s use of subver-
sive resistance as both a theoretical and practical strategy. Piuttosto
than excessive visibility or obsessive victimization, Muholi re-
visions the quotidian from her personal perspective as a citizen
of South Africa. The artist is determined to demystify the vio-
lence against black lesbians and shift it to the center of social
life. Gabeba Baderoon rightly characterizes this violence as an
“attack on ordinariness that matters to everyone,” because it
exposes and neutralizes the power in dominant ways of seeing
(Baderoon 2011). Instead of capturing that reality by focusing
on the negative or submitting to it, Muholi uses pleasure and
beauty to script a sense of belonging. This inclusiveness extends
beyond her social circle. As is evident in the works discussed
above, Muholi’s developing visual archive negotiates the past in
the present by invoking, refusing and/or embracing traditions of
depiction. The artworks also critically engage the institutional
and cultural associations attached to dominant modes of rep-
resentation. Muholi’s endeavor thereby embraces conflicts that
pervade human history, tradition and everyday lived experience.
In sum, the artworks provide ways of reimagining human exis-
tence and enable their viewer to imagine how people connect
con, and belong to, their own communities and nations.

Raél Jero Salley is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art and Discourse at the Uni-
versity of Cape Town in South Africa. His research interest and writing is
in modern and contemporary visual practices related to blackness, Africa,
and African Diaspora. He is director of “the names we give: Arte, Culture
and Society,” an interdisciplinary forum for public workshops, scholarly
symposia and publications, creative performances and events. Rael.sal-
ley@uct.ac.za

Notes

I am grateful to the Emerging Researcher Program at
the University of Cape Town and the National Research
Foundation, South Africa for sponsoring research towards
Questo articolo, to Zanele Muholi and her collaborators for
assisting me in my research and providing photographs,

the Center for Curating the Archive at UCT, Santu Mofo-
keng and Lunetta Bartz, The McGregor Museum, the Arts
Council of the African Studies Association, and a special
thanks to the editors of this special issue for their support.
1 One evening in late April 2012 Zanele and I
spoke by phone. She was in crisis, having just learned
about a break in at her flat. No one was physically

injured, but the flat was ransacked. Few things were
stolen from the flat, but twenty external hard drives
were removed. These drives housed Zanele’s visual
work produced between 2008 E 2012, much of which
is irreplaceable. The loss of this visual archive is most
traumatic for Zanele. She suspects that the invaders
mean to disrupt and disable her work to archive the

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visual history of black lesbians in South Africa. If this is
the case—and it seems to be, given that none of Zanele’s
partner’s belongings were stolen—it is a profound loss,
one that is at once private and public.

2 Zanele Muholi, interview with the author, Cape

Town, South Africa, novembre 15, 2011.

3 The photographs in Faces and Phases were
exhibited at Michael Stevenson, Cape Town in 2010.

4 Duggan-Cronin’s images were published as The
Bantu Tribes of South Africa between 1928 E 1954. IL
images were organized into eleven population groups,
and were “intended to stand as ‘records’ of declining
communities whose ‘racial purity’ and tribal customs
were perceived as threatened by modernity and misce-
genation” (Garb 2011:21–25; see also Jacobson in Garb
2011). To preserve the expected image of traditional sub-
jects, Duggan-Cronin routinely supplied the props and
costumes that his figures lacked to produce a mythic
image of an idealized natural world, habituated by
groups of “typical” people. Mofokeng’s The Black Photo
Album was developed while he was a researcher at the
Institute for Advanced Social Research at the University
of the Witwatersrand (1988–1998).

Judith Butler argues that lesbianism does not
operate by expressing an inner essence, but is rather
meaning produced in opposition to dominant forms of
gender that by virtue of their repetition and perfor-
mance, appear natural (Butler 1990; see also Horne and
Lewis 1996).

6 Zanele Muholi, interview with the author, Cape

Town, South Africa, novembre 15, 2011.

Earlier artworks by Muholi inflamed passions

and revealed political agendas. In 2009, then South
African Minister of Arts and Culture Lulu Xingwana
walked out of Muholi’s exhibition that featured sensual
images of black lesbian women. The Minister described
the images as “crude misrepresentations of women
(both black and white) masquerading as artworks rather
than engaged in questioning or interrogating—which
I believe is what art is about. Those particular works of
art stereotyped women” (Smith 2011:67).

8 www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi3128728089/
9 Zanele Muholi, interview with the author, Cape

Town, South Africa, novembre 15, 2011.

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