chAPtEr 6 SHootInG VIolEnCE And tRAUMA: tRAVERSInG VISUAl And SoCIAl toPoGRAPHIES In ZAnElE MUHolI’S woRk ANtJE SchuhMANN Zanele Muholi is currently one of South Africa’s internationally acclaimed artists. The main focus of her work is the representation of black lesbians and transgender people at the intersection of race and class. Although she is perhaps best known as a photographer, she does not work exclusively in this medium, but in dialogue with films, clips, installations, beadwork and other media. Her intention is not to produce single masterpieces – l’art pour l’art – but rather an inter-textual multitude of visual representations of the Other. Her work may be situated in the context of feminist artists such as Phybia Dlamini and Gabrielle le Roux, who produce art at the intersection of community engagement, youth development and the documentation of the margins of hetero-normative societies through the bricolage of film, installations, writing, drawing and photography. Muholi’s aim is to challenge not only the normativity of heterosexuality, but also to subvert the dominant impression of homosexuality as a mainly white, Western and middle-class phenomenon. Her artistic exploration of body politics produces a voice that articulates a community’s condition into the collective silence. Gaze Regimes.indd 55 2015/05/05 3:29 PM The multiple forms of her artistic expression follow Muholi’s political interests: the promotion of human rights and equality for persons with non-conforming gender-performances. She herself locates her artwork within what she calls ‘visual activism’. Feminist and post-colonial analyses of representational politics generate particular aesthetic and ethical questions and dilemmas which can be well illustrated through a consideration of Muholi’s art (Schuhmann 2014b). This chapter looks at her work in its own right, while at the same time using Muholi’s art to engage a resonant spectrum of questions around the wider political economy of representing violence and trauma. This includes the challenge of subverting contemporary practices of Othering and their multiple legacies of oppression, as well as the risk of inadvertent complicity with hegemonic gaze regimes. To understand fully the representative strategies mobilised by Muholi, and in order to engage these questions, it is necessary to embrace her full body of work and to try to interpret it within wider theoretical considerations, from post- colonial film theory, trauma studies, socio-linguistics and psychoanalytic cultural theory. It is only through a multi-perspectival analysis that the complexity of the context and the achievement of Muholi’s work can be mobilised for a better understanding of today’s visual politics. Rooted in the tradition of critical theory, this chapter locates her art within the socio-political realities with which she grapples: My project attempts to reclaim citizenship and calls for an end to Queercide – a term I coined for the systematic atrocities and hate crimes against lesbians, gay men and trans-people in my country (Muholi films4peace [nd]). This chapter relates her work to various artistic traditions which also mobilise the body as a site of desire and destruction. As such this chapter engages Muholi’s manifold visual modalities intending to reflect on those forms, contents, rhythms, perspectives and streams of consciousness that she employs through a transdisciplinary mode of analysis. The chapter is written and composed as a theoretical reflection and queer inquiry which intends to promote post- colonial feminist epistemologies. As such, it is not concerned with a straightforward question-answer schema, with static and essentialising 56 GAZE rEGIMES Gaze Regimes.indd 56 2015/05/05 3:29 PM politics, but rather with contemporary understandings of the fluidity of concepts. When analysing the politics of visual representations, moving or not (Zanele films and shoots all the time; one medium traverses into the other), diverse realities and expressions are more constructively theorised if normative notions (for example, of ‘women’ as opposed to man, ‘film’ as strictly distinct from photography, or ‘Africa’ as being non-Western) are conceptualised not as mutually contradictory binaries, but as continuums. The writer, the subject and the reader are no longer distinct entities in search of a truth but rather, a multitude on a journey of finding different ways of seeing and reading: Through the various projects of activism I have worked on in the sphere of the visual and the creative, I not only reflect on absence, but attempt to begin to imagine different futures, different ways of thinking about our lived experiences, other ways of being, seeing and being seen (Muholi 2011). • Let’s begin with following Zanele Muholi into three exhibitions of her work in recent years. Insila Yami/Isilumo Siyaluma 2006–20111 opens at Blank Projects in Cape Town in November 2011. Red on white, a black body in the night, naked, moving images on a monitor, murderous headlines in a crowded collage. Turn around: poems and text stretched out over the opposite wall, photos, images of blood, clots, smears, interrupted traces of pain when time becomes spatial, a cycle is rearranged in the form of ornaments as wallpaper. One year later. It is the Johannesburg opening of the Faces and Phases show. The lobby of the Goethe-Institut is filled with music and a large crowd. Words fly around the courtyard looking for space to be contemplated. In the writings about Muholi’s work, terms such as intimacy, pleasure, private/ public, playfulness, positive images, home stories with public impact, counter stories, utopia, autobiographical, family album, commemoration and celebration surface (Baderoon 2011; Gqola 2006; Gunkel 2010; Schuhmann 2014 a & b; Smith 2004). Words, images, activity. chAPtEr 6 57 Gaze Regimes.indd 57 2015/05/05 3:29 PM Exhibition of Faces and Phases at the Venice Biennale (2013). In 2014, and several awards later, and at this time already an honorary professor at the University of Bremen, Muholi, together with Gabrielle le Roux, opens the Queer and Trans Art-iculations: Collaborative Art for Social Change show at the Wits Art Museum, located on the street corner where Braamfontein intersects with the university campus. The appropriation of a social and physical space is now no longer symbolic. The outnumbering by young black queers/activists/students is striking – and even if only temporary, an aspirational de- and re-territorialisation of the museum’s ‘white cube’ renders the usual audiences slightly puzzled at the margins. The show includes Muholi’s photographs, beadwork and an installation of gravesites. An international aspect is added by Le Roux’s drawings and film projects portraying transgender people in Africa and Turkey. • Muholi grew up in Umlazi township in KwaZulu-Natal, raised by a single mother who worked as a domestic worker. She started out as an activist in the South African NGO environment in the early 2000s when she 58 GAZE rEGIMES Gaze Regimes.indd 58 2015/05/05 3:29 PM ©Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of STEVENSON Zanele Muholi at the Wits Art Museum exhibition: Queer and Trans Art-iculations: Collaborative Art for Social Change (2014). was co-founder of the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW), a membership-based organisation for black lesbians in Johannesburg. She was involved in initiating the campaign ‘The Rose has Thorns’ – one of the first campaigns to tackle the increase in hate crimes against black lesbians in South African townships. Muholi’s working-class background, combined with her being a member of the South African Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) community, whose social and geographical topography is still highly segregated along the axis of race and class, place her at the intersection of the international art circuit and those still living at the hetero-patriarchal margins of apartheid’s legacies. For her shows Muholi makes sure to bridge this gap by providing transport for members of the local communities represented in her work; from the margins of society she brings them to the privileged space of the white cube. The community Muholi archives in her work is the community she comes from, and the one she returns to when documenting how hate crimes affect the lesbian community and their friends and families. She also mentors young LGBTIs in how to self-document their chAPtEr 6 59 Gaze Regimes.indd 59 2015/05/05 3:29 PM Courtesy of Madelene Cronjé/Mail & Guardian experiences in visual or textual contributions to Inkanyiso – Muholi’s Queer Media platform. According to Hakim Bey, we could argue that by including those normally excluded from a still predominantly white, heterosexual, male-dominated, and middle/upper-class art world, Muholi generates a ‘temporary autonomous’ zone (Bey 1991). When the combi taxis arrive from the townships it enables Muholi the artist to decentre, through her bussed-in audience, a traditionally white comfort zone. At the same time, the artist allows the inhabitants of white hetero-normative comfort zones to experience and maybe interact with the Other without the risk of leaving behind their green suburbs or the secure pockets of gentrification in the inner city when looking or gazing at – or consuming – Other realities. No wonder, then, that the opening of her Love and Lust exhibition at the Stevenson Gallery in February 2014 was described thus: The prevailing tone in the air was that which acknowledged Muholi as a messiah, who has united us all; black, white, drag queen, Butch, township dwellers and suburbanites in a space where the societal and cultural etiquette was challenged to fit the context of diverse people in the Museum and Gallery, thus embraced the contrasts of love and loss under one roof … It became a melting pot of culture and norms as all protocol was abandoned. Songs of freedom were chanted in celebration of a ‘soldier’ who had fought a good fight and was now being rightfully honoured (Humbane 2014). Is this a carnivalesque moment of transgression, where legacies of violence and difference are contested, transgressed, and momentarily dissolved in a container of proclaimed equal status, looking and speaking, soon to dissolve again in one way or another? These situations earn Muholi a twofold credit: on the one hand, for organising a social and spatial transgression which provides access to those excluded and which exposes those historically – and currently – sheltered and removed from those at the margins. On the other hand, it reinforces her street credibility and authenticity within the white cube as a member of what is referred to in South Africa as the ‘previously/ historically disadvantaged’ group. This, in turn, enhances her two mutually reinforcing statuses: being an artist and being an activist. Muholi is well aware of the dialectics of power in post-apartheid 60 GAZE rEGIMES Gaze Regimes.indd 60 2015/05/05 3:29 PM South Africa. She grapples with this not only through her participatory approach towards the communities with whom she works, but also in the form of her work itself. How to present, to represent, those at the margins for the sake of documenting and celebrating their/one’s own joy, while at the same time risking feeding the regimes of imperial gazes, hungry for the ‘new’: the black homosexual or transsexual female beaten and raped? How to tell a counter-story without referencing the very normative politics of Otherness one aims to counter? How to intervene in hegemonic white feminist imaginaries of the black Other as a poor, abused, black shemale without restating or denying it? Is experiencing international fame and exposure only a chance to table an important issue, or is it also a risk? Are there ways, moments, in which an artist and/or activist can escape the forces of commodification in a context where rape is consumed in the gesture of disgust, fed by a proclaimed colour-blind interest in gender-based violence, which is, in fact, often overlooking the supposedly peaceful homes of white suburbs? Focusing on the over-researched misery of black townships, imagined as colonised by a black hyper-masculinity, frames past and present white violent masculinities as either tragic incidents or singular monstrosities outside of the imaginary of a civilised white norm. A vivid recent illustration of this discursive paradigm was evident in the reporting about, and the analysis of, the Oscar Pistorius murder trial. Media reports presented the femicide mainly as rooted in the circumstance of the situation, whereas his biography located the violence outside of broader societal patterns through individualising. This analysis outnumbered by far those reports which situated the man’s deeds within a broader analysis of a society where trigger-happy, hard- body, white alpha masculinity is still an intrinsic element of various forms of structural violence. How to visualise, to write, or to speak about violence in the context of multi-layered signification processes? How to exile one’s perspective from the conflation of hegemonic white, middle class, feminist, of imperial, of racist, and of hetero-normative gaze regimes surrounding us? Subverting and disturbing normative signification processes can impact on the imaginary and, as such, produce social change or, as Toni Morrison says: ‘imagining is not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the Other. It is, for the purposes of the work, chAPtEr 6 61 Gaze Regimes.indd 61 2015/05/05 3:29 PM becoming’ (Morrison 1992:4 in Kaplan 1997:xvii). What do we become, and how? Freud speaks of Schaulust, which one could translate as ‘pleasure in seeing’ (scopophilia), which is understood to be opposed to a narcissistic pleasure in looking. In this context, Otto Fenichel speaks of the child’s capacity to look at an object and to feel along with it; looking that stimulates empathy. Kaplan states that children learn about the culture they find themselves in through looking, meaning: What we are supposed to look at and what not? Who may look and who may not? She argues that subjectivity is constituted through looking. But before that children learn to be in relation with someone through engaging in looking (Kaplan 1997:xvi). Contrary to this mutual process of looking as relating to each other with curiosity, and this includes also the wish to know, the notion of the gaze, according to Kaplan, signifies anxiety and the attempt to not know, to deny, to keep at a distance (Kaplan 1997:xvii). In the aftermath of the prohibition of cross-race looking in the American South and elsewhere, tied into the prohibition of interracial sexual looking, looking for the Other today should be free. It should be applicable without boundaries ‘… but the weight of white supremacy tends to limit its meaning within the west to whites looking for non- whites’ (Kaplan 1997:xx). The commodification of lesbian sexuality within a predominantly hetero-patriarchal porn industry also speaks to this complex paradox, as does the recurrent resurfacing of poverty-chic in the fashion industry. An innocent looking at the Other often becomes a consuming and appropriating gaze, locking the Other in the position of remaining an exoticised object of desire. The question is how to represent violence in art, in order to conscientise people and to subvert normative gaze regimes, by either avoiding these regimes or undermining them though estranging mimicry? I have kept the visuals and the story line illustrative, avoiding an artistic rendering of the story – this would only hide the truth, the grit and the shocking reality of Queercide. Employing an aesthetic that mimics a public broadcaster documentary, it aims to challenge viewers who have a choice to act – to intervene – but seldom exercise those choices (Muholi films4peace [nd]). 62 GAZE rEGIMES Gaze Regimes.indd 62 2015/05/05 3:29 PM Muholi explores societal voids which enable a violent topography of extermination where race, class, gender and (sometimes only assumed) sexual orientation intersect. In South African townships, poor black lesbians (and especially those who are male-performing) live in a permanent ‘state of emergency’, as Wendy Isaack (2003) calls it. Her description of this existence resonates with Georgio Agamben’s notion of bare life, which he developed in Homo Sacer (1998). Agamben theorised the global growth of lawless spaces where certain categories of persons, stripped of access to societal protections, are reduced to their ‘naked’ selves, to their bare life. His gender-neutral argument was developed further by Ronit Lentin in her text ‘Femina sacra: Gendered memory and political violence’ (2006). Lentin explores a ‘specific form of state-sanctioned violence enacted towards survivors of Transnistira, Ukraine, using testimonies of women survivors of Transnistiria’ (2006:463). She looks at the women who survived genocide in Europe in the 1940s to develop the concept of femina sacra ‘… she who can be killed without charge of homicide’ (2006:463). Ronit Lentin’s gendered historical adoption of Agamben’s concept speaks to Isaack’s notion of a gendered ‘state of emergency’ in contemporary South Africa, a situation which practically equals a state of non-accountability and lawlessness. This is best illustrated in a representative study of the South African Medical Research Council according to which every fourth man in the country admits to having raped at least once (Jewkes, Sikweyiya, Morrell & Dunkle 2010). Agamben situates his notion of the ‘bare life’ in a cultural history of political imprisonment, which works via inclusion as well as exclusion (to be locked out/Auschließung) through social barring (Ausgrenzung) in the German sense of placing someone beyond or outside of the boundaries of the social. This is precisely how Laurie Penny describes the dialectics of democratic liberal inclusion and exclusion as experienced by women: After women gained complete legal rights in many countries, our societies still cultivate a rigorous, stage managed loathing for female flesh … We do not look young enough, slim enough, white enough and willing enough – messages that come to us subtly and not so subtly… and are manifest in rituals of self-discipline ... It is not enough to locate women’s oppression in the body only. Oppressive normative body chAPtEr 6 63 Gaze Regimes.indd 63 2015/05/05 3:29 PM politics, which are reinforcing essential gender difference and hetero- normativity have to be seen in their intersection with intensifying capitalist modes of consumption, unpaid reproductive labor and so forth (2011:3). … [W]e are aware that our bodies are not our own; we are at constant risk of sexual violence and murder; one in five women in Britain and America is a victim of rape, and the rest of us learn to live in fear of rape (2011:1). Given that sequential traumatisation is not unusual for women in South Africa, the serial character of Zanele Muholi’s cultural work can also be read as a representation of the repetitive patterns of traumatic acts, of homophobia in particular and of the everyday re-occurrence of structural violence against women in general. It claims a voice to enunciate a community’s conditioning into the collective silence. The Greek word trauma signifies an injury, a wound. Translated into today’s psychological understandings, a trauma is the experience of an event which causes feelings of extreme horror and helplessness. If the traumatisation does not stop and/or is not reintegrated through a healing process of the scattered sense of self, psychic and somatic symptoms might continue beyond the actual experience in form of post-traumatic stress symptoms. Total repression of memory, a split of self, the multiplication of self, dissociation and flashbacks are only some of the effects dealt with in different phases of trauma therapy: stabilisation, trauma exposition, processing of trauma consequences. Attempting to reunite, to create a synthesis of lost body sensations, to undo survival mechanisms which are helpful during the traumatic event, such as dissociation and splitting, but are potentially harmful thereafter, and to learn to live with the memories inscribed into the psyche and the body – all this forms part of trauma therapy. Re-establishing a sense of security is key for traumatised individuals and communities. This is in deep contradiction with the phenomenon of sequential trauma, which was extensively studied in the context of Jewish adults and especially children who survived the Holocaust. Rosenblum speaks about the hardship of surviving a major historical trauma and the feelings of guilt and shame that are often triggered by having survived, sometimes under degrading circumstances. Whereas silence might condemn the survivor to a ‘dried out life’, speaking 64 GAZE rEGIMES Gaze Regimes.indd 64 2015/05/05 3:29 PM out, especially when done publicly, might trigger such strong somatic reactions and psychotic episodes that these might lead to suicide (Rosenblum 2009:1319). This new approach, challenging the psychoanalytic key concepts for cure – remembering and telling – is also a challenge to political approaches towards change. Political approaches are often based on making atrocities visible in order to stop them, and inserting survivors’ voices into the collective amnesia in the form of eyewitness narrative. Muholi’s key approach of visual activism is centred on generating visibility, representation, documentation, archiving and commemoration. But how to represent trauma, violence, cruelty? How to interlink healing and memorising through commemoration? How to celebrate having survived within a space of being continuously at risk? Kaplan’s thinking about how to deal with one’s exposure to the imperial gaze – a gaze that carries parallel structures with the male gaze, as she argues, and the hetero-normative gaze, as I would like to add – speaks to this. She reasons: … if it is true that all people’s eyes in the west have been imperialized, white Americans’ eyes as well as those of African Americans and other minorities, the ‘healing’ of this imperialized vision is more urgent for minorities. Easing the pain of having had to endure the imperial gaze is most needed for those whose bodies were damaged by the camera (Kaplan 1997:222). Liberation theorists like Steve Biko and Albert Memmi spoke to the dialectics of power: ‘The colonial relationship which I had tried to define chained the colonizer and the colonized into an implacable dependency’ (Memmi 1992:ix). Biko’s description of the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed makes the mutual condition of liberation and (self)-healing even more clear: ‘The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed’ (Biko 2002:92). How do we disentangle such a condition, which we can read through the prisms of racial oppression, gender discrimination, and homophobia? Kaplan reflects on how to ‘heal imperialized eyes’ and she identifies two main filmic approaches: chAPtEr 6 65 Gaze Regimes.indd 65 2015/05/05 3:29 PM Some undertake an ideological project of reversing the oppressive gaze (and as such remain to a certain extent within the parameters of western structures). Other films I call ‘healing’ (following Bambara) because they seek to see from the perspective of the oppressed, the diasporian, without specifically confronting the oppressor’s strategies (1997:221). Muholi’s work follows both approaches. Her different series and individual pieces of work develop a visual inter-texuality. This is perhaps most prominent in her film Difficult Love (2011). Here the artist speaks about herself, traces her roots, and confronts us with the violence suffered by women as well as with the dreams and joys women share amongst themselves and with Muholi, and, consequently, with us. It is about ‘making seeing happen’: the women being seen, the audience seeing the women, and seeing Muholi as she is seeing them, and looking back at us through the camera as we see. Differently. Differently? In Difficult Love we see a film about hate crimes against black lesbians; we see a film about the artist at work; we see the camera shooting and we see Muholi taking a series of photographs which we then see reproduced in the film. The unashamed emotionality of herself and of others in this award-winning film urges the viewer to acknowledge the humanity of the protagonists and to empathise and undo the ongoing de-personalisation that is revealed. Photographs are more intense than moving images, Susan Sontag says, because they show a precise moment without the flow of time (Sontag 1991). She speaks of photography as a way of storing the world, of capturing experiences in our head (1991:10). When shooting we appropriate the object in the process of relating ourselves to the world. And yet, photos are not so much a statement about the world as fragments of reality, accessible to everyone. A passport with an ID photo reverberates through the South African history of apartheid, a time when all who were considered non-white were forced to carry passbooks (the dompas) so the state could control their movements (Baderoon 2011). Today, identification papers and photographs are central to the various global migration and border regimes, regulating exclusion or belonging. The imperial gaze verifies your identity with your legal status in terms of citizenship; it parallels the patriarchal and hetero- normative gaze and related powers of identification when policing who is proper enough and who may pass through public spaces unharmed. And it differentiates who will be targeted. Photographs are utilised as a proof of the 66 GAZE rEGIMES Gaze Regimes.indd 66 2015/05/05 3:29 PM Being, 2007. Film poster for Difficult Love (2010). brutalised reality of an individual/collective out there so that it can no longer be denied. Photographs can cause us a momentary turmoil, before releasing the viewers’ eyes to move sideways again: When I produced my early photos I was angry. I had no language. I was just angry. I took photos at the height of hate crime: I thought people are raped but you can’t erase this image (Muholi in Baderoon 2011:405). chAPtEr 6 67 Gaze Regimes.indd 67 2015/05/05 3:29 PM ©Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of STEVENSON You can’t erase the image. What does this imply? Does it mean that the existence of an image in and of itself has a potentially transformative capacity because it frames a ‘truth’ that would otherwise be lost to the collective memory? Beyond old or new regimes of producing ‘truth’ and ‘proof ’, according to Sontag (1991) the impact of photography relies on the existence of a political consciousness as a relevant prerequisite for the moral signification process that photographs may trigger. Given such a context, images such as Nick Ut’s photo of a naked Kim Phuis fleeing her just napalmed village during the Vietnam war, or Sam Nzima’s photograph of the fatally wounded Hector Pieterson during the Soweto uprisings in 1976, gain and generate momentum and raise consciousness. The pitfalls accompanying the attempts to engage with the scope of violence are manifold. I remember the concentration camp Dachau next to the town where I grew up in the 1970s in the south of Germany. My class went to the site for educational purposes. Back in school, we watched movies shot by the US army when they were liberating the concentration camps. I saw images of survivors of the gas chambers, walking skeletons in black and white, mountains of cut hair which filled chambers, next to rooms filled ceiling high with extracted teeth. I still see myself watching. The stream of consciousness can be cut into a ‘before seeing’ and an ‘after seeing’ photographic representation of horrors. In the case of Sontag (1991:25), this ‘negative epiphany’ of seeing happened in 1945 when she was paging through a book and came across images of the Nazi concentration camps Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. For myself the stream of consciousness was cut, disturbed and awakened when I saw similar images as part of educating a new generation of democratic Germans. But does the representation of suffering automatically have a conscientising effect? Is it enhancing empathy, or does it also numb, or even corrupt? How do you speak to people who don’t understand how a black lesbian face looks [when it is] not raped and bruised? …. I have the choice to portray my community in a manner that will turn us once again into a commodity to be consumed by the outside world or to create a body of meaning that is welcomed by us as a community (Muholi in Baderoon 2011:401). 68 GAZE rEGIMES Gaze Regimes.indd 68 2015/05/05 3:29 PM Different explanations attempt to understand the hate crimes that take root in societal acts against black lesbians in South Africa and often involve gang rape, torture and humiliation, as well as murder, while also trying to understand the perceived increase in hate crimes. Due to inconsistent reporting and data collection, as well as massive forms of silencing, epidemic secondary victimisation, neglect and/or ignorance at the hands of the police and justice system, many hate crimes are either not reported at all, not processed as hate crimes, or, in the majority of all cases, are not thoroughly prosecuted. Through strong lobbying since the mid-2000s, largely done with the sparse resources of a few NGOs and networks which, in the course of this lobbying, often over-stretched their financial, organisational, human and emotional resources and capacities, the media and government began to respond, albeit with reluctance. In 2011 a Corrective Rape Task Team was established by the Justice, Crime Prevention and Security cluster to conduct a legislative audit of existing hate crime legislation. In early 2013 the National Council Against Gender-Based Violence, based within the Department of Women, Children and People with Disabilities, was established. Both structures are unfortunately regarded as passive and dysfunctional. In spite of the existence of small-scale reports and research with multiple recommendations (for instance, the very comprehensive Outside the Safety Zone [2013] by Susan Holland-Mutter), neither legislative nor broad-based societal interventions have been effectively implemented. Successfully prosecuted cases are by and large outnumbered by cases that are not investigated and not processed. This produces a sense of impunity. The cycle of either taboo or scandalised visibility of the experiences of black lesbians in South Africa mirrors Sontag’s (1991) argument that there cannot be photographic proof of evidence of a reality as long as there is no definition of such an event. Similarly, Theresa de Lauretis (1989:32) argues for the recognition of the semiotic relationship between the discursive and the social as always being a reflexive one. Materiality precedes the sign – in our context, the image – but follows it as well. She argues that the materiality of domestic violence only comes into existence once it is named as such, because only then do we anchor such phenomena in our collective consciousness. The ways in which we linguistically frame violence inform chAPtEr 6 69 Gaze Regimes.indd 69 2015/05/05 3:29 PM our (non)-understanding of it. Do we label a husband and father shooting his wife and children due to his loss of income as simply another ‘family drama’, and is this not hiding specific aspects of violence that occur when patriarchal role models under precarious capitalist modes of living become overheated? In the context of a globally increasing femicide, the gender- neutral cover-up term ‘spouse abuse’ is another example to illustrate why De Lauretis (1989) couples the concept of the ‘rhetoric of violence’ with what she calls the ‘violence of rhetoric’. Our language, including visual language, is based on specific codes with engraved imperial, gendered and hetero-normative asymmetries.2 It seems there is no neutral space from which to speak or shoot. Kaplan’s feminist film theory places the emerging new images made by women from ethnic minorities in the USA in the 1990s in a historic context: These images necessarily function in relation to prior images and stereotypes – in relation, then, to the history of imagining minorities – rather than aim to produce any new truth about minority groups. Women filmmakers … seek to intervene in the imaginary – to change how these images are produced – rather than to present minorities ‘as they really are’ (1997:219). Muholi is archiving lives and communities that are often rendered invisible. She is also generating material for a genealogy to enable an understanding of the power of normativity and violence when documenting the formation and existence of non-hegemonic subjectivities: For the longest time I have reflected on absence: the absence of recognition of our black queer identities; the absence or lack of visual and textual representation of queer lives; the absence of queer voices in the articulation of contemporary arts; the absence of queer representation in post-apartheid citizenship (Muholi 2011). Mercer summarises Isaac Julien’s visual strategy to not only address but to counter the double bind that black people are objects of representation as they are denied access to the means of representation. In Julien’s films ‘… the black subject “looks back” to ask the audience who or what they are 70 GAZE rEGIMES Gaze Regimes.indd 70 2015/05/05 3:29 PM looking for’ (Mercer 1991:200 in Kaplan 1997:xxi). Consequently, Kaplan argues that white people – and I would like to add also people identifying as heterosexual – ‘can also be destabilised when exposed to the gaze of the Other, since this is a gaze to which such subjects have not traditionally been subjected’ (1997:xix). This confrontation is not always welcomed. In 2009 the South African Minister of Arts and Culture, Ms Xingwana refused to open the Innovative Women art exhibition funded by her own department, after previewing Muholi’s work. The Times of 1 March 2010 reported that after she saw a series of photographs of ‘naked, black women embracing each other’, Xingwana considered the work to be ‘pornographic’ and stormed out of the exhibition. In a statement read by her spokeswoman, Lisa Combrinck, Xingwana reported: ‘Our mandate is to promote social cohesion and nation-building. I left the exhibition because it expressed the very opposite of this. It was immoral, offensive and going against nation-building’ (Evans 2010). Xingwana did not look with curiosity originating from wanting to get to know the Other, which can, but not necessarily must, be oppressive. Her gaze reflected rather ‘… extreme anxiety – an attempt in a sense to not know, to deny, in fact’ (Kaplan 1997:xvii). Well, one could argue that the minister was not mistaken. The autobiographical gestures in Muholi’s work remind one of family albums but her images do not promote a family of citizens which, in mainstream nationalist thinking, is imagined as a patriarchal, heterosexual unit. In this sense, Muholi’s images do challenge hegemonic nation-building. They present a collection of stories that do not fit into hegemonic understandings of race and gender and their intersections with the compulsory heterosexuality of dominant, nationalist discourses that despise the transgressions of normative values. In a Foucauldian sense, Muholi’s archiving generates not only an archaeology but also a genealogy of black queer lives. According to Gerald Posselt (2003, author’s translation), Foucault tried in his last years to unfold ‘the intrinsic connections between the production of power and knowledge as well as the origins of the constitution of the modern subject’. Foucault is not so much interested in writing the history of the past, but aims rather to describe the transformation of contemporary discursive formations, institutions, and practices (the prison system, the study of sexuality etc). As such, the notion of genealogy is invested in deconstructing the notion of truth. In this theoretical framework, chAPtEr 6 71 Gaze Regimes.indd 71 2015/05/05 3:29 PM Muholi’s work, in spite of her own position as a black lesbian with a township background, should not be read as showing a ‘this is how they are’ truth about black lesbians and transgender people, which white and homo-/heterosexual audiences do not access; rather it can be seen as an intervention into the scopes of hegemonic imaginaries and their respective voids. Posselt’s reading of Judith Butler’s notions of genealogy provides us with further tools to unpack Muholi’s intervention in hetero- normative ways of seeing, bound to the imaginary of a static two-sex system. According to Posselt, Butler argues that genealogy is a … critical method for the uncovering of the fundamental categories of sex, gender and desire, as well as the materiality of the body, as effects of specific power- and knowledge-formations. Her aim is to identify assumed origins as naturalised effects of a discursive practice, and to debunk binary oppositions as transformable constructions (Posselt 2003). The aspect of serialism in Muholi’s work Faces and Phases, or the mandala- like images, framed and printed as an eternal wallpaper pattern, plays with the tension of individualism and collectivism, construction and deconstruction. This is displayed by the women and trans-people looking back at the narrow regime of two sexes and matching normative gender performances from a position of fluidity, as if saying ‘I am what I want to be’. At the same time it challenges the notion of exceptionalism as the serial character seems to demonstrate ‘we are here and we are many’; and it speaks to the serial rapes and killings based on the deeply engrained societal structures enabling violence against women and trans-people. Muholi’s invitation to the opening of Insila Yami/Isilumo Siyaluma 2006–2011 says: Note: Between March 2011 – September 2011, four young black lesbians under the age of 25 were brutally murdered in South African townships. Some of the reported cases, known to the police, are: 2011 March: Nokuthula Radebe (age 20) 2011 April: Noxolo Nogwaza (age 24) 2011 May: Nqobile Khumalo (age 23) In the exhibition news clippings, headlines and newspaper reports form a collage. They are glued to the wall like wallpaper with the beautiful 72 GAZE rEGIMES Gaze Regimes.indd 72 2015/05/05 3:29 PM Ummeli (2011). Witnesses (2011). chAPtEr 6 73 Gaze Regimes.indd 73 2015/05/05 3:29 PM ©Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of STEVENSON reproduction of ornamental images. Blood drips on the paper, the camera eye preserves the traces, some altered by an imprint of a finger. The computer cuts and multiplies them by mirroring the red form into ornaments resembling flowers, police badges, spiderwebs and mandalas. Muholi seduces us to look through a kaleidoscope, a tube internally coated with mirrors, reflecting the puzzle of colourful, transparent pieces at its end as one ever-changing ornament. Similar but always different, uncontrollable but artificially fabricated, tricking your eye but real in your hand. Our gaze, seduced by beauty, meanders over these red mandalas. Mandala making is a spiritual image and practice. It symbolises abstraction and concentration with the purpose of transgressing our bodily identification and spatial experience. It is a repetitive process, creating a form which is meant to vanish and, by doing so, reminds us about the fragility and transitory reality of life. Muholi’s blood ornaments are beautiful and it is exactly not displaying the aftermath in the form of scars or the threat of being/becoming violated that is captured like an atmospheric trace connecting some of the serious faces or even the bravery of a daring posture. The uncanny gains presence in the subtleness of violence reverberating as a constant stream of consciousness in Muholi’s work, even within themes of intimacy, joy and beauty, and it does so especially when far removed from the concrete, when it is turned into an abstract sign fabricated out of the artist’s blood. Muholi’s work not only references itself, but also stands in for a larger context of artists working conceptually within the thematic field of violence, identity, sexuality, lust, joy and intimacy. Marcuse (2001) links the use of blood in Jenny Holzer’s series LUSTMORD (1994) to the work of Anthony Viti in his Berlin show GEWALT/Geschäfte (1994), where he attempts to introduce his body’s materiality into his work by using semen and blood to address his mourning for the loss gay communities suffered due to AIDS, and to highlight the post-traumatic stress of war-torn communities. Marcuse describes how Jenny Holzer designed one issue of the Süddeutsche Zeitung magazine (46, 1993), a weekly glossy supplement of one of the largest national newspapers in Germany. On the cover and the following 15 pages, Holzer addressed through her artwork and in an interview the rape of Yugoslavian women during war. The front page carries an attached card reading in red letters: ‘There where women die, I am wide awake’. The text on the back of the attached card is printed 74 GAZE rEGIMES Gaze Regimes.indd 74 2015/05/05 3:29 PM in black letters. To read it you need to touch and turn the card. In the magazine a brief introduction is followed by a series of photographs with zoomed images of English and German texts written on skin in red, blue and black. The position of the text on the card represents a victim from a perpetrator’s or an observer’s perspective. In the tradition of agitprop, the shock element was the red ink on the front page’s attached card which the reader has touched without knowing that the colour red not only symbolises blood, but that the ink actually carries traces of blood donated by the survivors of war rape. Precisely because Holzer is reporting from a war zone without depicting the ‘real’ horrors, without sensational ‘authentic’ images, but using artificially constructed photos and text, clearly representing and signifying the violence, she is provoking high-impact social resistance. Muholi’s work speaks to such processes of abjection and transgression: The passage in which we bleed The passage where we were born The passage through which we become (wo)men? The erotic passage meant to be aroused, is raped The passage we love is hated and called names The sacred passage is ever persecuted (Muholi press release, Opening of Insila Yami/ Isilumo Siyaluma, 2006–2011 [27 October 2011]). Muholi preserves her bodily fluid, released through her vagina, on translucent tracing paper. Paper, immersed in sulphuric acid and then washed and dried, allows the artist to trace an image onto it, to re-present the image covered by the paper itself onto its surface. The air between the cellulose fibres makes the paper appear like a blank, white tabula rasa, but it is the beating of the fibres that make the paper translucent and enable us to see what is underneath. We resist this work; we do not want to see what Muholi calls ‘other ways of being, seeing and being seen’. Her translucent pages connect us with the South African Constitution. Through the pages of the constitution, which hold the post-apartheid promise to protect the vulnerable, to make right what was wrong, to free those formerly not free, to constitute a society of equals, the violent processes of everyday abjection keep resurfacing. chAPtEr 6 75 Gaze Regimes.indd 75 2015/05/05 3:29 PM Psychoanalytic readings of cultural and social practices uncover the residual traces of the hidden, the internal, the repressed and explore the projection of the expelled onto the margins, wherein language serves as the tracing paper through which we see an image ascending. Ann McClintock (1995) explores the violence of abjection, a psychoanalytic concept, which, according to Julia Kristeva (1982:84), lies at the core of constituting social beings through acts of expulsion, as formative for modern industrial imperialism. To imagine oneself as social we learn to expunge ‘certain elements that society deems as impure: excrement, menstrual blood, urine, semen, tears, vomit’ (McClintock 1995:72). What else do we cast away? We have abject objects like the clitoris, domestic dirt and menstrual blood. We have abject groups like prostitutes, Palestinians and lesbians. We have abject zones like Israeli territories, prisons, battered women’s shelters. As the ‘expelled abject haunts the subject as its inner constitutive boundary’, McClintock argues, in line with Kristeva, that … abject people are those whom industrial imperialism rejects but cannot do without: slaves, prostitutes, the colonized, domestic workers, the insane, the unemployed and so on … Inhabiting the cusp of domesticity and market, industry and empire, the abject returns to haunt modernity as its inner constitutive repudiation: the rejected from which one does not part (1995:72). According to Kristeva, (1984:84) the self and society will not succeed with its purification work of abjection. Expelled elements keep haunting and disrupting, possibly even dissolving, the edges of what we consider to be the norm, the identity of the self or society: I see myself as a person occupying insider/outsider status, tracing and crossing delineated borders in order to reflect upon both our displacement as black LGBTI individuals around the globe and our creative resiliency in building ‘homes’ through our bodies and communities. In facing these complexities, my pictures are meant to dare us all to question the act of refusing citizenship, of rejecting visas and turning people away at borders, and even of denying people their right to medical care due to lack of funds. I dare us to ask why queer bodies remain on the outside of an unquestioned heteronormative sociality (Muholi 2011). 76 GAZE rEGIMES Gaze Regimes.indd 76 2015/05/05 3:29 PM The materiality of the images ‘Ummeli’ and ‘Witnesses’ (2011) through the blood of the artist, standing in for the blood shed by countless victims, symbolises the horrors, yet it is also an everyday fluid that we all share. As such, blood is banal. Zaltzman reminds us of the void, experienced by Hanna Arendt when exploring the tension between horror and banality in her book The Banality of Evil, her report of the trial of the Nazi mass- murderer Adolf Eichmann. ‘It is finding nothing where she was seeking to grasp the roots of evil that engenders the frustration of thought, and not finding any deep meaning for it is for Arendt what reveals the banality of evil’ (Villa 2010:669). It is precisely not the singular exception – the psychopath behind the tree in the night – but the normal guy from next door; the politician’s hate speech; the second victimisation of the police force, that is at the centre of the problem. The problem is to be found at the middle of society and not its pathologised and criminalised margins. When we acknowledge the absence of the extraordinary we are forced to face the everyday normality of violence against women and/or LGBTI people: from silencing and misrepresentation to the physical control of women’s sexuality and assaults of their bodies because ‘you dare to wear pants’, ‘your skirt is too short’, and what is critically referred to as ‘corrective rape’. ‘You want to be a man? I’ll show you your place.’ In the context of war, Zilla Eisenstein argues, with reference to Clausewitz: If war is politics in another form, and if gender is a political configuration, then the process of gendering males and females is a continuation of politics and war in other forms. It is why the rape of females continues to be so central to war, and a form of war, and not simply a crime of war (Eisenstein 2007:12). Here, Eisenstein argues that rape is not an exception to the rule but a camouflaged rule of warfare and conflict itself. What could this mean for our understanding of what is often referred to as South African ‘rape culture’? It is argued that post-apartheid South Africa is experiencing a low intensity warfare, at least; that its transition remains unfulfilled, that it is not post-conflict on a societal level considering its increasing economic inequality, the high levels of crime, an increasingly murderous xenophobia, and its topping of global rape statistics. chAPtEr 6 77 Gaze Regimes.indd 77 2015/05/05 3:29 PM Acts of violence targeting women and transgender people are reflected in an uncanny routine of anticipation, shock nevertheless, outcry, followed by commemoration. This continuum of ‘sexual terrorism’, as Arriola describes the femicide at the Mexican border (2003), shines in the form of traumatic flashbacks and an anticipation of no tomorrow through the continuum of women’s fragile recreations of the everyday as liveable. Acts of homophobia consume lives, which now are no more. Acts of homophobia consume the lives of those who still struggle – tired, sad, angry – to keep going with their own lives against the continuation of homophobia; for justice for those murdered; for allies amongst progressive forces and movements against a conservative backlash of traditional authorities, politicians and religious leaders. In her work Muholi photographs scars, smears blood, sucks tampons, stages cross-dressing, celebrates same-sex tenderness, mimics domestic workers, loads intestines onto her naked body, films herself naked at night on the beach, twists her pubic hair, parts her lips, looks into the white porcelain closet. She traces pockets of joy as well as documenting the regimes of destruction that traumatise LGBTI communities in spite of their protection in the Constitution. Her visual activism is constructed as a set of practices which collapse boundaries through form and content. Muholi stages the representation of her visual work as a social transgression and a temporary symbolic redistribution of territory beyond the private/public and periphery/ metropole; at the same time she translates her social interventions into politicising and positioning her visual project prominently. This is a project of applied interferences, reimagining and redistributing visual and social topographies, in order to de-centre the centre and re-centre the margins. rEFErENcES Agamben, G. Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Arriola, ER. ‘Women on the border. Gender and sexuality at the US-Mexican border’. Speech at the El Paso Conference, 25–26 April 2003. Baderoon, G. ‘“Gender within gender”: Zanele Muholi’s images of trans being and 78 GAZE rEGIMES Gaze Regimes.indd 78 2015/05/05 3:29 PM becoming’. Feminist Studies 2.37. (2011): 390. Bey, H. TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone: Ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991. Biko, S. I Write What I Like. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. De Lauretis, T. Technologies of Gender: Essays on theory, film and fiction. London: Macmillan, 1989. Eisenstein, Z. Sexual Decoys: Gender, race and war in imperial democracy. London, New York: Zed Books, 2007. Evans, S. ‘Minister slams “porn” exhibition’. The Times 1 March 2010. [Online]. Available at: http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2010/03/01/minister-slams-porn-exhibition. Gqola, D. P. ‘Through Zanele Muholi’s eyes: Re/imagining ways of seeing black lesbians’. Zanele Muholi: Only half the picture. Cape Town: Stevenson, 2006. Gunkel, H. The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality in South Africa. New York: Routledge, 2010. Holland-Mutter, S. Outside the Safety Zone: An agenda for research on violence against lesbian and nonconforming women in South Africa. GALA African Gender and Sexuality Research Series. Braamfontein: MaThoko’s Books, 2013. Humbane, A. ‘Black South African visual activist lesbian, Zanele Muholi, in transparent coffin of love and loss’. Inkanyiso, 14 February 2014. [Online]. Available: http:// inkanyiso.org/2014/02/24/2014-feb-14-black-south-african-visual-activist-lesbian- zanele-muholi-in-a-transparent-coffin-of-love-and-loss/ (accessed 3 March 2014). Isaack, W. ‘A state of emergency: Hate crimes against black lesbians (2003)’.[Online]. Available: http://www.equality.org.za/legal/articles/2003/hatecrimes (accessed 4 August 2004). Jewkes, R, Y Sikweyiya, R Morrell and K Dunkle. ‘Why, when and how men rape. Understanding rape perpetration in South Africa’. South African Crime Quarterly 34. (2010): 23–31. Kaplan, EA. Looking for the Other: Feminism, film and the imperial gaze. New York: Routledge, 1997. Kristeva, J. Powers of Horror: An essay on abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Lentin, R. ‘Femina sacra: Gendered memory and political violence’. Women’s Studies International Forum. Framing Gendered Identities: Local Conflicts/Global Violence 29.5. (2006): 463–473. Marcuse, Y. Jenny Holzer: Lustmord – Traumatisierung der Massen. Magisterarbeit: Universität Augsburg, 2001. McClintock, A. Imperial Leather. London: Routledge, 1995. chAPtEr 6 79 Gaze Regimes.indd 79 2015/05/05 3:29 PM Memmi, A. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992 (1965). Muholi, Z. African Women Photographers #1. Granada: Casa África/La Fábrica, 2011. Muholi, Z. ‘Zanele Muholi’. [n.d.]. [Online]. Available at: http://films4peace.com/artist/ zanele_muholi (accessed 1 March 2014). Penny, L. Meat Market: Female flesh under capitalism. Winchester, Washington: Zero Books, 2011. Posselt, G. ‘Genealogie’. Produktive Differenzen. Forum für Differenz – und Genderforschung. 2003. [Online]. Available: http://differenzen.univie.ac.at/glossar. php?sp=25 (accessed 20 March 2013). Rosenblum, R. ‘Postponing trauma: The dangers of telling.’ The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 90. (2009): 1319–1340. Schuhmann, A. ‘Battling hate crimes against black lesbians in the rainbow nation: Discussing the limitations of a US-American concept and exploring the political horizon beyond law reform’. State Accountability for Homophobic Violence. Ed. W Isaack. Johannesburg: People Opposing Women Abuse, 2008. 5—16. Schuhmann, A. (a) ‘Postcolonial backlashes: Transgender in the public eye’. Black Intersectionalities: A critique for the 21st century. Eds. M Michlin and JP Rocchi. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014. 36—50. Schuhmann, A. (b). ‘How to be political? Art activism, queer practices and temporary autonomous zones’. Agenda, queer & trans art-iculations: Decolonising gender and sexualities in the global South 29.4. (2014): 94—107. Smith, G. ‘Outlaw culture’. Mail & Guardian, 3–9 September 2004. Sontag, S. Über Photographie. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1991 (1977). Villa, F. ‘Review of L’Esprit du Mal [The Spirit of Evil] by Nathalie Zaltzman’. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 90. (2010): 667–674. NotES 1 An isiZulu expression for period pains. 2 See problematisation of the term ‘hate crime’ in Schuhmann 2008. 80 GAZE rEGIMES Gaze Regimes.indd 80 2015/05/05 3:29 PM