Post on 20-Jan-2023
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“Gender within Gender”:Zanele Muholi’s Images of
Transbeing and Becoming
Gabeba Baderoon
Before I knew about transgender, I called it gender within gender.
–Zanele Muholi, 2011.
I n h e r k e y n o t e a d d r e s s to the “African Same-Sex Sexualities and
Gender Diversity” conference in Pretoria, South Africa, in February 2011,
Desiree Lewis pointed to Zanele Muholi’s photograph Ms. D’vine I as exem-
plifying the utopian possibilities of queer liberation. With Lewis, we
observe the complex and playful textures of Ms. D’vine’s self-possessed
performance of gender in the photograph, her waist draped in beads
woven in the colors of the South African flag, a brightly decorative yet
slightly stiff necklace around her neck, and the sole of one of her bright
red shoes worn through. The setting of long grass marked by discarded
plastic bags in which Ms. D’vine poses at first recalls then unsettles an
image of rural Africa by testifying to the continent’s urban realities. Lewis
notes that this vivid and “emphatically queer” image “blurs markers of
tradition and modernity . . . and defies the usual emphasis on violence, on
health, on statistics” that reduces African sexuality to an instrumental
litany of deficits and disease. Instead, in Muholi’s photograph Ms. D’vine
observes no requirements of authenticity and no strictures on self-expres-
sion and, therefore, to Lewis, appears “entirely free, dethron[ing] normal-
ity, heteronormativity, and homonormativity.”1
In her camp persona, Ms.
D’vine consciously inhabits a marginal and original space, rather than a
Feminist Studies 37, no. 2 (Summer 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc.
pragmatic and respectable one, and thereby embodies the promise of
freely imagined possibilities for the self.
This possibility of a radical playfulness and the utopian promise of
pleasure and self-invention in Muholi’s photography continues a strong
theme in recent African feminist and queer of color writing on sexuality.2
It is particularly striking because of the pall cast over debates about gender
and sexuality in Africa by the charge that “homosexuality is un-African,”
an accusation that extends to expressions of diverse genders, because sexu-
ality and gender are often conflated in such views. No matter how often
historians, sociologists, and other scholars show convincing evidence to
the contrary, the trope that varied genders and same-sex sexualities in
Africa are corrupt practices imported from the West is stubbornly invoked
by conservative politicians, as well as religious and civic leaders, to strategic
effect, as their claims to represent authentic African culture often deflect
attention from issues of governance.3
Gender variance is obscured by such ideas about sexuality in South
Africa. The country’s history of slavery, colonialism, and the institutional-
ized racism of apartheid have generated a profuse and often damagingly
interwoven set of assumptions around sexuality, gender, and race. The
stigmatizing of queer sexuality is entwined with the assumption that
people who are lesbian or gay are actually anatomically distinct or simul-
taneously female and male-bodied.4
The conflation of sexuality, sex, and
gender has also had an impact on trans people, who are often assumed to
be homosexual, a fact that has spurred much transphobic violence. In
contrast to these narrow frameworks for public discussions of sexuality
and gender, the notion of gender diversity posits that gender expression
ranges across a broad spectrum–one can, for instance, be a masculine
woman or be a person who used to be a woman and is now a man; the sex
assigned to one’s body can be distinct from the gender one expresses; and
gender is distinct from sexuality–that is, although they form a part of the
lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/intersex (LGBTI) community, not all
transgender people are lesbian or gay.
Despite the prevalence of constricted ideas about gender, perceptions
have started to change. This is evident in some promising signs: the work
of the respected South African nongovernmental organization Gender
2 Gabeba Baderoon
DynamiX, which is entirely devoted to transgender issues in Africa; the
publication in 2009 of Trans: Transgender Life Stories from South Africa, a collec-
tion of autobiographical writing by trans people, and the earlier 1998 auto-
biography, From Juliet to Julius: In Search of My True Identity, by the Ugandan
transgender and intersex activist Julius Kaggwa; the production of ExquisiteGender, a collection of short films by southern African trans people; and
the hand-drawn portraits of trans people by Gabrielle le Roux that consti-
tute the Proudly African and Transgender exhibition.5
The prominence of
(and sensitivity to) debates about transgender issues in Africa at the
“African Same-Sex Sexualities and Gender Diversity” conference, also
reflected in the title of the conference itself, is another measure of the
growing profile of transgender politics, alongside the continued signifi-
cance and political urgency of attention to sexual diversity.
The political strategy to invoke claims of cultural authenticity to
denounce gender and sexual diversity in Africa means that much is at stake
around questions of representation, including the very language for talk-
ing about these topics. The use of the word “queer” in this essay, for
instance, signals a choice in a difficult debate. Muholi points to the ambigu-
ities of such a decision, noting that “queer language is so foreign here. The
West is speaking its own language. Are we using our own language? What is
queer in Zulu?” In a panel discussion of LGBTI activists and scholars enti-
tled “Who Are We?” held in August 2010 at the Institute for the Humanities
in Africa at the University of Cape Town, I asked Zethu Mathebeni, who
researches black lesbian identities in South Africa, what the implications
were of using LGBTI in an African context. In response, Mathebeni pointed
to ongoing attempts to reclaim often-compromised local terms such as
stabane and moffie as examples of an indigenous language for sexual and
gender diversity.6
As Muholi also notes, “You want to contest the tradition
that refuses or erases your existence. . . . What is a lesbian in our own
languages, in our own settings, in our own environments?” On the other
hand, the terms that make up LGBTI are undoubtedly part of a commonly
used vocabulary in black communities in South Africa. For instance,
Mathebeni reported that the people she speaks with during her research
consistently and without prompting use the term “lesbian” to name them-
selves. Muholi herself uses LGBTI but is reflective about its implications:
Gabeba Baderoon 3
“We are using adopted languages in order for people to understand who
we are. It’s dangerous because it goes along with perception of us being un-
African. It means the homophobes get away with it.”
Muholi makes a thoughtful contribution to this debate but declines
to become entrapped in a reductive focus on authenticity. Instead, she has
chosen in her photographs to convey a politically meaningful vision of
LGBTI intimacy and pleasure in private spaces. This is in clear contrast to
the theme of trauma that has been used to give an easy legibility to black
and queer bodies in much writing on African sexuality (and recently also
in the United States).7
Outside of this focus, Muholi feels that countless
other histories are left unrecorded. Reflecting on the context for her own
work, she asks, “How do you speak to people who don’t understand how
a black lesbian face looks [when it is] not raped and bruised?” Commenting
on her approach, Muholi says, “I have the choice to portray my commu-
nity 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.”
For her, the route to this more complex, self-generated view has been
to convey “the visual pleasures and erotica of my community so that our
being comes into focus, into community and national consciousness.”8
Such images of domestic intimacy and rarely seen lesbian eroticism follow
the call to African women by Zimbabwean scholar Patricia McFadden in
“Sexual Pleasure as Feminist Choice” to pursue the power of bodily pleas-
ure and the self-affirmation and resilience that can issue from this. Lewis’s
keynote speech, mentioned above, in which she draws on José Muñoz’s
germinal study, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, deepens this
critique of the developmental model of African sexuality, which as serts
that Africans need to be helped to achieve a Northern vision of sexual
identities and rights, and reaches instead for a self-confident and ecstatic,
although not insular, vision of African gender and sexuality. Importantly,
although Muholi became known as a photographer who engaged with the
then-invisible lives of black lesbians in South Africa, she started to en gage
with the topic of “gender within gender” in 2003, and her sense of commu-
nity definitively includes trans people, as is evident in the photographs of
her ongoing Trans(figures) (2006-2011) and Faces and Phases (2007-2011) series
4 Gabeba Baderoon
on lesbian and trans life in urban and rural, and South African and inter-
national settings, from which images are excerpted in this essay.
Embodying a new vision of African sexuality, Muholi mobilizes a vi sion
of queer privacy with an intimate, collective, autobiographical visual proj-
ect through which she makes a powerful claim on public visibility for
queer lives. This move into a public privacy around the theme of sexuality
can also be seen in recent collective autobiographies in South Afri ca. In
addition to the appearance of Trans: Transgender Life Stories from South Africa,
other notable publications include Hijab: Unveiling Queer Muslim Lives, a
groundbreaking collection of writing by lesbian, gay, and trans Muslims;
Myriam Dancing: Women Loving Women, a collection of Christian les bian writing;
and Yes, I Am: Writing by Gay Men in South Africa, an anthology of autobio-
graphical works. Of all the recent autobiographies pub lished in South
Africa, however, it is Native Nostalgia, Jacob Dlamini’s riveting memoir of
growing up in a black township under apartheid, that is the most apt
model for Muholi’s work.9
In Native Nostalgia Dlamini dares to reflect on
the complexity, fullness, and even pleasures of life for black people even
during the worst days of state oppression and violence. This com plex view
un settles the official national narrative that portrays black life during this
period as uniformly empty and characterized solely by political oppres-
sion. In contrast, like Dlamini’s memoir, the visionary world that Muholi
creates envisions the private as the arena of a dissident memory that ques-
tions the exclusions of national narratives and finds in art a utopian imag-
ining of “the country we want to live in.”10
In Muholi’s photographs in
this issue of Feminist Studies, we therefore see a consistent theme of dream
selves, dream bodies, dream communities, and dream spaces.
How do Muholi’s trans images do their liberatory work? To under-
stand this, we first have to follow the trajectory of her earlier career as a
photographer. Muholi was born in Umlazi, South Africa, in 1972 and first
trained as a photographer at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannes burg
from 2001 to 2003. She sees herself as a visual activist whose role is to reverse
the absence of African LGBTI lives in public space and to “ensur[e] that our
collective visual narratives and imageries as black queers–especially those
of us who come from marginalized spaces–form part of South Africa’s
national collective memory.”11
Her approach is both intensely per sonal and
Gabeba Baderoon 5
multilayered–her definition of LGBTI life does not focus on sexuality alone
but also includes economic, racial, and gendered exclusions.
Through her projects, Muholi often enters difficult spaces. She first
became known in 2004 for photographs of lesbian lives devastated by a
plague of sexual violence that was worsened by an ineffective state and
civil response: “When I produced my early photos I was angry. I had no
lan guage. 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.” She focused on
visual activism because the reverberating effect of sexual violence was to
drive an already neglected community even further from public attention,
noting that “basically we were just erased. There were no images any more.
Women did not like to be photographed because they would be exposed.”
Muholi’s insistent recovery of these suppressed stories was ex pressed in her
first book, Only Half the Picture.12
Her photographs in this book are works of
commemoration and celebration, especially of ordinary people “without
big names, who don’t count.” Even then, however, her images testifying to
violation were marked by a strong aesthetic accomplishment and accom-
panied by others in which she explored formal boundaries.
Muholi’s work is deeply conscious of its antecedents. Looking at her
photographs, I immediately think of other photographs, even when they
do not exist. By this, I mean that Muholi is driven both by the absence and
a certain compromised presence of LGBTI lives in the visual archive. As a
result, one can discern a simultaneous assertion of presence and a sense of
mourning in her photographs.
Muholi pays careful attention to time in her work. She wants to
create narratives with depth, with a past and a future. Because she sees
her self as reversing a pattern of absences in the visual archive, Muholi is
very conscious of finding a history in which she is a part and which would
also allow her to envisage a future. That sustaining claim emerges for her
from the transatlantic history of images of black life. In 2010, while in
London for an exhibition at the Autograph Gallery, Muholi encountered
200 images from W.E.B. Dubois’s Paris Albums, the exhibition of black
American life he commissioned for the Paris Exposition of 1900. Stepping
into the gallery, Muholi felt an intense sense of recognition. “I just wanted
to cry. What I’m doing is what has already happened. There is a line of
6 Gabeba Baderoon
black women in photographs taken back to the nineteenth century.” This
sense of a visual past of which she is a part also gestures hopefully toward
the future: “It makes me think of the last community. Let’s say fifty years
from now, lesbianism within black life won’t be an issue anymore and
people won’t feel the need to emphasize those identities. They will be
looking back and then they will be referencing us, people who used to be
called lesbians. This is art in a hundred years.” In her review of Muholi’s
Faces and Phases, the historian and feminist activist Yvette Abrahams also
perceived a connection to this future, saying the book “creates for me a
sense of love we can take for granted. It brings me a foretaste of a future
when we are truly free.”13
The past recalled by this utopian vision is evident in the history of the
identity photograph. South Africa has a tradition dating from the colonial
period under the Dutch of using identity documents to stifle people’s
movements. This is the history of the image as capture, as arrest. Under
apartheid, the most intrusive and damaging form of state control was the
enforcement of the pass laws, through which black people were forced to
carry an identity document, the hated “passbook,” or dompas. If you were
black, the lack of a pass could get you arrested and removed to one of
several invented countries or “homelands.” The passbook with its identity
photograph was therefore the state’s primary instrument of disenfran-
chisement, racial division, and restriction of movement. These laws were
abolished when South Africa became a democratic state, but even today,
our national identity books and their ubiquitous ID photos govern our
lives. In order to apply for a job, open a bank account, or get a driver’s
license, one must have the nonnegotiable, little green identity book, once
tellingly called the Book of Life. The ID book also indicates your gender
and is thus an important and often tense point of contact for transgender
people with the state. For trans women and men whose identity docu-
ments do not match their physical appearance, every encounter with
authority is a potentially hostile one, leading to delays at airports and
invasive demands to confirm one’s gender identity. Recalling the experi-
ences of trans activists such as Skipper Mogapi from Botswana and Victor
Mukasa from Uganda, Muholi says, “you need to have double identity
books in order to cross borders.”
Gabeba Baderoon 7
The watchful gaze of the state is therefore a continuing theme in
Muholi’s photographs in Trans(figures) and Faces and Phases. Muholi also
draws on other traditions in this work–for instance, the portrait, with its
directness, intimacy, and claim to singularity, as well as the ghost image
that haunts the portrait–the mug shot, the carceral photograph. In her
images for Trans(figures) and Faces and Phases, Muholi alludes to the past uses
of the identity photograph to capture and constrain, famously conveyed
in Ernest Cole’s photographs of passbook arrests in his 1967 collection,
House of Bondage: A South African Black Man Exposes in His Own Pictures and Wordsthe Bitter Life of His Homeland Today.
14In her contemporary revisiting of this
theme, Muholi’s photographs convey how South African townships and
spaces in other African countries have become confining spaces that
refuse the citizenship of lesbians and gender-variant people because of
gender-based violence.
But there is another dimension to this allusion. To achieve her ambi-
tious project to redefine not only the content of images about LGBTI lives
in Africa but the very form of such images, Muholi’s works convey both
density and fluidity. “Being,” the title of one of her early series on lesbian
and trans life, is a gerund, a noun of perpetual becoming. I noticed early
on that Muholi shoots series of photographs, characterized by a continu-
ity between images and between the photographer and the people she is
shooting. Muholi acknowledges the complexity of the relationship
between photographer and subject (a term she declines to use for the
people in her images) and between photograph and viewer. Muholi is a
graduate of one of the premier photographic schools in South Africa and
is represented by the prestigious Michael Stevenson Gallery; yet, even with
the imprimatur of the art world and her activist work, she is very careful
about the license that photography gives to artists. For instance, to photo-
graph someone at the height of the sexual violence against black lesbians
carried the real risk of appropriation. To avoid this, Muholi says she took
photographs “in a reportage style. [Through this method,] I relate to
someone’s story. I record stories.” It was very important to her to convey
the distinctiveness of voices that were not her own: “If I had captured it, it
would have been like appropriating because where are their voices? It
would have been Zanele’s story rather than people’s stories.” In this sensi-
8 Gabeba Baderoon
tivity to the idea that taking a photograph means to “capture” a moment,
Muholi plays with visuality itself. She uses the word “capture” often in our
conversations, with all the tangled implications of the word. Its obvious
meaning is the recording of distinctive moments through the camera, yet
she is simultaneously wary of the seduction of capture–of constraining
and claiming others’ lives as visual trophies.
ID photos draw on the idea of the image as fact, as proof of existence;
and this declaration of existence is also a function of Muholi’s images,
which therefore play with the allure of capture, of solidity. This, after all,
is the work of the ID photo. As she notes, “the power of naming means to
put something into existence.” In Trans(figures) and Faces and Phases, Muholi
both documents and asserts the existence of lesbian and transgender lives
in Africa but also alludes to their multiplicity and variety, so the identities
within the images cohere but also soften around several points.
The photographs we see in this essay are therefore dense with visual
complexity. They are identity documents not created by the state, and we
feel the push and pull of their dueling impulses toward solidity and
process, being and becoming. Some of the photographs are limpid to the
point of transparency. We become absorbed within them, rather than
acting upon them. Despite their intimacy, we also learn a certain com -
portment and discretion in looking at them. They show us the careful
construction of the codes of the body and where we can and cannot look.
What is the subject of these photographs? Why, in looking at them, do
I think so deeply about the relationship between people in the photographs
and the photographer? To me, Muholi is undoubtedly present in the
images and her method reaches toward autobiography. From her first
book, Only Half the Picture, the relationship she developed with the people she
photographed was a subtle expression of reciprocity and tenderness in the
face of violence and the possibility of further violation through being made
visible. In this context, Muholi felt that a photographic relation of mutual
presence and coproduction between photographer and subject could be a
powerfully collective and collaboratively crafted space: “If the space is
negotiated between photographer and the person photographed, if people
are given a space to write themselves, they have ownership over their own
voices.” Are her works autobiographical? “Yes and no,” she clarifies. “In
Gabeba Baderoon 9
most of my projects I put myself, [but] it’s an (auto)biographical project
because it involves a lot of us.” In the latter sentence, Muholi asks me to
include the strategically placed parenthesis in “(auto)biography,” making
the word signal the in-betweenness of the act of biography and autobiogra-
phy in the images, a gesture toward both singularity and collectivity.
In the year that we speak about the hundreds of photographs she has
pro duced in this project, Muholi never once mistakes one person for an -
other, never once confuses a photograph with another. She knows every-
one individually; she knows their narratives and also the history and shifts
that have brought them to the present. In these accounts and in her rela-
tionship to her work, Muholi is as invested, as present, as exposed as the
people in the photograph. Empathy and mutual sustenance, I find, are part
of the motivation for her portraits of transgender people. She asserts: “For
each and every face, it’s more about me as much as it is about the people.
For each and every one I’ve captured, I see myself in them. It doesn’t
matter if that person is trans; the face that is a living, breathing being says
something about me. It confirms my family, which I’ve never had. These
are immediate families or connections I have made over time. You are a
queer family; you’re sharing the same struggle.”
Through her Trans(figures) and Faces and Phases projects, Muholi has
produced images and concepts about transgender lives of immense
subtlety and depth, yet that also touch on a nerve both within the LGBTI
community and broader South African society. Muholi acknowledges
that the topic of transgender lives in Africa is a tense one: “It’s compli-
cated, it’s complicated, it’s complicated.” Yet, as with her earlier work,
Muholi is motivated by an unjust and weighted absence: “People whom I
know have transitioned in front of me, and I cannot say I’m not interested
in them. We are one family. If we say gender is fluid, what does that fluid-
ity mean to me as a person who is taking photographs of people who are
LGBTI? Will I be making a claim just like everyone and say we are serving
LGBTI people, but leaving out the T and I? I’m saying here are the trans
people in front of me. So what do I do now with all these transitions and
all these images that are not recorded?”
Although Muholi’s concern with the invisibility of trans lives sounds
similar to her earlier focus on black lesbian and gay lives, the political
10 Gabeba Baderoon
context of transgender issues within the broader LGBTI movement itself is
contested and edgy. Being lesbian, Muholi acknowledges that some in the
lesbian community have complicated and often strained relations with
transgender identity and politics. She ascribes this partly to fear of the
unknown: “For so long we knew about lesbianism and who we are. Trans is
fresh and delicate.” More significantly, she explains that “we live in a
hetero sexually dominated space, as though there is nothing other than
being lesbian and gay, and then here comes the transgender people claim-
ing their rights. In a way, the homosexual culture vanishes, because you
thought that was the only thing that was there after heterosexuality. Be -
cause we think this notion of men and women equals to straight, and any -
thing else leads to homophobia.” Furthermore, there is the question of
what being male means. She asks: “What do we think of men and what
men are supposed to be to us, and why do some people want to be men
when men rape lesbians? Hearing what other feminists and lesbians say
forced me to do the work [on transgender issues].” The assertion of trans-
gender identity and politics unsettles the clear lines of earlier LGB positions.
Presenting perhaps the most intractable problem, there are under-
standable concerns among feminists, including trans and other queer
feminists, about the continuing problem of patriarchy, which does not go
away when people change genders. Muholi herself has experienced domi-
nating behavior from trans men. “I don’t like to be feminized by a trans-
man. Sometimes they push it harder. Sometimes they look at lesbians as
‘lezzes,’ as something less because you’ve graduated or crossed genders.”
So, part of the complication that trans identities pose to some feminists
and the LGBTI community is the ongoing challenge of patriarchy. Trans
feminists themselves engage with these issues, and Muholi’s questions
signal areas of tension and anxiety that black lesbians and trans men have
just begun to explore. Muholi’s photographs therefore help to continue a
necessary dialogue about these topics and simultaneously draw people
into a sense of community and empathy.
In this context, Muholi has thought very carefully about what it
means to photograph trans people. Her primary feeling is empathy about
being marginalized: “I know what it means to be othered. I know what it’s
like when people think that I am diseased. I was invited to an African femi-
Gabeba Baderoon 11
nist forum in 2006, and some feminists didn’t feel comfortable to be in the
same space as lesbians. So I can imagine how people feel with the trans
issue and the lesbian issue.” In both Faces and Phases and Trans(figures),
Muholi found herself translating empathy into a specifically visual ques-
tion: how to envision a spectrum of gender expressions when the visual
language for this is so constricted. “How do you communicate that in a
photograph?” she asked.
Reading the PhotographsThe images reproduced here give a sense of multiplicity and difference.
They do not form a mechanically reproduced set of portraits, but a chore-
og raphy of presence. In the images, Muholi not only wants to make visible
people who are usually unrecorded but also to ask difficult questions
about the nature of visibility itself. For instance, when photographing
trans people, it would be unfitting to create the impression of an instru-
mental transformation, “like using a skin product, before and after.” In -
stead, she wanted to convey that there is not simply one way of being
transgendered. The photographs are therefore not static but neither do
they evade their duality–eliciting a recognition of identity even as they
testify to its flux. This is an exercise of the photograph as becoming, draw-
ing its own making into its surface.
This is illustrated by the word “phase” in the title of the Faces and Phasesseries. It recalls the label “fashionable,” which is one of the ways in which
homophobes attack the legitimacy of LGBTI identities–it’s “fashionable,”
meaning superficially popular or transient or just a phase. Muñoz dis -
cusses a similar connotation for queer people in the word “stage,” as in
“it’s just a stage.”15
In these photographs, however, a phase is part of an
organic history through which one passes or where one lingers. These are
Muholi’s trans images of being and becoming, both at ease and in process.
In the photographs, we learn to read the posture and orientation of
the body and to reflect on the signs through which we get to know the
people who are presenting themselves to us. The clean lines and strong
contrasts of Victor Mukasa’s face and suit, Skipper’s upright posture and
wary, protected expression, and Betesta’s slightly angled shoulder create a
deliberately poised impression of the trans men in Muholi’s portraits. She
12 Gabeba Baderoon
reveals the reason: “I see them like Obama, like those big guys, because
they are politicians, pushing the queer struggle, the transgender struggle.”
Muholi’s deep affection for trans women is evident in her photo-
graphs: “If there is one human body that really makes me comfortable, it’s
trans women. How careful they are. They won’t push any finger in my
eye.” In return for the care she discerns in them, Muholi responds with an
infinitely hospitable camera. The pattern of salt and sand on Tingy’s skin
elicits a gaze that resembles touch. Muholi says wonderingly, “She
brought her own bathing costume. This is a not a drag queen at the beach.
This person is saying, I am a woman.” In the evocative texture of black
plastic against Revelation’s skin, we may at first read a fashionable recy-
cling of discarded material, but actually she is signaling what it means to
own nothing, to be banished by one’s family, and to have their rejection
made concrete by burning all one’s clothes.
As always, the affective charge of Muholi’s images also serves a politi-
cal purpose. To assert the beauty and belonging of trans women’s bodies
subverts the expected view of women’s bodies in public space. For trans
people in Africa, Cape Town is a dream city, the place where most re -
align ment surgeries and therapies take place, where there is a thriving
queer scene (although one that is distinctly class and race divided) and
where Gender DynamiX is based. On the other hand, Muholi points out,
“living and visiting are two different things.” After reassignment, trans
people have to find jobs, accommodation, and hospitable communities;
and Cape Town suffers from the common South African condition of
xenophobia toward Africans from north of its border. Nonetheless, Cape
Town re mains a place in which to dream of freedom and community for
queer people. And in that dream, Muholi is interested in pushing the
boundaries of where trans people belong. They may be welcome in safe
spaces, but “you don’t expect the trans woman at the beach, in nature, in
the public space. But we are part and parcel of this nature. We come out
of those spaces. If you want people to understand that you exist, be in that
space. The beach is a space. Be in that space.”
Muholi feels that the body is a platform for resistance, but beyond
that lies the imagination, an infinitely capacious space. She manifests her
imaginative hold on the city’s space through aesthetically complex
Gabeba Baderoon 13
images. The black and white photograph of a lush Ms. Christina in a
striped dress among discarded tires lays claim to an apocalyptic but also a
textured and richly visual space. Tingy showed Muholi the scars on her
back where she had been stabbed: “But,” Muholi says, I wasn’t interested
in showing that. I was shooting a beautiful woman on the beach. I would
be sensationalizing if I shoot if what you and I know.” Discretion–the fine
judgment of what you show and what you do not–marks Muholi’s trans
photography.
While shooting her Faces and Phases images, Muholi was obsessively
careful about not pathologizing the people she was photographing. Once
again, discretion was central. In some cases, this had to do with rules of
comportment and composition that would not be immediately evident to
an outsider:
When you shoot trans men or when you shoot butch lesbians you have to
be careful of the breast. So I have to be careful that a person slightly gives
me her shoulder to divert from the actual image that will greet the viewer
when they see it. You don’t want to show the private parts of a trans
woman. You don’t want to show the big bust of a trans man, if he is not
comfortable with it. You don’t want to project the big bust of a butch
lesbian, if she is not comfortable. It confirms and takes you back to where
you’ve been and you don’t want to be.
For Muholi, just as the body has rules of comportment and discre-
tion, the face holds a central meaning. The nuanced intimacy of the
medium close-up portrait is the primary mode that unifies the Faces andPhases project. Muholi believes deeply in the meaning that resides in the
human visage: “The face speaks to me. The face presents what I am that I
am not able to confirm or confront. The face has a voice. The face means a
presence and an existence. When you are alone, in a space of solitude,
your face says something even if you don’t see it, and a portrait says some-
thing even if you don’t say it.” This concept of a palpable presence in the
gestures and expression of the face, even when it appears impassive or
unknown to itself, means that the face is uniquely revealing. Moreover,
the act of looking at a face is potentially a genuine form of exchange, both
an encounter and a gift. In these images, Muholi says, “I want you to be
confronted by the face of a person as your face is looking at that face. . . . I
14 Gabeba Baderoon
want you to see the person.” This investment in the face, the body, and the
spaces they inhabit, as well as the larger imaginative realm that encom-
passes them all, is part of the utopian impulse of Muholi’s work. On the
other hand, it can also mean asserting the right of gender-variant bodies to
occupy spaces that have previously been occupied by straight bodies.
Although the images of Ms. D’vine, Revelation, and Ms. Christina un settle
normative expectations of women’s bodies in public spaces, does the
image of Tingy similarly shift perspectives, or do these photographs of her
assert a right of presence in a transphobic space that simultaneously also
constrains her within familiar regimes of visual access to women’s bodies?
One of the most radical aspects of translife for Muholi comes from
her reading of trans men’s bodies. Muholi has been reflecting on and
making art about trans women and men since 2003. Her encounters with
trans men have been central to Muholi’s own thinking and she feels there
is an enormous amount to learn from them about notions of gen der. In
her ongoing and deeply reciprocal work within the larger queer commu-
nity, Muholi is interested in debates that are delicate and even painful to
some in the trans community. She recounts, “I kept on asking a lot of
unsettling questions. How far can people go without over emphasizing?
Are all trans men butch?” She found a certain set of answers in the
approach of a transman named Gerald to issues of gender in the trans
community, noting “He confirms the questions I am asking myself.”
As he conveys in his film for the Exquisite Gender collection produced as
a Gender DynamiX project, Gerald’s notion of manhood is deeply
thought ful. “The first rule of masculinity is that it is individual. I decide
my limits, my capabilities.” As a result, his sense of the comportment and
composition of the body is radically different from that of the other trans
men Muholi has photographed. “I am a mind, not what I wear,” he asserts.
“I am a man. Balls don’t make a man; breasts don’t make a woman.” As
part of this very different relation to the transbody, he has decided that “I
don’t bind my breasts [or agree with] the perception I must pack.” Gerald’s
comfort as a trans man from the global South, with the multiplicity of his
body and what it signals, conveys for Muholi a moving and supple mode of
being. But it is also a potentially contentious position to take. To Muholi,
Gerald has claimed a trans body that causes us to rethink gender. She
Gabeba Baderoon 15
points out that in a context in which many African trans women and men
do not have access to legal protection, medical treatment, or sup portive
communities, Gerald’s position is a radical one. In her reflections on this
sensitive debate, Muholi thinks of Gerald as inhabiting the “in-between” or
claiming a gendered body that destabilizes the normative range of genders
and sexualities even within the transgender movement. She calls this
contesting transnormativity.
This space of the in-between is where Muholi finds a path that is truly
open, vulnerable, and full of possibility. She says that
in-between is not a comfortable position. You don’t belong. You can easily
be rejected by both sides. You must be willing to lose a lot. You are negoti-
ating a space internally. There is also a space with friends–how to deal with
this new being. To say you are an in-between gendered person, those you
have left behind feel betrayed by you. Those who are looking for you on
the other side, they are waiting. It destabilizes the whole notion of gender.
I’m comfortable with that. If I were to transition, I don’t want to be an
extreme of everything. I want to live and love and negotiate my space.
I want to conclude this essay by lingering on this delicate and creative
place, the in-between, and reflecting on Muholi’s phrase “gender within
gender” with which this essay began. The phrase invites a perpetual state
of reflection, both inside the self and in more collective spaces, and it
acknowledges and welcomes multiplicity. Muholi explains that “gender
within gender” was the phrase she used “before [she] knew about trans-
gender,” demonstrating that people create concepts for what they know
in the absence of authorized terms. Gender within gender signals a reflec-
tiveness and scholarship that might otherwise remain in private and
marginal spaces. After all, Muholi is an intellectual as well as an artist and
activist, and she has always included the generation of “histories, knowl-
edges, and subjectivities” among her aims.16
Therefore, I would like to
hold on to this phrase, not as belonging to the time “before [Muholi]
knew” about transgender, but as a form of knowing that comes from
mutuality and openness.
In-betweenness may also be an apt description of the formal character
of Muholi’s photographs. In their attention to play, invention, and pleas-
ure, they draw the viewer toward an as-yet-unimagined space. In them,
16 Gabeba Baderoon
the body and the imagination become platforms for invention. This is part
of the appeal of trans images for Muholi, who says that “trans people
invent new things in order to survive.” During one of our long conversa-
tions, she recalled a beauty pageant in a small town she recently visited, far
from the glitter of Johannesburg or the dream city of Cape Town. “In
Mafeking where I was taking images for a new Faces and Phases, instead of
Ms. Butch Lesbian they had Mr. Lesbian. Do you understand that naming?
They are butch but they are beyond that. You are not a lesbian, not a
stone butch, not a soft butch–but Ms. Femme Lesbian, Ms. Butch, a les -
bian over the top, Mr. Gay–even though their genitalia is still that of a
woman.” As Muholi points out, in these forms of play and self-expression
that take place far from the centers of authority over queer language and
identity, confident new concepts of the self are emerging.
These names mark the body as a utopian and creative space. And,
indeed, Muholi sees the trans body as “a body of rights, from head to toe,
how you breathe, your head, your heart, your toes, your legs, how you
walk, you talk, the toilet you use, the language you use. It’s psychological,
it’s art, it’s the language. It starts with the body, the mind, the face, the
presentation. The presentation is everything.” In this formulation, the
body, the imagination, the psyche, and the image are intimately con -
nected. Muholi’s photographs, in which she crafts spaces of mutual pres-
ence and invention, claim a necessary space of identity and also range
beyond it to the possibility of invention and play.
On this note of invention, play, and performance, I return to Ms.D’vine, in image V of Muholi’s series. A sheer black sheet forms a curtain
that discreetly but incompletely divides the yard with its lines of drying
clothes from the homemade stage on which Ms. D’vine faces the camera.
She is kneeling on sandy ground, her legs clothed in stockings more sheer
than the sheet, lending a faint sheen to her skin. Her hands are delicately
folded across the apex of her legs, curtaining what Muholi reminds us
cannot be revealed. Continuing the theme of what is hidden and what is
revealed, Ms. D’vine is clad in a strapless black bra and panties, trusting us
with her unclothed and yet also lace-covered body. Most ambiguous of all
is her face–her expression half-startled, half-vulnerable, half-rebuffing,
half-questioning, half-open, her mood compelling but indefinable before
Gabeba Baderoon 17
the eye of the camera. Something like in-betweenness, before and afterness,
a penumbra of possibilities surrounds the instant of this photograph. Look -
ing at her face, I recall that the missing letter in Ms. D’vine’s name is “I.”
N o t e s Unless otherwise noted, all quotations by Muholi are from a series of interviews I
conducted with the author between 2010 and 2011. [AU: Where were the interviews
conducted?]
1. Desiree Lewis: “Same-Sex Sexualities in Africa: Development Discourse or Utopia”
(keynote speech, “African Same-Sex Sexualities and Gender Diversity Conference,”
Pretoria, South Africa, 13-16 Feb. 2011). [AU: is this available anywhere?]
2. For example, Patricia McFadden, “Sexual Pleasure as Feminist Choice, Feminist Africa 2
(2003), www.feministafrica.org/index.php/sexual-pleasure-as-feminist-choice; and
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New
York University Press, 2009).
3. Marc Epprecht, Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004); Serena Dankwa, “‘It’s a Silent Trade’: Female
Same-Sex Intimacies in Postcolonial Ghana,” Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research13 (2009). [AU: Please supply inclusive page numbers for this article; also nr. or
month, season]
4. Amanda Lock Swarr, “‘Stabane,’ “Intersexuality, and Same-Sex Relationships in
South Africa,” Feminist Studies 35 (Fall 2009): 524.
5. Ruth Morgan, Charl Marais, and Joy Rosemary Wellbeloved, eds., Trans: TransgenderLife Stories from South Africa (Johannesburg: Fanele, 2009); Julius Kaggwa, From Juliet toJulius: In Search of My True Identity (Kampala, Uganda: Fountain Publishers, 1998); and
Gender DynamiX, Exquisite Gender, DVD (Cape Town: Gender DynamiX, Support
Initiative for People with Atypical Sex Development Uganda [S.I.P.D.], 2010).
6. Stabane, or isitabane, a Zulu term for intersex person, is also used as a derogatory word
for lesbians and gays. Moffie is a colloquial term derived from Afrikaans for queer and
effeminate men in Cape Town, used with a range of connotations, some of them
positive but many of them negative. Both terms are in the slow and difficult process
of being reclaimed by some in the LGBTI community.
7. See, as an example, Eng-Beng Lim, “Queer Suicide: Introduction to the Teach-In,”
Social Text (November 2010), www.socialtextjournal.org/periscope/2010/11/a-suicide-
teach-in.php. [AU: Web address is correct?]
8. See Zanele Muholi, “Mapping Our Histories: A Visual History of Black Lesbians in
Post-Apartheid South Africa,” 2009, www.zanelemuholi.com. [AU: Is this the Web
page name? This article is paginated or not? Note 11 has page 6. Also see note 13.]
9. Pepe Hendricks, ed., Hijab: Unveiling Queer Muslim Lives (Wynberg: The Inner Circle,
2009); Elise Van Wyk, Myriam Dancing: Women Loving Women (Cape Town: Acqua, 2009);
18 Gabeba Baderoon
Robin Malan and Ashraf Johaardien, eds., Yes, I Am: Writing by Gay Men in South Africa(Cape Town: Junkets Publishers, 2010); and Jacob Dlamini, Native Nostalgia (Johannes -
burg: Jacana, 2010).
10. I am quoting here the title of Nonhlanhla Mkhize et al., The Country We Want to Live In:Hate Crimes and Homophobia in the Lives of Black Lesbian South Africans (Pretoria: HSRC Press,
2010).
11. Although her original essay specifies “lesbians,” here, in our conversation, Muholi
wished to change this to “queer” to indicate the broader reach of her current work.
See also Muholi, “Mapping Our Histories,” 6.
12. Zanele Muholi, Only Half the Picture. [AU: Please supply full bibliographic details here.]
13. Yvette Abrahams, “Playing with ‘Normal’: A Review of Zanele Muholi’s Faces andPhases,” 2010 (www.zanelemuholi.com), 5.
14. Ernest Cole, House of Bondage: A South African Black Man Exposes in His Own Pictures and Wordsthe Bitter Life of His Homeland Today (New York: Random House, 1967).
15. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 98.
16. Muholi, “Mapping Our Histories.” Page nrs?
Gabeba Baderoon 19