1

“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