Bubblegum Club

Tag: Judith Butler

  • Strategies for Survival – An Arts Course Countering Histories of Erasure

    Strategies for Survival – An Arts Course Countering Histories of Erasure

    “Reading silences, rereading denials, deciphering edited out material and actively pouring over existent African Studies scholarship about intimacies, erotics, sexualities, pleasure, desire, and friendships is critical. This would avail the skills, methodologies and theories to unmute, unsee, and unlearn the outright erasure of multiple forms of evidence of queerness.” – Stella Nyazi

    Texts lie scattered across a circular table at the WAM café – the rickety legs supporting pages of politicized queer theory. Light leaks in through the double volume windows of the WAM café. Artist Abri de Swardt sits opposite me, describing Strategies for Survival, a seven-week course that he and art historian Nomvuyo Horwitz facilitated at the Wits School of the Arts, University of the Witwatersrand at the end of 2017.

    Samuel Fosso, Self-portrait (1976)

    The course was used as an opportunity to reevaluate and identify failings within the curriculum – locating relevance to the city and the institution in the wake of the Fallist Movement. This was drawn in part from, and in response to, Abri’s engagement with the same body of students during the practice-based Staging Mediums course the previous year. The programme was positioned within the broader framework of Reading the Contemporary. In this instance, reading, was approached from the context of Drag culture, where ‘read’ has come to mean, “to wittily and incisively expose a person’s flaws, often exaggerating or elaborating on them”. Imbedded within this approach is a sense of criticality towards that which ‘the contemporary’ as temporal category delineates, and the blind spots within this designation.

    Lorraine O’Grady, Art Is…. (Woman with Man and Cop Watching) (1983), Performance view, African-American Day Parade, Harlem

    A seminal text in framing Strategies for Survival is Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2009) “Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. Instead, ‘there is a life that will never have been lived,’ sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost. The apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life. Grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living, exposed to non-life from the start.”

    The notion of “grievability” is positioned as a signifier of value and persistence in relation to the social hierarchies of class, race, gender, sexuality and ability, inducing which bodies, beliefs and populations matter, and on a differentiated scale, those which are systematically erased. Butler’s text also describes the intersection between precariousness and precarity with regards to human life – positioning the concept of ‘flourishing’ as central to the distinction between living and merely existing. This takes on a more direct level in necropolitics and accountability for lives lost, which locally can be foregrounded in the Marikana Massacre and the recent Life Esidimeni arbitration.

    Akram Zaatari, Anonymous, Studio Shehrazade, Saida, Lebanon, early 1970s. Hashem el Madani

    Strategies for Survival examines various subject positions and modes of socialization disidentifying with the invisibility of normativity and its associated subjectivities of heterosexuality, whiteness and ablebodiedness. José Esteban Muñoz writes in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999) that,“disidentifications is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.”This theoretical framework investigates the confluences of queer bodies, black bodies, impaired bodies, trans bodies, intersex bodies, female bodies, cyborg bodies and non-human bodies as well as the moments of affinity and strategic collectivity between them, while simultaneously being aware of subjective experience and the nuanced levels of systemic violence enacted on and within those subject positions.

    Contemporary art practices are considered through the lens of queer theory, but also from radical black writing, trans–, and disabilities activism, eco-feminist text and indigenous rights texts, and affective modes such as joy, love and rage. Strategies for Survival is framed within post-colonial discourse and explores modes of ‘Africanizing’ the curriculum through the writing of Stella Nyazi, Zethu Matebeni and Nkunzi Nkabinde among others, while interrogating capitalist constructions of time and production – extending into the ‘non’-neutrality of digital space. The vast subject matter and theoretical framing illustrate the importance of approaching pedagogical practice with considered modes of criticality – while promoting platforms for mobilization, resistance and visibility within and beyond the institution.

    “Silence Equals Death” – ACT UP

    * Images from course slide show

    Rafa Esparza, STILL (2012)

     

    Gran Fury, Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do (1989)

     

    Igshaan Adams, Bismilah (2014)

     

    Claude Cahun, Hands (1929)

     

    Alvin Baltrop, The Piers (wreckage) (1976 – 86)

     

    R.I.S.E, #NOCOLONIZERS (2017)
  • Thinking about de-gendering as a route to personhood

    Thinking about de-gendering as a route to personhood

    So the first time I encountered the term ‘cisgender’ was on my colourful Twitter timeline. Some troll was ignorantly spewing his privilege and a beautiful bisexual boy that I follow called the troll a “cisgender straight white male” while telling him to take several seats.

    After tediously Googling the term, I was informed that being “cisgender” means that your gender identity matches the sex that you were assigned at birth. So basically when you were born your physical attributes, which are anatomically and physiologically predetermined, and your internal conviction that you are either male or female, plus the cultural behavioural expressions of those convictions, all marry each other harmoniously.

    When the beautiful bisexual boy was calling out that troll, “cisgender” sounded like a swear word because how could one body have so much hegemonic power, such unadulterated privilege. It seemed obscene until I realised I am cisgender and confronting this privilege was bewildering since other components that make up my identity, such as race, nationality, sex and sexuality are not necessarily hegemonic.

    Initially, I was confronted by my cisgender privilege a couple of years ago when I approached a public restroom that did not have the universal male or female signage. Instead the figure on the door was just a person, which I certainly am, but this privilege of fitting comfortably at one end of the sex/gender binary made me question if I even belonged in that gender neutral space because hello hi, the entire world has created public restrooms, and every other space, on the dominant societal  assumption that everyone is cisgender. This prolonged perpetuation of the sex/gender binary has caused for the maintenance of gender inequality. As a human being dedicated to the decolonisation of my mind, walk through this with me as I unpack how de-gendering is crucial to decolonisation (decolonisation in this context being the undoing of hegemonic “norms” and mindsets.)

    Firstly, let’s get this one thing clear, “nature” does not dictate how we perform gender, instead we do as producers of our culture. The assignment of sex at birth is based on our understanding of gender identity. So girls have uteruses and boys have penises. This basic arrangement of gender and other various subtle and overt arrangements of gender are reproduced socially by power structures in order to shape individual action, and because of the histories of the powers that be, these arrangements appear solid.  Therefore it is dominant ideologies that perpetuate the sex/gender binary in order to maintain power dynamics.

    I believe that if we started with discarding sex assignment at birth as a “regulatory practice” that “institutes the production of discrete and asymmetrical oppositions between ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’, where these are understood as expressive attributes of ‘male’ and ‘female’” then we could ultimately de-gender society and “true humanism” could be realised and instituted (Judith Butler). Being freed from these shackles of the sex/gender binary allows individuals to step into a personhood that is not regulated by hegemonic norms or socially prescribed ways of being and interaction.

    However, this immediate route to de-gendering is essentialist. We are still part of a world that has “norms” and ideals that are deeply interwoven into our social fabric. For example, the social construction of the female body and the normalisation of the male body has considered the female body as “the other”. This othering of the female body is based on anatomy and physiology and this othering also seeps into the subjugation of a feminine expression of gender. Femininity is still assumed to be debilitating. People with female bodies and whose gender expression is feminine are victims of oppression. Hence histories that reflects the need to implement equality constitutionally, institutionally and domestically.

    So before we can de-gender, I believe we need to de-cisgender first. There are and always have been and there still will be many more individuals who are non-binary, transgender and queer. Forget my privileged gender neutral experience, there are people who wake up every day compromising how they navigate their existence because of this idea that there are only two sexes and their manifestation should either be masculine or feminine depending on their body. I believe that once cisnormativity and its partner in crime, heteronormativity, are overthrown from our mindsets and understanding of bodies and sexuality, then surely the superiority of the male body and masculine expression would collapse?

    It is important to realise that the crux of our minor differences are what these dominant ideologies that perpetuate oppression are built on. It is about damn time that we interrogate this social construct and unlearn how we have been taught to prescribe ideas onto our bodies as well other people’s bodies.

    Only once the intricate hierarchies involved in our understanding of gender are undone then we can move into the dismantling phase of the entire construct: no body will be categorised and no personhood presumed in accordance. Essentially, people could simply be people.