3 She My Desire: Exploring Black Sexual Politics through Zanele Muholi

Only Half the Picture works in service of the Black lesbian diasporic archive. The transnational Black queer consciousness that transpires out of such moments of critiquing emerging modern sexualities is central for understanding the impact of this work. This section will be a reading of images with a theoretical context in Black art theory and performance studies, which must be deconstructed.

(Figure 1. Dada, 2003)

Dada, 2003 is an image that strikes the soul to the core. The image is of a Black woman naked, bare breast, strapping herself into a leather harness with what appears to be a nude colored penis-shaped dildo. You can see the contrast of her pubis mons having kinky hair against the paleness of this silicone dildo. She is, like the title suggests, suiting up to play Dada.

            Dada centers Black lesbian pleasure, outside the controlling and pornographic gaze of heteropatriarchy. In erotic telling’s of lesbian encounters, the erotic belongs to the power of the gaze that does not belong to the Black lesbian. We witness her. In 2016, Pornhub Insights[1] discovered that worldwide, the top searched pornographic terms were “ebony” and “lesbian.” What does this mean for the historical erotic imagery of Black women and the lesbian body? What does it mean when these two categories intersect? Dada is a gaze into the lesbian erotic. In Black lesbian cultural production,[2] the theme of the white dildo on the Black lesbian body is recurring. The white dildo is an expression of power; maybe the Black lesbian body is searching for dominance via the white phallus figure. Maybe the white dildo is only available; there is not a larger market of sex stores in South Africa. The most notorious are all centered in Cape Town’s gay neighborhood of Sea Point. How does one have access to white dick?

One must consider the legacy of sexual violence and apartheid. The white penis on the black lesbian body is an erotic role-play.[3] She gets to be her oppressor, she plays the role, a sadistic endeavor, but nonetheless a reflection of the (im)possibility of lesbian desire[4].

The questions that arise from Dada are a result of Muholi’s play with abstraction and figuration as art methods. Okwu Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu’s book Contemporary African Art since 1980 describes figuration as “the various modes of deploying the human figure for its formal and expressive potential” which seeks “to understand the rhetoric of the figure and… its dialectical relationship with abstraction” (Enwezor 41). The Black lesbian body’s relationship to this dildo could be consequential, but the consequence is overridden by the potentiality of pleasure. Homosexuality as unAfrican is a direct policing of sexuality and same sex desire. Dada enlists materiality to expose tensions of same sex desire in panoptic settings. The township is setup for extralegal surveillance. The Black lesbian body is an abstraction. Her expression of intimacy is pornographic for those who gaze and project notions of deviancy. Dada showcases the Black lesbian body with white dildo as dissent.

Muholi’s use of abstract materialism in this photo speaks to the repertoire of Black art. For Enwezor, abstraction is “antithetical to the very conditions of postcolonial subjectivity” but Muholi actually asserts that abstraction is, in fact, a way to facilitate discourses that give the black lesbian body more nuance (Enwezor 41). Muholi titled the exhibit Only Half the Picture, which speaks to the lack of knowing of Black lesbian lives. The use of abstraction deals with the idea of black lesbian desire beyond objectification by heteronormative sexualities. For Enwezor, “abstraction in the hands of black artists was thus perceived by critics as a mark of black inauthenticity… it was also a sign of abandonment of both political cause and community, a gesture of the artist’s social irresponsibility” (Enwezor 43). However, abstraction mobilizes a politic of Black lesbian desire under conditions of containment.

Muholi does not directly address the subjectivity through obvious means of pointing directly at the murders and hate crimes affecting Black lesbians. She does, however, individualize the Black lesbian and her specific pleasures. This strap on harness is the self-determination that post apartheid South Africa has given her. The lone black lesbian body is not fugitive in her desire. As a photographer Muholi thus had to liberate her “imagination from the burden of representation through experimentation with gesture, surfaces, and compositional elements” (Enwezor 43). This experimentation is reflective of a bravery exhibited in Black art, post-apartheid.

Historically, Black South African artists were marginalized from creating art during Apartheid. Segregated art schools and white art industries left Black artists only appearing in the genre of “township art” which referred to art that was essentially a celebration of Black dispossession. Muholi studied Advanced Photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg. During Apartheid, Black Artists participated in photo workshops as a way to receive art training when mainstream institutions denied black admission into art institutes. For example, Johannesburg’s Polly Street Art Center was established under the white artist Cecil Skotnes in the early 1950’s. “Polly Street graduates…became the new authentic black artists committed to representing black life in the impoverished townships” (Enwezor 43). This representation of township life had a deeper motive; like Muholi, the utility of abstraction deviated from optical literalism, which is what many expect from struggle narratives of South African poverty. Muholi resists these optical literalisms and uses abstraction as a way to make commentary on whiteness and the construction of modern sexualities.

(Figure 2. Beloved I, 2005)

            Beloved is a series of photos highlighting the relationship between two black lesbian bodies. This image of embrace shows two bare women. The woman in the front has a bare breast, which is being kissed on the neck by a faceless woman. Instead of seeing her face, we see her head full of dreadlocks. Embrace. Beloved I is a meditation on the possibilities of desire for Black women.

I am referring back to the Porn Hub statistic that says Ebony and Lesbian are the top search terms on pornographic sites; I wonder, are they searching for these images? Are they longing for the genuine embrace of Black women loving each other? Cultural critic Hazel Carby suggests that for “many non-black individuals, black cultural products are a substitute for prolonged and meaningful contact with black people…[people]…find it easier to deal with images of blacks rather than the people themselves” (Ligon 40). The Black lesbian in the pornographic imaginary is not the focus of this photo. When I first encountered this photo, it reminded me of my favorite poem by Muriel Rukeyser titled “Yes, We Were Looking at Each Other”

Yes, we were looking at each other

Yes, we knew each other very well

Yes, we had made love with each other many times

Yes, we had heard music together

Yes, we had gone to the sea together

Yes, we had cooked and eaten together

Yes, we had laughed often day and night

Yes, we fought violence and knew violence

Yes, we hated the inner and outer oppression

Yes, that day we were looking at each other

Yes, we saw the sunlight pouring down

Yes, the corner of the table was between us

Yes, our eyes saw each other’s eyes

Yes, our mouths saw each other’s mouths

Yes, our breasts saw each other’s breasts

Yes, our bodies entire saw each other

Yes, it was beginning in each

Yes, it threw waves across our lives

Yes, the pulses were becoming very strong

Yes, the beating became very delicate

Yes, the calling the arousal

Yes, the arriving the coming

Yes, there it was for both entire

Yes, we were looking at each other

Instead of having to return the gaze back to addressing controlling images[5] the two women in these photos look into each other, look into the erotic. The erotic as a radical aesthetic in Black lesbian articulation emerged with Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”[6]. Lorde asserts that the Erotic potential of Black people has been suppressed by an inferior subject positionality. This positionality has created much distance in intimacy as exampled in the non-erotic life of Black women. Lorde states “when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying” expressed barriers to Black women seeking desire from one another (Lorde 59). The violence’s of the Apartheid past make it (im)possible to imagine Black women loving each other. There is literature about same sex desire in the male mining system of South Africa[7], but can we imagine what happened in the absence of husbands in small towns and villages? Can we imagine the embrace between two Black women while their men have been stripped from home, sent to work in different providences? We have to imagine an alternative history. There must be a re-imagining of desire and the negotiations of pleasure during Apartheid. It gives humanity to a group of people caged by the violations of racial capitalism. Beloved brings intimacy to the forefront to remind the viewer of the possibility of black lesbian desire.

Lorde instructs, “recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary dreams” (Lorde 59). Lorde envisions a radical articulation that can remake and reclaim the meaning of Black lesbian identity through the erotic. Rejecting heteronormative expectations of pleasure births the erotic. For Lorde, a queer positionality is definitive of an alternative approach to pleasure that is not built on domination and submission. Lorde invokes sexual agency within the erotic. “When I speak of the erotic, then I speak of it as an assertion of the life-force of women” (Lorde 55). Lorde’s disposition is essential to Muholi’s erotic articulations of lesbian desire.

Glenn Ligons’ book Yourself in the world: selected writings and interviews meditates on seeing the black body represented through various settings. For example, “the dissolution of the body’s boundaries is seen as a productive moment, where the fusion of the body to history, to space, to sound, and to language points toward new possibilities” (Ligon 28). In Beloved I the boundaries that have been placed on the Black lesbian body are dissolved in this embrace of the erotic between these two women. Where are these women? The black female body is easily locatable- in the mines, in the hostels, in death and in pornography. However, the isolation of the black female body in Embrace shows the possibility of Black escape. They found each other in safety. Thus, a new Black female subjectivity is birthed, through the desire to escape into a Black lesbian erotic. These two bodies refuse to be preoccupied with positive representation of the Black lesbian body that is respectable to homonormative sensibilities. Beloved I is an embrace of the love between Black women.

“Talking back is ‘the expression of our movement from object to subject” and a gesture of defiance that heals to make new life and new growth possible (Browne 62). Beloved, we were looking at each other. The gaze is not a stare down, but a stare into the Black lesbian body. Let us look into each other.

(Figure 3. Iphondo, 2003)

Iphondo is an isiXhosa word for providence. Providence is a noun, which means god or nature as providing protective or spiritual care. Pictured is a blurry photo of a naked woman, bare breasted with waist beads right above her pubis mons. The picture is significantly blurred, but there is an emphasis on the deeper symbolism of the waist beads. The Black lesbian body is vulnerable again, naked, but on display in this photo is a cultural remnant of indigeneity. Since the fifteenth century, waist beads have been a cultural practice in Southern Africa. The reference to beads is a symbol of growth into womanhood, a communication of fertility to their potential partners. Iphondo shows a woman with a waist necklace and at the center is a stone. The stone is a material discourse of protection. The stone cleanses you. Let the crystals protect you[8]. Muholi asserts that these waist beads are a source of protection and spiritual care. Iphondo. Homosexuality is unAfrican. Yet, here Muholi uses the waist beads as a way to assert Yes I am a lesbian, I belong here.

The story of Nongqawuse comes here again. The story of how the spiritual protector failed and provoked a transition into modern society. The Black lesbian body, in this photo, is spiritually protected by her stone. Iphondo (which also means the borders of different tribal areas) has become vulnerable with her naked body exposed and vulnerable to violation. This relates back to Nongqawuse, who had a prophecy to prevent the Xhosa from being violated by English settlers. No one listened to her prophecy. No one listens to the Black Lesbian cry. The use of indigenous imagery is relevant for the discourse of South Africa and national belonging. To belong in South Africa and to be a part of the nine ethnic groups, is to hold onto the customs of one’s tribe. Even though there was colonization and apartheid, one must hold on to one’s culture. The Black Lesbian body is a postcolonial subject, a shadow of themselves. The black and white, gray scale intentionality is a larger discourse on the intimacy in being bare but being indigenous. “Black and white image serves to desexualize the fantasy of black women’s hypersexuality” (Nash 50). We must separate the naked black lesbian body from the pornographic[9]. Black and white is an opportunity to re-imagine her. Re-imagine her articulation of intimacy and selfhood. People want to undress the Black lesbian body, so ready to make her other. But in Iphondo she is one of you, still resilient in a space of cultural decay, she is a part of your culture.

Jennifer Nash’s book The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography helps speak to the recovery work of Muholi’s use of materiality of the waist beads in Iphondo. Nash begins by thinking through the complexity of Saartje (Sarah) Baartman’s lingering in the national and global imaginary of the exposure to Black women’s bodies[10]. Baartman is an indigenous woman from the Western Cape, a part of the Khoisan tribe. From her enslavement in 1810 until her premature death, “Baartman’s body functioned as ‘a master text’ that allowed audiences to access and assess the ‘primitive’ other;” her body was on display in human circus-freak shows (Nash 27). The difference-seeking gaze at Baartman’s body made assumptions of the Black female body via a colonial gaze. This historical moment is re-triggered in Iphondo. Here the black lesbian body is vulnerable to that same gaze, that same undressing. She is the freak show, Muholi uses nudity as a reference to many hate crime murders and public executions that leave the Black lesbian body naked on the ground for the community to see[11] the (dead) Black lesbian body. I wonder did they see the stone before they killed her. However, Muholi must recover black female bodies from these images of violence, because according to Nash, “representation inflicts violence on black female bodies,” thus the calmness of nudity is a reference to the erotic, the pornographic, but also to the reiteration of the social life of Black lesbianism (Nash 30),. “Signs of healing… shield black women from further visual exploitation;” there is healing in this image (Nash 31). There is confirmation that the Black lesbian body still wants the spiritual protection from the universe.

Muholi interrogates the (im)possibility of black lesbian desire. For example, “the black female’s body’s woundedness comes at the expense of capturing the possibilities of black women’s pleasure” (Nash 31). As mentioned above, Muholi’s previous work does include a heavy discourse of the black lesbian body left naked in the wilderness in the aftermath of her murder[12]. But in Iphondo, nudity speaks to the possibility of pleasure. The stone is utilized to express intimacy. These intimate moments are countering the violence of representations of the “African Woman” I rely on Patricia Hill Collins’ theory of controlling images[13] to think reflexively on my positionality as a U.S. born Black lesbian and how images that control me are very much historically different for the South African woman. I rely on the dehumanizing legacy of apartheid attached with a strong cultural and tribal hegemony in social space. To extend, “Controlling images are thus pedagogical insofar as they work to make ‘natural, normal, and inevitable’ a dominant racial order, offering instruction on the hierarchy that marks daily life and providing viewers as analytical framework for interpreting black female flesh” (Nash 34). The racialization of queer sexuality as whiteness has excluded blackness from claiming space in this identity, and hegemonic heteronormativity has erased alternative sexualities from existence. These controlling images, thus, pedagogically inform communities that the Black lesbian body does not belong, she does not participate in our culture, and I raised you better than this. We didn’t raise you like this. “Representation is one of the preeminent sites in the production of racial and sexual inequality;” the inequality and hypervisibility of the Black lesbian body is a result of controlling images instructing “viewers on how to injure Black female flesh and naturalize notions of black female sexual alterity” (Nash 33;37). Controlling images let the people know that a way to correct a lesbian is to sexually violate her. Curative rape is a civilizing mission, like Christian crusaders occupying African villages, making them modern townships. The settler mentality became the Native mentality. To extend, colonialism “sexualized black bodies, converting Black bodies into black flesh… the process of being made into a commodity;” thus the authority over the black lesbian body is invested in the flesh of the black lesbian body (Nash 40). Muholi conjures the “long psychic and material reach of slavery.” The psychic control of the Black lesbian body renders her faceless in this photo (Nash 40). Who is this woman? Iphondo, what providence does she come from? Who is her tribe? Who do we hold her accountable to?

Apartheid rendered the indigenous woman (im)possible. Hide your culture, hide your waist, and hide your stone…

In conclusion, Muholi’s work in Iphondo is about countering the objectification that is projected unto the Black lesbian body, by countering the controlling image of Homosexuality as unAfrican. The Black lesbian body is protecting herself spiritually with all she knows as an indigenous woman of South Africa. She is dispossessed within the borders, within her culture. Iphondo also means borders. Nash’s chapter “Archives of Pain: Reading the Black Feminist Archive” introduces the concept of recovery work, which is a “black feminist representation that attempts to salvage the black female body to the violence of the visual field” (Nash 47). Muholi has to recover the Black lesbian body from notions that she is traitor of the nation. The Black woman is the nation, how could she be antithetical? Homonormative nationalisms only find utility in the reproduction of the black woman and not the pleasure/interiority[14] of the Black woman. “Black feminist recovery work: its task is to visually locate black female bodies outside of sexual economy, to insist on black women’s sexual and corporeal wholeness, not to further sexualize black women’s bodies or to assert black women’s embodied fleshy pleasures” (Nash 52). In Iphondo she is whole. She is self making in this, an assertion that this is who she is underneath, protected by the spirits. To follow up with Lorde’s Erotic as Power, “the erotic is a practice of self, a way of feeling in one’s body, a kind of self-articulation that recognizes the ‘life-force of women’ and a practice that is articulated in a host of sites, in ‘our language, our history, our dancing, our work, our lives’” (Nash 54). These beads are a source of self-representation that orients the Black South African lesbian back to her indigenous origins.

(Figure 4. Independent, 2005)

Independent evokes taboos of both sexuality and race play in a post-Apartheid South Africa. Apartheid was a regime of racial segregation, and specifically the relationship between white women and black women was predetermined to be one of exploitive labor (very similar to the black woman during plantation slavery in forced service of the white woman). Independent is a meditation on what it means to desire whiteness in this era of Emancipation. Pictured are two bare breasted women embracing each other. In front is a darker skinned Black woman. Her bare nipple is dark brown, her veiny hands are interlocked with the hands of what appears to be a white woman, whose hand is reaching towards this black woman. Muholi’s utility of the bare breast is another discursive relation to controlling images of the African woman. Sarah Baartman’s image includes her breast as abnormal compared to the petite body frame of the European woman. Muholi addresses the fetishization of black women’s breasts by desexualizing the context and avoiding a pornographic interpretation of excessive representation of Black features. The undressing of the white body and exposure of white breast in relation to the Black body is of interest in my analysis of interracial intimacy for the Black lesbian body. The white woman’s nipple is exposed, pink as it is being hit by the sunlight. This Black woman’s skin is glowing from the sunlight, evoking a promise of freedom. They stand together, effectively engaging with a history of racial domination.

This is one of very few color images in Only Half the Picture. The use of daytime is an immediate connection to the miscegenation laws, the segregation laws, and the nightly curfew placed on Black people during apartheid[15]. Many narratives of interracial desire during apartheid had to take place at night. In queer communities of South Africa during apartheid, a secrecy had to occur in order to practice their desire. There was a night curfew of 9PM for non-white people. Narratives from South African writers discuss  the nighttime as an underground avenue to engage in race play[16]. This curfew only allowed for white people to exist in the cities, making it safer for them at night[17]. After nine, Black people had to be put away in their informal settlements, resting for the next exploitive workday. In some respect, the apartheid ways of navigating space still remain in post apartheid. When I visited Johannesburg, I was surprised at how the streets are virtually empty at night after busy and crowded interactions during the day. Thus, visuality is a representation of history. The daytime element of Independent demonstrates how in this time of  emancipation, she can love at any time.

Interracial race play and intimacy is another reason to render to the lesbian body abject via homonormative (black) nationalisms. In Zethu Matebeni’s “Intimacy, Queerness, Race” there is a meditation on how Muholi’s images are both troubling and liberating[18]. Muholi opens possibilities for claiming an erotic position and complicates post-colonial desires rooted in “painful colonial histories of black female torture while also desexualizing the black female” (Matebeni 404). The relationship between black and white women was nonetheless violent during Apartheid. Thus, Independent questions the constitution of interracial queer sexuality. “It is almost impossible to imagine this photograph being taken in apartheid South Africa, where interracial female same-sex intimacies remain undocumented…representations of interracial same-sex sexuality are rare, unless depicting (white) gay male desire” (Matebeni 409). There is a high level of impossibility in this photo. Apartheid’s regime is about the structural, economic and emotional distance between black and whites. The element of embrace in Independent shows a closeness that was meant to be taboo, even in the afterlife. The notion of “Rainbow Nation” was only supposed to prevent the country from entering into a massive civil war in 1994; it was not supposed to affirm interracial desire. Independent is a critique of the archive, an assertion that this always existed. The faceless bodies are either a utility of universal experience or anonymous desire.

In the afterlife of Apartheid, black queer identity is understood to exist outside the black community. “The irrational claim that black queerness colludes with whiteness not only works against interracial intimacy but also constructs same-sex couples and intimacy as monoracial” (Matebeni 410). To address the traumas of the past, one has to distance themselves from whiteness. Interracial intimacy creates an ‘intense-lover-power-dynamic’ meaning the stakes of this highly politicized desire is definitive of Black lesbian subjectivity. Loving in conflict is definitive of black lesbian desire, apparently. Monoracial desire is a safety and a way to avoid the traumatic past of sexual violence’s perpetrated by white supremacist regimes,[19] or is it? Independent is located within a specific moment of South African racial history. 2005 – eleven years after apartheid, meaning what is the possibility for truly embracing the love of whiteness? There is a secrecy in the images of Only Half the Picture– a facelessness. Who are these women? What is their relationship with each other? Muholi is not Born Free[20] and this nameless, faceless, white woman is not Born Free either. Both of these subjects are a product of Apartheid’s psychic regime. There is something enduring about the display of their love in Independent. Independent from judgment, independent from the past. Muholi is disrupting hegemonic expectations of Black sexuality. To extend, “the image of two female bodies against each other intimates to the possibility of a future without fear, threat but intimacy and desire. It makes imaginable, visible and speakable interracial ‘queer’ desire, while simultaneously opening a renegotiating and unfixing of hegemonic blackness” (Matebeni 414).

There also exists an alternative script in Independent. One that could be commentary on the erotic hold whiteness has on the Black body in the afterlife of apartheid[21]. Race play is a concept worked through in Arlane Cruz’s book The Color of Kink and it is used as a framework to “re-imagine the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence,” which “highlights the contradictory dynamics of racialized pleasure and power through eroticizing racism and racial-sexual alterity” (Cruz 33). Muholi engages with the erotic memory of Apartheid as a continued site of production for Black lesbian sexuality. Independent perpetuates a specter of miscegenation[22] even in lesbian sexuality, which is not tied to a politic of reproduction (Cruz 43). The Afrikaner white woman was seen as the mother of the White Afrikaner nation, even though she is a settler and not indigenous.

The existence of the white woman has thus displaced the Black woman in her own homeland. In this representation, Black female sexual politics are an expression of sadomasochism[23]. Cruz asserts “sadomasochistic desire might be a place from which to exercise power and to exorcise it through the repetition of particular power relations” (Cruz 47). Meaning, the Black lesbian body which seeks the desire of a white female body could be an expression of desire to redress the power of white womanhood in South Africa’s national imaginary. There must be, first, a removal of the national belonging of whiteness and then, second, a re-integration of whiteness on the terms of the black body.

Unlike the imagery of the national imaginary, in the image of Independent, the Black woman leads. Think 1956 Pretoria Women’s March, a critical moment in South African feminist history that celebrates a white dominated feminist coalition. White feminism advocated for themselves and not for the Black woman. Think Olive Schreiner, a suffragette who referred to Black people as Kaffirs[24] and the Europeans as the master race. There has been a historical distrust of the relationship between white and Black women in South Africa. More recently in 2016, at the Pretoria High School for Girls, a Model-C boarding school with predominantly white women, staff were exposed for racist school conduct codes regarding hairstyles, speaking native languages and displays of homosexuality[25]. Even in the contemporary, White womanhood reigns supreme in how South Africa constructs respectable womanhood. The fact is, white women were largely complacent in Apartheid because they benefitted from Black dispossession. Muholi discursively interrogates this in Independent, thus making this the only image in Only Half the Picture where a white body appears. Yet, a Black female body leads. Independent erotically crosses racial borders.

The critical question here is: Can the white woman be Independent in a land that is not hers? Muholi’s decision to include this white body in a discourse of Independence is also a sadomasochistic desire for whiteness to be included in the South African imaginary even though there is an ever-present settler positionality. To extend, “race play reveals the profound paradox of this enduring fantasy/reality dialectic: even as these practices recite, indeed require “real, shared world” historical and political references, such play can be imagined, enacted, and narrated as pure fantasy” (Cruz 48). Thus Independence is a fantasy, a dream not actualized, and again, the barrier of whiteness is a symbol of Black dispossession.

In conclusion, Independent alludes to the unspeakable pleasures of Black women’s submission to the white female body (Cruz 39). Interraciality, as it relates to postcolonial queer sexuality, is a challenge to narratives of historical progress. These unspeakable pleasures are hidden via the facelessness of both the white body and the Black lesbian body.

(Figure 5. Case Number, 2004)

Case Number is a sole receipt of a South African Police Service memo of “Rape and Assault.” Muholi photographed the receipt of a person who had just been raped and assaulted in Soweto (the largest township in South Africa[26]). The receipt only leaves the information of the Inspector, the case number, the victim’s phone number, and the date of 16 December 2004 (the prime of South Africa’s joyous tourist season). It is just a receipt, not even a police report; a simple notification that the event occurred. The erasure of anti-Black and anti-queer violence from state archives is shown in Case Number. The lack of detail shows a lack of investment in making an intervention on these violence’s against Black lesbians.

Teju Cole’s essay “Death in the Browser Tab” can help explain Muholi’s choice to highlight the materiality of the state via receipt. Cole reflects on recent police-related murders of unarmed black people in the United States and how accessible witnessing black death has become. “I felt that death had come within too-easy-reach, as easy as opening up a browser and pressing play. I recognized the political importance of the videos I had seen, but it had also felt like an intrusion when I watched them: intruding on the sorrow of those for whom those deaths were much more significant, but intruding, too, on my own personal but unarticulated sense of right and wrong” (Cole 202). Cole presently speaks to what Muholi understood back in 2004 with the continuous murders of Black lesbian women in the township in a post-Apartheid South Africa. The sensational death of the Black lesbian body could be captured in local press newspapers detailing the grotesque and symbolic ways lesbians were being publicly executed in these informal settlements. Whereas white queers bought condominiums in Rosebank to mimic gay neighborhoods in the United States, Black lesbians were left vulnerable to the remains of land dispossession and informal settlements. Muholi does not want to explicitly induce a passive affect and subjective gaze with the image of the receipt, but more critically, Muholi reinforces how, in a new South Africa, violence and structures still remain. The same police force that killed seven hundred children during the 1976 Soweto Uprising is the very force that negates the Black Lesbian Genocide happening in the township. This genocide is structural, physical and psychic.

Suid-Afrikaanse Polisiediens. In Soweto, children held signs stating To Hell With Afrikaans during the uprising, yet on the police receipt, Afrikaans is represented as the official language of documentation. This is a representation in a post Apartheid South Africa that the regime is not over, and that the black lesbian body continues to navigate the inefficiencies of the afterlife of Apartheid. All Muholi leaves us with is a receipt. A proof of purchase, a proof of trauma. “There is still time. That is when I stop the video and exit the browser” (Cole 206). Cole exits the browser tab that hosts the moment from the social death of the black body to the actual death of the black body. He watches a video of Walter Scott being killed by an officer. A faceless (however not nameless) white officer. He has to stop the video. He cannot confirm what he already knows is happening. The Black necrophilia of Black Art is what Muholi avoids by adopting an abstract critique of the nation state. Muholi will not control the imagery of the Black lesbian body as a subjectivity of violation and death. She returns the gaze back to the paradoxes of the state. To be post-Apartheid, but still operate in Afrikaans[27]. To have Truth and Reconciliation Commissions for hate crimes of the past, while negating contemporary manifestations of this violence.

Muholi’s Black lesbian critique of the paradoxes of Black nation-making is central for understanding the impact of attaching the materiality of this receipt to the Black lesbian body. Muholi is the co-founder of the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW). Founded in 2002, FEW is the first Black lesbian rights organization in Southern Africa. The aim of FEW is to advocate for lesbian rights granted in the constitution yet not always granted in real life. When lesbians are murdered, FEW organizes funerals for women and advocates for public memorialization of women, such as the creation of public benches in townships to honor the existence of women who have been murdered. FEW is notorious for their One in Nine Campaign, a campaign to gain justice for Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo, otherwise known as Khwezi to the public, a Black queer woman who was violently sexually assaulted by South African President Jacob Zuma in 2005[28]. One in Nine created a national dialogue about rape culture in South Africa. One in nine women will be sexually violated in their lifetime in South Africa. “The Campaign supports survivors of sexual violence – those who report the crimes to the police and choose to engage the criminal justice system as well as those who choose not to or are unable to report their rapes,” according to their website.

The legal process was a reminder that South Africa’s new democracy is only reserved for the elite violent patriarchs. Jacob Zuma admitted to assaulting this woman as if she deserved it for her sexuality and HIV positive status. Muholi’s Case Number was created in 2004, an eerie premonition to the horrors of South Africa’s new democracy to deal with the toxic masculinities that perpetuate sexual (and in this case state-sanctioned) violence against Black women.

Khwezi passed away in October of 2016 at the age of 41 from HIV/AIDS complications, after my return from spending the summer in Johannesburg in the Gay and Lesbian Archives working with Muholi’s personal archive. I learned about Khwezi and the resistances that followed. FEW organized legal support and protested for Jacob Zuma’s resignation well before the neoliberal movement #ZumaMustFall[29] When I heard about Khwezi’s passing, I froze; it was during my time in South Africa when the One in Nine Coalition interrupted Zuma’s speech that I was exposed to Jacob Zuma’s history as a rapist (which is surprisingly not problematic for the ANC women’s auxiliary group). I froze because another Black woman was violated and killed by the heteronormative (black) nationalisms that rendered her abject. I froze because the silence around HIV/AIDS in South Africa is still taking lives as a result of denial in President Thabo Mbeki’s administration[30]. South Africa’s new democracy was not righteous, but was rather a violent assertion of the dominance of patriarchal ideologies. Khwezi died from her citizenship being questioned as she exposed the violence’s of the nation state power held by Black men. Khwezi died from Mbeki rejecting the HIV/AIDS crises, refusing medicine, and defunding public health. We forgot to check back in with South Africa after their freedom moment in 1994. Were they even free? Khwezi’s death could have been prevented. Marikana[31] could have been prevented. Case Number addresses this very paradox of a lack of initiative to prevent these gross violations from recurring. The lack of detail and the power of ambiguity activates authority to abuse.

Muholi’s work as an activist shows that her call for a Black Queer Visibility[32] is more than some theoretical exercise[33]. Case Number is a call into the diaspora to not forget about the logistics that are required for a transitional democracy. Case Number is an archival retrieval of the dismissal of Black women’s pain and violation without retraumatizing the actual imagery of the black female body. The cultural investment in the black female body’s woundedness comes at the expense of critiquing violent regimes that wound her.

(Figure 1. ID crises, 2003)

ID crises is a performance of survival. Crises. She is in crises, the country is in crises, a crisis of representation. Pictured is a woman in the process of binding her breast. She is in isolation; her boxers signify a masculine of center[34] aesthetic. Alone, she prepares to begin the day. The window’s light exposure signals an early morning, the beginning of day, sunrise. The window panel is cemented, signaling the housing types typical to township homes. Her bare breast exposed, she is in the middle of the process of covering herself. Maybe for survival. Maybe she will pass better while navigating the gazes trying to undress her, see who she is. She looks down concentrated on the task. The grain of film shows Muholi capturing this act in just the right moment. Film is an intimate photography medium because it relies heavily on capturing the moment, the captive body in the moment. The performativity of binding one’s breast is a layered process of making self. Alterations to the self can be seen as a protection from gaze, or an affirmation of an emerging identity. ID crises. The title could be a reference to how the Black lesbian body- in her cultivation of an aesthetic of fabulation[35]– negotiates an identity crises based on fact or fantasy. The fact of black lesbianism is a constant navigation of postcolonial anxieties. Homosexuality is unAfrican. The fantasy of black lesbianism is that the black lesbian wants to be a man, altering herself to mimic a masculinity that does not affirm her. I will show you are not a man.

Jared Sexton’s article “The social life of social death: on Afro-pessimism and black optimism” opens with a quote from Frank B. Wilderson. “Such gatherings are always haunted by a sense that violence and captivity are the grammar and ghosts of our every gesture. This is where performance meets ontology,[36]” (Sexton 1). ID crises is haunted by the violence and captivity of existing in the confining geography of the township. Her binding is a gesture of survival and her performance is her ontology. However, as Fanon asserts, ontology “does not permit us to understand the being of the black man,”[37] thus ontology does not permit understanding of the Black Lesbian body, but is that the goal of ID crises? There is a movement of escape, to break every enclosure, an inherent fugitivity exhibited in ID crises that is, however, performative.

Sexton’s article is a meditation on if Afro Pessimism and Black optimism have the same logical and ontological priority of establishing Black death and Black life as the same phenomenon. To extend, “does (the theorization of) social death negate (the theorization of) social life, and is social life the negation (in theory) of that negation (in theory)?”(Sexton 35). Muholi addresses this question in ID crises by highlighting the quotidian anxieties of black lesbian presentation into the world. The binding of the breast is an act, a performance of  survival as much as it is about aesthetic. The social death of masculine of center lesbians leave them vulnerable to appearing as an outlier and abject in community space, however the social life exists that many black lesbians engage in a self-making process that plays into gender variance. Sexton’s article doesn’t complicate blackness via sexuality or gender, as it is a critique of Black studies’ mission of intelligible inquiry of contemporary dispossessions in the diaspora. However, I use Sexton to understand the tensions of the social life of social death for the Black lesbian body. To extend, “social death might be thought of as another name for slavery and an attempt to think about what it comprises, and social life, then, another name for freedom and an attempt to think about what it entails” (Sexton 17). Social death is how one interrogates the fantasy of the Rainbow Nation. Social life is the affirmation of the fact of Black Lesbian identity.

Sexton asserts: “A living death is as much a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of…the modern world system. Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space” (Sexton 28). The shadows of ID crises are a meditation on the underground life of the black lesbian body. She has to armor herself aesthetically to survive the day, the modern world system. She oscillates between citizen and subject, history and heritage. She is in an ID crises. This act of binding being displayed is a material representation of the theoretical divide between social death and social life.

(Figure 3. Aftermath, 2004)

Aftermath catches the audience in a moment of wanting to refuse the gaze. The aesthetic of displacement[38] activates one to question why they must look at her scars. Aftermath is a continuation of symbolic discourses Muholi uses without rematerializing sexual trauma. Pictured is a woman standing solo, covering herself. What is central to this image is a scar on her right thigh. It is a scar that looks as if a knife ripped through her. Aftermath exposes us to the torture of the Black Lesbian body without forcing us to return to the site of injury. The mutilation of the Black Lesbian body must be interrogated as a performative act of the heteronormative urge to contain. This afterlife of apartheid has not turned into a regime of countering violent masculinities that use force to silence the Black Lesbian body. Aftermath is a photo of silences. What happened to her? I can’t help but to question. But I know I shouldn’t.

Sadiya Hartman’s Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America theorizes how violence was central to the making of the slave. Is violence central to the making of the black lesbian? Post-Apartheid South Africa is a failure of implementation and a further denial of humanity for Black Lesbian women. The spectacle of Black Lesbian suffering is represented in Afterlife. “What concerns me here is the diffusion of terror and the violence perpetuated under the rubric of pleasure, paternalism, and property” (Hartman 4). Who felt they had access to her? Who gave them permission to touch her, cut her? The pleasure in mutilating the black lesbian body is a part of a larger disposition toward black necrophilia. Heteronormative nationalisms grants paternal access to seizing the Black lesbian body as personal property for moralistic reprimanding. He has control of her. “I am concerned with the savage encroachments of power that take place through notions of reform, consent and protection” (Hartman 5). What is the aftermath of a free South Africa? Is it continued violence? “Emancipation appears less the grand event of liberation than a point of transition between modes of servitude and racial subjection. As well, it leads us to question whether the rights of man and citizen are reliable or whether the appellation “human” can be born equally by all” (Hartman 6). The Black lesbian is not human. Emancipation has not been granted yet. She must still slave to subjection and serve the perceptions of cultural authority that render her abject. Her safety and life, are in the hands of man. To extend, the 1996 Constitution that promises equal protection of citizens regardless of race, sexual orientation, gender, etc. also produces more corporeal anxieties for the liberal order.  Thus, the double bind of equality and exclusion illuminates modern state racism from its Apartheid predecessor rather than simply providing an instance of the dismantling of the Rainbow Nation agenda, which has been conveniently enacted in post-Apartheid South Africa. People would rather encounter Aftermath and ponder interventions for LGBT equality than interrogate what structural servitude looks like for the Black majority in South Africa.

This need to posses the Black Lesbian body contributes to the spectacular suffering of her existence. Aftermath forces the audience to not only inquire about what the scars are, but to also question, how is this violence a perpetuation of the Apartheid state-making project?