"Gender within Gender": Zanele Muholi's Images of Trans Being and Becoming

Abstract

"Gender within Gender": Zanele Muholi's Imagesof Trans Being and Becoming Gabeba Baderoon Before I knew about transgender, I called it gender within gender. —Zanele Muholi, 2011. In her keynote address 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, dethroning] normal ity, heteronormativity, and homonormativity."1 In her camp persona, Ms. D'vine consciously inhabits a marginal and original space, rather than a Feminist Studies37, no. 2 (Summer © 2011 by Gabeba Baderoon 390 Gabeba Baderoon 391 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 392 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 fuliet to fulius: In Search of My True Identity...