“Invisibility and hypervisibility” of ‘Ndebele women’ in Zimbabwe’s media

Abstract

abstractIn this article, I argue that Ndebele women, as the subject position of those who pay the gender price of the marginalisation of Matabeleland within Zimbabwean nationalism, are an impossible category in representation. In what can be characterised as the twin challenges of the “crisis of voice” (Couldry, 2010) and “crisis of representation” (Alcoff, 1991), they cannot represent themselves and efforts to speak about them and for them further silences this group. In this article, I mobilise postcolonial and decolonial feminist theories in considering ways in which the double play of invisibility and hypervisibility silences women in the marginalised Matabeleland region (Ndhlovu, 2007; Mhlanga, 2013; Ncube and Siziba, 2017). I trace this invisibility and hypervisibility through a cartoon published in the state-owned daily newspaper, The Chronicle, on 4 February 2016, illustrating how the silencing of Ndebele women works discursively. From the lenses of Zimbabwe’s regional politics, the cartoon was interpreted as sexist, regionalist and bordering on ethnocentrism. However, this dominant reading of the cartoon was challenged for its patriarchal representation of Ndebele women. I use Fairclough’s (1995) discourse analysis method to locate the struggle over meaning in the broader context of the politics of representation in Zimbabwe in terms of popular culture production in the Southern region, and the ethnicised and regionalised politics of the country. I seek to problematise “location, voice and agency” in the representation of Ndebele women in popular culture, in general, and in an editorial cartoon published in a government-owned newspaper, in particular, considering how their subjectivity is “constructed within structures of domination” (Shome and Hedge, 2002:266). Following from Spivak’s (1988) work, I argue that Ndebele women are a subaltern class existing outside mainstream institutional recognition and validation.