Queer knowledge and the politics of the gaze in contemporary South African photography: Zanele Muholi and others

Abstract

This article is concerned chiefly with work by the contemporary South African lesbian photographer and activist Zanele Muholi, drawing some comparisons with photographs by Sabelo Mlangeni and Lunga Kama. All of these photographers are concerned with the visibility of sexual minorities, the politics of the gaze, the construction of archives, the role of photography that is activist, and the generation of new ideas about community and citizenship. Muholi's work, in particular, speaks to tensions between the body politic and the biopolitics of the black body, the autochthonous subject of tradition and the queer agent of utopian possibility. In teasing out some of the complexities of these tensions and their implications for audiences of the photographs, this article considers thematic concerns and formal attributes of a number of works. It interrogates, too, their implications for thinking about queer futurity in the postcolony, and what their reception reveals about the judgement – and tolerance – of the new custodians of national cultural identities in South Africa.