Visual counternarratives: trans-embodiments in Zanele Muholi’s Beulah and Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji

Abstract

This study explores how portraiture and the colonial gaze are reframed by photographer Zanele Muholi and writer/visual artist Akwaeke Emezi as a means of depicting trans-embodiments in South Africa and Nigeria, respectively. I contend that both artists challenge heteronormative notions of the body to create a Black counter-archive that resists the violent regimes of invisibility to which transgender bodies are subjected in Africa. I discuss how Muholi’s Beulah (2006–) adapts old colonial portraiture strategies to subvert narrow constructions of gender and identity. The gender non-conforming images and transgressive representations serve to introduce Emezi’s use of visual elements in The Death of Vivek Oji (2020) for narrative, thematic, and symbolic purposes. Both Muholi and Emezi contribute to creating a language that speaks about gender and sexual diversity in Africa, and to developing visual counternarratives that seek to remove the limitations of established modalities of identity and belonging.