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Female impersonation and gender ambivalence: Does drag challenge gender norms?
No full textThis article explores the question of whether drag, in the form of female impersonation, unsettles gender norms. Some scholars and analysts of drag performance, such as Rusty Barrett (1998), James Scott (1990), Verta Taylor and Leila J. Rupp (2003), argue that drag is a form of resistance to dominant gender norms. I depart from these assertions and maintain that such a perspective overlooks the complexity of drag. While it can be argued that drag highlights the performative attributes of gender (see Butler 1996), drag queens in many ways affirm the stigmatised effeminate stereotype of gay male sexuality. It is thus too simplistic to posit drag performance as either subversive or reaffirming of heteronormative gender models. Building on the insights of scholars such as Judith Butler (1990; 1996), Lila Abu-Lughod (1990), Keith McNeal (1999), Carol-Anne Tyler (2013) and Caitlin Greaf (2015), as well as drawing on some of Andre Charles RuPaul’s drag race shows, I argue that drag does not aim to challenge dominant gender norms. Rather, I maintain that drag highlights the inherent ambivalence of gender generated by heteronormativity, simultaneously playing with the inconsistencies between gendered cultural paradigms and actual experience. It is in this interstice that drag performance, as an art of irony and parody, opens up possibilities for gender multiplicity
The mandate of Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission in promoting and protecting the rights of persons with disabilities
Full text linkPersons with disabilities are vulnerable to systematic discrimination, social exclusion and prejudice within political, social and economic spheres. They are at the highest risk of human rights violations. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), of which the main object is to promote and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms for all persons with disabilities, implicitly nominates National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs) as key institutions in the advancement of rights of persons with disabilities. Similarly, the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Africa impliedly designates NHRIs as institutions responsible for monitoring the implementation of the rights of persons with disabilities. In the same spirit, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights recognises that NHRIs compliant with the Principles on the Status of National Human Rights Institutions commonly referred to as the Paris Principles are the cornerstone of national human rights protection systems. The Paris Principles enjoin NHRIs to take comprehensive action towards both human rights promotion and protection. The Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission is the NHRI of Zimbabwe and is accredited by the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions as fully compliant with the Paris Principles. The ZHRC’s mandate to advance the rights of persons with disabilities is drawn from the CRPD, and most importantly, domestic legislation sanctioning its existence. This paper seeks to explore the mandate of the ZHRC in the promotion and protection of the rights of persons with disabilities in Zimbabwe
Ratification of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples\u27 Rights on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Africa: An overview of the implications
No full textSurface and underneath: A linguistic landscape analysis of the Bosman neighbourhood in Pretoria
Full text linkThis article explores how the study of the linguistic landscape (LL), which is to say the texts visible in public space, allows for a rich and complex understanding of place. More specifically, the article studies the Bosman neighbourhood in Pretoria through a geosemiotic lens. Geosemiotics situates signs in the material world, approaching them as actualisations of a multimodal social semiotic and as a site of encounter of the cycles of habitus, interaction, place semiotics and visual analysis. Walking is adopted as a research methodology, a means of reading the city and also a praxeology with which to constitute place. Aspects of LL that are considered here are reading path, change over time, materials used, represented participants and local and global production. Themes discussed are the habitus of receivers and producers expressed in the LL and mediated practices such as literacy. Language domination, the differentiation in LL according to power and temporality, informal and transgressive texts and the narratives and lives of producers and receivers are also introduced. Bosman emerges as a site of entanglement where origins, aspiration, intimacy and vulnerability merge in unexpected ways
Guarded visions: walls, watchtowers and warped perspectives in the Israeli occupied West Bank Palestinian territory
Full text linkThis paper examines the relationship between Israel’s fortification of physical space and narratives of division in the Israeli occupied Palestinian West Bank Territory. I argue that the fortification and separation of physical space deepens segregation, and increases fear, hostility and disconnection between people living in this context. Furthermore, I suggest that this relationship between narratives of division and insecurity and structural mechanisms of control within the West Bank influences and impacts on individuals such that personal perspectives become guarded and defensive. The mediation of subjects through a defensive lens can prevent individuals from forming connections that acknowledge the permeability of seemingly impenetrable distinctions between inside and outside, or self and an-other. The looking, recording and representation of people in a place that is guarded and framed from a position of insecurity reduces the capacity of individuals to locate openings that traverse restrictive boundaries. In order to contextualise my discussion, I have included personal documentation of defensive structures photographed in the West Bank between 2013 and 2014. I position my observations and analyses in relation to discussions about the Oush Grab Military Base presented by the Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) in their recent publication Architecture after revolution (2013)
VIADUCT 2015 ‘Archival addresses: photographies, practices, positionalities’
Full text linkThe Research Centre, Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA) at the University of Johannesburg has since its inception convened a number of notable conferences that have invigorated academic debates and stimulated new avenues for research and enquiry. VIADUCT 2015, titled ‘Archival addresses: photographies, practices, positionalities’ continues in the VIAD trajectory by having presented a platform for significant and substantial explorations of ‘the complexities of contemporary archival practices, and how these play out using lens-based and new media technologies
BETWEEN DEMOCRACIES 1994-2014. Remembering, narrating and reimagining the past in Eastern and Central Europe and South Africa
Full text linkOn the generous invitation of conference organiser Dr Judy Peter, two staff members and three students from the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Pretoria were privileged to attend this conference on remembering in Eastern and Central Europe and South Africa, held at the University of Johannesburg from 13 to 15 March 2015. The conference represented a remarkable collaboration between scholars from and /or scholars working on these two not-so often compared or juxtaposed parts of the world. The reason for Dr Peter bringing Eastern/Central European and South African memories, monuments, memorials, public histories and art into a single scope, is the trajectory shared by both regions of having become democratic only after the end of the Cold War, hence the dates: 1989-2014
‘Other ways to be’:Home, space and (un)belonging in the poetry of Ursula K. Le Guin
Full text linkUrsula K Le Guin’s writing, in poetry, fiction and expository prose, displays a carefully nuanced response to space and place. In many of her narratives, the protagonist journeys to a distant realm and then returns home via a complicated route, thus following a conventional quest structure. The theme of home – the place where one is welcome and at ease – is recomplicated, I suggest, in her later writings. In Always coming home, the “home” posited by the title is located, not in any definable place or time, but within a holistic appreciation for the interconnection of natural phenomena. In her later works, Blue moon over Thurman Street and Out here: poems and images from Steens Mountain Country, Le Guin and her collaborator, photographer Roger Dorband, take the interrogation of “home” still further until the volumes become intensive investigations of mutability and duration as well as familiarity and dislocation. Through Le Guin’s characteristic propensity for balance and equipoise, these volumes lead the reader to new understandings of self, place and (un)belonging
Face Forward: International Typographic Conference
Full text linkThe inaugural Face Forward typographic conference, which was held at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) in Ireland, forms part of ‘ID2015; the Year of Irish Design’ governmental initiative, which aims to bring global awareness to various branches of Irish design and by extension, typography. Face Forward is the first peer-reviewed conference of its kind, and offered a sizable forum for engaging with and presenting critical research into typographic production, representation and dissemination in use
Imagi(ni)ng ‘alternativity’: Loslyf, mainstream Afrikaans pornography and post-apartheid Afrikaner identity
Full text linkAt the time of its launch in June 1995, Loslyf was the first and only Afrikaans pornographic magazine in South Africa. Editor Ryk Hattingh was the primary creative force behind the magazine for the first year of its publication. During this time, Loslyf contributed towards the broader project of democratic expression in an expanding South African visual economy, as a simultaneously well considered and underrated (at the time of its publication) cultural product. As a powerful contributor to an Afrikaans imaginary (and a representation of a new Afrikaner imaging) emerging at a time of political renewal, Loslyf provides a glimpse into the desires, tensions and tastes of and for an imagined community potentially still shaped by a past ruled by censorship. The magazine can be seen as an example of an attempt at reinvesting the prescriptive and seemingly generic genre of pornography with cultural specificity and political content, with a view to making this genre more interesting and relevant, alongside an attempt to imbue stifling visualisations of Afrikaner/Afrikaans identity with the same characteristics. Whilst Loslyf succeeded in fracturing the “simulacrum” of pornographic representation, it also demonstrated that an image of this kind of “alternativity” is difficult to sustain