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CSA&GCSA&G

A queer lockdown

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by Pierre Brouard

A lockdown is a very queer thing, but to be queer in a lockdown can be even trickier.

Queer people who want to come out may not because if they face hostility they cannot escape, and those who are out may suddenly find they face a new kind of scrutiny, unleavened by opportunities to leave the home even temporarily and find solace in friendship and community.

A young trans man of my acquaintance reached out to me recently to say that as he was forced to be with his family during lockdown he was faced with an extreme and intense version of their transphobia, manifesting in deliberate mis-gendering from his family, accompanied by promises (threats?) of prayer interventions to “de-trans” him.

As Mamba online noted “amid the pandemic, millions around the world are under some form of lockdown or isolation, leaving vulnerable people at the mercy of those they live with.” Citing a UK organisation, the Albert Kennedy Trust (AKT), they say that “If you’re a young person and you’re thinking of coming out, press pause on that until you get support.” Of course this may be possible for some, but if you are gender diverse in some way, it is often more difficult to “press pause” on how you look.

AKT also noted that for many LGBTQIA (queer) youth, homelessness is already their reality. While there are few statistics on queer-specific homelessness in South Africa, international studies have shown that queer youth are more likely to end up on the streets. And South Africa only has one shelter for queer people in crisis, the Pride Shelter in Cape Town: what might other queer people across the land do?

It is important, I believe, to see this issue against the backdrop of a broader gender violence epidemic. There is already evidence of gender-based violence (GBV) becoming worse during a lockdown: victims and perpetrators in domestic violence contexts may be forced to stay together, in pressure-cooker spaces, and opportunities to find support will be limited by the requirements to stay at home.

The South African picture seems mixed: so far domestic violence organisations report fewer calls, although they believe victims may be too scared to reach out; rape statistics seem down, and Thuthuzela Care Centres are less busy according to the Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust. A number of these organisations noted that the beginning of the lockdown was a time of great anxiety for those living in unsafe relationships and homes as they would have had to make quick decisions about where to sit out the lockdown, based on variables they could not always control.

So far, so bad.

Pivoting away from queerness as problem, I’d like to turn to the idea of queerness as opportunity. When you’ve lived your life on the margins, or been sexual in ways which are under the radar, away from the gaze of prudes, life in a time of Covid-19 can simply be a new challenge.

One thing is clear: hooking up during lockdown is not only illegal it is almost impossible to achieve, and even people who are in relationships but do not live together are faced with a complete hiatus in the intimate sphere (beyond phone/cam sex, becoming re/acquainted with one’s sex toy collection and developing a shortcut to Pornhub).

For some, who have lived through the fears of HIV, STIs and even risks associated with hook up culture, a prohibition on sex may seem like another hurdle to be negotiated, not resigned to. Jay, 28, from Spain, in a Huffpost story, had this to say:

“I already feel like I put myself at risk so much already with some of these encounters that Covid almost doesn’t feel that risky in that particular context.” Pressed to explain, he clarifies: “Crazy people, STIs, all the risks that come with walking into a stranger’s house and making yourself vulnerable. Most of the time in secret, so if something were to happen no one would know where you are.”

Obviously I’m not suggesting that queer people (or anyone missing sex, casual or not) break the requirements of a lockdown, but I’m arguing that queer people have “form” when it comes to making peace with danger, and have a rich history of counter-narratives and counter cultures to draw on.

Here are some ways in which this could play out.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if hook up culture and its apps, Grindr and Scruff come to mind, were just a tad kinder, making it possible for people to share ideas and feelings, not just nudes? This is not an attempt to sanitise queer sub-cultures, many of which have fought very hard to break the shackles of heteronormativity and moralism, but there is a case to be made that some aspects of hook up life are dehumanising, splitting the affective from the physical. A sex quarantine, which this is in effect for many people, is a chance to ask some tough questions about what makes us really feel better about ourselves.

Queer people can re-ignite debates about what constitutes family. This has crept up on us over the last decade or two, but the traditional heterosexual family (whether it’s nuclear or extended it usually involves men and women living in spaces with children they have created heterosexually) is under the microscope in ways hitherto unimaginable. And the queers have come to the party; surrogacy, co-parenting in different homes, single and polyamorous parenting arrangements, have all entered the lexicon. In addition, a group of queer people living together in a tight or loose, but unromantic, set up do often consider themselves to be family. And even those who don’t live together might see their queer kin as just that, people to draw on in good times and bad, sometimes before their biological brothers and sisters.

In the context of this lockdown, I know that I have un/consciously reached out to my queer family, especially those who are living alone, to see how they are doing. Some have lost or abandoned (or been abandoned by) their genetic family, or we have a shared experience of marginality: in these times “your people” have special needs, perhaps, and there is an intensity to video and audio calls which I cannot deny.

Such kinship is an example of social capital – “direct and indirect resources that are a by-product of social networks” – in operation. Heckman speaks of queer kinship forms as exemplars of bonding, bridging, and linking social capital.

According to Hawkins and Maurer “Bonding social capital refers to relationships amongst members of a network who are similar in some form. Bridging social capital refers to relationships amongst people who are dissimilar in a demonstrable fashion, such as age, socio-economic status, race/ethnicity and education. Linking social capital is the extent to which individuals build relationships with institutions and individuals who have relative power over them (e.g. to provide access to services, jobs or resources).”

Because queer people often live at the intersection of multiple identities and communities, argues Heckman, they have a unique position within social networks and thus a particular relationship to bonding, bridging, and linking social capital.

Deploying queer capital

Deploying queer capital in the lockdown is, of course, easier said than done.

But I would argue that bonding, bridging and linking are in the queer “wheel house”: now more than ever we need to be there for each other. But the Covid-19 experience is also a time of vigilance. Queer people must seize this moment to ask the bigger questions: can restrictions on civil liberties be used post-Covid by those who resent queer rights; will sentimentality about “family” we are seeing push back the gains of queer family forms; will ideas about “sexual safety” and “morality” be invoked to sideline sexualities and genders outside of Rubin’s charmed circle? We haven’t locked down the implications of Covid-19, perhaps only time will tell.

(If you need phone or Skype support or counselling on coming out, contact OUT in Pretoria on 012 430 3272 / 066 190 5812 or call the Triangle Project Helpline on 021 712 6699 in Cape Town.)

CSA&GCSA&G

The SheLadies Programme

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by Belinda Pakati

Reflections on a pilot project (Community Outreach Programme)

Working with young mothers from High Schools in our Community Outreach Programme has been interesting and fascinating. Young people are curious human beings who like to experiment and explore. This can often lead them to engage in toxic relationships and sub-cultures. Despite the good values that their birth parents had taught them while growing up, getting exposed to social media and negative sub-cultures greatly influenced their lives.

The peer leadership programme carried out by the CSA&G Community Outreach Student Volunteers worked with young people between the ages of 16 and 18, divided into 10 boys and 10 girls from High Schools in and around Pretoria. The programme is focused on providing learners with information on gender, sex and sexuality, basic information on HIV/AIDS and discrimination, drug and alcohol use, communication and negotiation skills, teenage pregnancy and sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR).

The focus in this article is on one school in Atteridgeville. During the recruitment of schools to partner and work with, the Life Orientation (LO) teacher we approached became very supportive. The teacher liked the idea of the programme and assisted in identifying a group of 20 learners to form part of the programme.

During the sessions, particularly on teenage pregnancy and SRHR, learners were very excited to have a space where they were able to speak freely and openly about sex. They participated fully while learning and having fun.

While the learners were interacting with one another, I noticed that when a question on teenage pregnancy was posed to the whole group, both boys and girls would pass it on to specific learners in the session. In a scoffing manner they made remarks like: “We do not know, those who have babies must answer because they know better”. Those that had babies responded by saying “we are not text books you must leave us alone”. The student facilitator intervened to control the situation by reminding the learners that they must abide by the group rule of respecting one another.

In observing the way that the learners were engaging with each other, I felt that the young mothers were somehow alienated: were they facing challenges in the school and from their fellow learners? I decided that I needed to come up with an intervention to engage more with them. I then had a meeting with the LO Teacher where we discussed the idea of the intervention and obtained more information about the young mothers in the school.

The teacher felt that the idea was very relevant because the number of girls who fall pregnant at an early age in their school was high. She supported the programme and said these young women could be an example to other girls in the school. Then the SheLadies programme come into being.

Having these young women in the SheLadies Programme, together with student volunteers from the University of Pretoria, we were able to create a safe space to engage with them on the issues that affect them as young parents. For example, they had to leave school due to their pregnancy and after giving birth returned to the same school.

In the conversations during these engagements the young women indicated that before they became part of the SheLadies programme they did not worry too much about falling pregnant and getting STI’s. They just wanted to feel a sense of belonging to the culture of young people who were able to afford the expensive and fancy life that their friends were living. Even after pregnancy they did not stop seeing the older man because the demand became high now that they had babies. Some said the fathers of their babies were not able to maintain them and their babies because they too were still in school. Others left them while they were still pregnant, and some said now that they were young mothers their partners left them for other girls who did not have babies.

They then resorted to multiple-partner relationships and relationships with older men that could afford to meet their needs: expensive clothes and money. Some said they used the money from these relationships for the right reasons, although they got it in the wrong way.

I was emotionally moved by the stories of these toxic relationships. Poverty was mentioned as one of the driving forces for intergenerational and multiple-partner relationships as a method of survival in life.

They explained that life becomes easier if you embark on these kinds of relationships. You are certain that you have money for your child’s napkins and you will be able to pay the Aunty in your neighbourhood who looks after small babies while you are at school, or in the evening when you have to go out. There will also be taxi fares from home to school and back. You are able to buy food and clothes for siblings and school fees will be paid because the older man provides better support than boys your age.

Having these young women in this pilot project of the CSA&G Community Outreach Programme has afforded us an opportunity to make a difference in their lives.

We were able to help them explore other ways of surviving in life without being dependant on someone else. We also encouraged them to plan a very successful Career Day event which they organised and facilitated for their fellow learners. The event in a way was speaking to them indirectly, so they can benefit from it. We had invited other stakeholders from our university to come and share their knowledge and the importance of education, and to motivate the learners to have the eagerness to further their studies.

I had an opportunity to share from my own personal experience on how pressurising it is to not have higher education qualifications, while being surrounded by intellectuals in an academic institution. I also explained why I was unable to further my studies. I was a young mother myself and I had to return to the same school after giving birth. Raising a child with no support system was never easy. It meant that certain things had to be delayed – time waits for no man (or woman)! After matriculating I had to stay home and raise my child, indirectly relieving my mother from the burden I had added at home.

Behaviour change is very complex. Although I may have not succeeded in changing the mindset of all the young mothers in the programme, some of them were able to see and do things differently after the monthly engagements.

A few started to focus more on their studies, they were able to register for tertiary education by using the information they received during the Career Day Event mentioned above. Others were motivated to find temporary jobs so that they could take care of themselves and their children and save money to further their studies.

They even requested that we should have a session where we could discuss the difference between sex workers and people who engage in relationships to get money from men or boyfriends. Unfortunately, time did not allow this as they had to start preparing for their final exams, and our programmes are designed so that they do not disturb or obstruct our students and learners from focusing and concentrating on their studies. Their education comes first as it holds a key to opening doors for opportunities in life.

But I am confident that the programme changed some of the lives of these young mothers, and it helped me to think about my own story in new ways.

Shalate Belinda Pakati is a senior project manager who coordinates student outreach and community engagement programmes within CSA&G. She is also responsible for the HIV testing and counselling work and on going student support. She has a background in Human Resource Management. She is passionate about working with and giving back to the community. 

CSA&GCSA&G

The Covid-19 pandemic: Re/making common knowledges and common spaces

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Text by Tinashe Mawere

Banter(ing) the Lockdown and gender scripts

Gender scripts and gendered identities are always evident in the everyday. Butler (1988) argues that gendered meanings are made practical and visible through performances of the everyday. Rather than re/locating gender discourses as abstract and located in a world farfetched, it is important that we get realistic and focus on our everyday lives by reflecting on the current Coronavirus, Covid-19-induced lockdown. A quick and random survey of WhatsApp media related to the call to stay at home, circulating in groups that have Zimbabweans living in South Africa, reveals some performances of gender and ways in which toxic knowledges and practices about gender are re/produced and transported. The unrolling lockdown period to stop the spreading of Covid-19 in South Africa and Zimbabwe illustrates how a number of banters or jokes have imagined masculinities as struggling within the domestic space. Simultaneously, the female figure, whose position in domestic spaces has been normalised, has been depicted as having no issues with staying at home. This polarisation buttresses dominant and naturalised knowledge that positions particular spaces or locations as suitable for men and others as suitable for women, making gender and social hierarchies sensible.

Homes, masculinities and femininities

In addition to a clear depiction of the family and homes in heterosexual normativity as prescribed by global dominant knowledges (Peterson 2000), the current Coronavirus, Covid-19 lockdown banters also invite us to unpack the notion of home and the complexities of space and gendered identities. The historical and cultural privileging and naturalization of male power is implicated and acted out through notions of family and the distinctions between domestic/private and public/political spaces (Mawere 2019, 2016; Nyambi 2012; Lewis 2002; McClintock 1993). In narrating the situation at home during the lockdown, most banters position the family in the traditional and dominant sense of heterosexuality, with the wife and husband belonging to clearly-opposite sexual categories. This presentation silences non-heterosexual sexualities and supposes a hierarchy of sexualities where heteronormative sexualities are normalized while non-heteronormative sexualities are unspeakable. In the current national lockdown, it is important to problematize the effects of positioning only heteronormative families where multiple sexualities and sexual relations exist and are acknowledged especially in a ‘democracy’ like South Africa. In many ways, therefore, the lockdown is a microcosm of what happens daily in gendered South Africa. In addition to that, this particular familial notion brings in the complex issue of space and location, where space is polarized as domestic/private and public, and associated with distinct sexualities. This continues the existing discourse of specific roles for each named gender (Mawere 2016; Eisenstein 2000; Peterson 2000; McClintock 1993).

While women are portrayed as nurtured to, natural to and fitting neatly within the ‘imprisonment’ of the home, banters related to the national lockdown portray men as misfits in the domestic space and therefore excuse them from what are regarded as marginal spaces, occupations and identities. Men are shown struggling to survive inside the home – in confinement, implying and naturalizing the public and unbound as the space for men. This links to images of men as active, assertive, wild, agentive and dominant in public spaces. Where men are shown to be adapting to some of the characteristics of the domestic space (like child care, kitchen chores and having limited freedom), they are positioned as caricatures of an inverse and unnatural order of the world.

Confining men to the domestic space is tantamount to reducing them to mere boys; and emasculating them since real men cannot be boxed. This is why some of the circulating jokes during the lockdown show men playing with toys and also playing children’s games. While this locates care in femininity, it also locates care and femininity as marginal, since men are involved only because they have nothing else to do after their removal from their ‘serious’ occupations and spaces. In addition, the home is shown as marginal through its association with care and femininity, hence naturalizing and normalizing male power and locating it outside of domesticity.

Media, real or dramatized, that show men defying the lockdown should be understood in the context of men seeking to escape the emasculating aspects of space; and attempts to gain and prove their manhood. At the same time, the press-ups, frog-jumps, ground-rolling and skop ‘n donner, skiet and donner meted on the men who escape by the military is to censor such masculinities that are now challenging the state, the presidency and putting the nation in danger. President Ramaphosa said, “Staying at home, avoiding public places and cancelling all social activities is the preferred best defence against the virus.” This reveals how epidemics like Covid-19 triggered the surveillance of citizens and how self-surveillance and self-discipling of bodies have become markers of good and responsible citizenship.

No images of struggling women have dominated social media, reinforcing the normalcy and naturalness of their location in the domestic space, hence confirming women’s gendered role of nurturing and care. Thus, limiting women to domestic spaces becomes sensible, hence the circulating media related to the lockdown is re/producing the sensible. In many ways, this “normalises the inferior status of women, and asserts the superiority of men and the necessity for control” (Mawere 2019:34).

Historically, women have been denied space in public arenas, with their activity limited to the traditional private and domestic spheres. The collusion of African traditional leaders with the colonial administration during colonialism to curb the movement of African women in urban spaces (Barnes 1992) is important evidence to support this. In Zimbabwe, this is evidenced by the 1980s random raids of women stigmatised as prostitutes and vagrants in what the government called ‘Operation Clean-up’ (Ranchod-Nilsson 2006).

In Zimbabwe, South Africa and elsewhere, women who have attempted to go beyond their domestic spaces or acceptable limitations have been monitored by patriarchal spectacles, and framed as unreasonable. Moreover, efforts have been made to normalize them or to humiliate and crush them. Women in the entertainment industries, like Bev Sibanda and Chiwoniso Maraire (Zimbabwe), and those in politics like Joice Mujuru, Grace Mugabe and Thokozani Khupe (Zimbabwe), Winnie Mandela, Nkosazana Zuma (South Africa) and Joyce Banda (Malawi), in various ways, attempted to break the boundaries of domesticity which made them conflict with the patriarchal order (Mawere 2019, 2016).

The perceived absurdity of women’s occupation of the public space is a global phenomenon, as shown by the 1997 presentation of British women parliamentarians as Prime Minister Tony Blair’s ‘babes’ rather than as serious and independent deployees and the aggressive sexualisation of Sarah Palin, in the 2008 US Presidential elections (O’Neill et al. 2016, Perks & Johnson 2014, Harmer & Wring 2013) and the demonisation of Hillary Clinton in 2016 US elections (Ritchie 2013). During Zimbabwe’s national elections in 2018, after criticising wives of Zanu-PF politicians for breaking their boundaries and sneaking into public spaces through politics, Nelson Chamisa, the MDC presidential candidate, asserted his power, authority and competency for national presidency. He bragged about “his ability to keep his wife in the right space, i.e. in the domestic sphere. For him, failure to understand properly roles and responsibilities and to act accordingly accounted for Zimbabwe’s failure to grow and flourish” (Mawere 2019:63-64).

In many ways, the home is marginalised and this consequently naturalises social hierarchies based on women’s subordination (Mawere 2016; Yuval-Davies, 1997). Through the silencing of women’s experiences during the lockdown, the home is regarded as commonplace for femininities. Where women characters are shown, they are rather portrayed in a jovial mood since they are made extensions of the environment or as satirising the ‘locked down’ or captured men or rather making men’s lives unbearable by giving them ‘domestic’ chores like cleaning and laughing at them for being locked down. This speaks to what Gaidzanwa (1985) describes as the depiction of women as witches, which is characteristic of many literary texts. These negative images position women as vindictive and evil, substantiating the evil-woman motif which has largely been used as the basis for women elimination and exclusion from particular spheres of life that are deemed essential.

This is also supported by the Madonna-Whore complex where women either saint or sinner, but not both. Literature has shown that women are eliminated and excluded because of the negative images used to characterise them (Mawere 2019; Gaidzanwa 1985). Naturalising and normalising home as a space for women is a way of trivialising women and deterring them from participating in the public or in what are naturalised and normalised as male spaces (O’Neill, Savigny and Cann 2016). This accounts for the lack of cultural, structural and ideological support for women to occupy public spaces and provides reason for the policing of women’s bodies by patriarchy.

The home is associated with the private and is never thought of as the place for men. Addressing the nation, Ramaphosa directed, “From midnight on Thursday 26 March until midnight on Thursday 16 April, all South Africans will have to stay at home.” Staying at home metaphorically implies the emasculation of men. Most men who defied the lockdown did so to subvert their feminisation by the disease, by the threat of a foreigner, an intruder (especially in the context where the Coronavirus, Covid-19 has been associated with foreignness and whiteness, as articulated by Zimbabwe’s defence minister, Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri who publicly said that coronavirus is God’s punishment for Western countries[1]). Breaking the imposed boundaries and going into the public and expansive spaces is therefore a reassertion of masculinities.

A number of videos trending on social media show men disobeying the presidential directive to stay at home, marking disobedience as manly and obedience as cowardice and unmanly. Because of the association of cowardice with femininity, a lot of men have taken risks in life in order to prove their manhood. Disobeying the lockdown directive, especially through an irrational occupation of public spaces was a performance of manhood, which however, challenged the masculinities of the state.

Flattening the curve: Responsible masculinities and responsible citizenship

The South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa situates national defence and the nation’s survival in the imperatives of national unity, singleness of purpose, obedience and responsible citizenship. To ensure that this is done, through the use of the war metaphor, the state embarks on authoritarian nationalism as it brings the military on the streets to survey citizens and enforce the lockdown. In his speech, Ramaphosa articulates that those fighting to defeat the virus, and therefore to save the nation of South Africa from the threat of extinction should be responsible and actively participate to break the virus. This responsibility lies in flattening the curve of the virus or stopping its spread by staying at home. In this case, the defence of the nation, or the war front is located in one’s personal responsibility in stopping the spreading of the virus.

The home therefore, which has been marginalised in dominant literature and associated with femininities becomes central to the survival of the nation of South Africa. As a nation with both sick and healthy citizens and with the sick having to be cared for and healed and the healthy protected, the home is central. The care for the sick and protection for the healthy is located within home/private and within families rather than public spaces. It is therefore important to re/think our dominant perceptions of home, of our notions of defending nations, of masculinities and of nationhood. While the industrial, technological, mechanical and economical world has given us ‘comfort’ and a false sense that we can live and survival away from home and humanity, Covid-19 has forced us back to re/negotiate genders, masculinities, nationhood and citizenship.

Re/thinking home and nationhood

Banters associated with the lockdown and men’s non-compliance with presidential directives are spectacles, performances and re/productions of patriarchal cultures. At the same time, the lockdown measures that centralise South Africa’s defence and national survival at home offer a subversive text that urges us to re/think the notion of home and nationhood. It has taken a pandemic to teach us that there is an important space called home where toxic viruses, genders and lives are ‘flattened’. Subversively, Covid-19 has challenged us to re/think ‘marginal’ spaces and their potential to be spaces of life and our survival.

 

This article was first published by the CSA&G’s Gender Justice Project.

Tinashe Mawere is currently a researcher at CSA&G. He is working in the Gender Justice Project (Irish Aid) based at the University of Pretoria

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barnes, T. 1992. The fight for control of African women’s mobility in colonial Zimbabwe, 1900-1939. SIGS: 586-602.

Butler, J. 1988. Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal: 519-531.

Eisenstein, Z. 2000. Writing bodies on the nation for the globe. In S. Rancho-Nilsson & A.M. Tétreault (eds.), Women, States and Nationalism: At Home in the Nation, 35-53.

Gaidzanwa, R. 1985. Images of Women in Zimbabwean Literature. Harare: College Press.

Harmer, E. & Wring, D. 2013. Julie and the cybermums: marketing and women voters in the 2010 elections. Journal of Political Marketing, 12(2-3): 262-273.

Lewis, D. 2002. Self-representation and reconstructions of Southern African pasts. Deep hiStories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa, 57: 267-281.

Mawere, T. 2019. Gendered and Sexual Imagi(nations): the 2018 Zimbabwean E(r)ections and the Aftermath, Pretoria: CSA&G Press.

Mawere, T. 2016. Decentering nationalism: representing and contesting Chimurenga in Zimbabwean popular culture, PhD dissertation. Cape Town: University of the Western Cape.

McClintock, A. 1993. Family feuds: Gender, nationalism and the family. Feminist Review: 61-80.

Nyambi, O. 2012. Debunking the post-2000 masculinisation of political power in Zimbabwe: an approach to John Eppel’s novel ‘Absent: the English Teacher’. Counter-cultures in Contemporary Africa, Postamble 8(1): 1-14.

O’Neill, D., Savigny, H. & Cann, V. 2016. Women politicians in the UK press: not seen and not heard? Feminist Media Studies, 16(2): 293-307.

Perks, L.G. & Johnson, K.A. 2014. Electile dysfunction. Feminist Media Studies, 14(5): 775-790.

Peterson, V.S. 2000. Sexing political identities/nationalism as heterosexism. In S. Ranchod-Nilsson & M.A. Tétreault (eds.), Women, State and Nationalism: At Home in the Nation? London and New York: Routledge, 54-80.

Ranchod-Nilsson, S. 2006. Gender politics and the pendulum of political and social transformation in Zimbabwe. Journal of Southern African Studies, 32(1): 49-67.

Ritchie, J. 2013. Creating a monster. Feminist Medea Studies, 13: 102-119.

Yuval-Davis, N. 1997. Gender and Nation. London: Sage Publications.

Ramaphosa, C. 2020. ‘‘The most definitive Thuma Mina moment’ for SA: Ramaphosa’s plan for Covid-19’. (Available at https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/read-in-full-the-most-definitive-thuma-mina-moment-for-sa-ramaphosas-plan-for-covid-19-20200315, accessed 03 April 2020).

Ramaphosa, C. 2020. ‘Escalation of measures to combat Coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic’(Available at https://www.gov.za/speeches/president-cyril-ramaphosa-escalation-measures-combat-coronavirus-covid-19-pandemic-23-mar, accessed 03 April 2020).

Ramaphosa, C. 2020. ‘Message by President Cyril Ramaphosa on COVID-19 pandemic’ (Available at http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/speeches/message-president-cyril-ramaphosa-civid-19-pandemic, accessed 03 April 2020).

Ramaphosa, C. 2020. ‘President Cyril Ramaphosa deploys the SANDF’ (Available at https://youtu.be/3Te4RdMF1al, accessed 03 April 2020).

 

[1] Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri says coronavirus is God’s punishment https://mobile.twitter.com/violetgonda/status/1239082877352136705

CSA&GCSA&G

Black Queer Visibility: Finding Simon | 17 July to 9 August 2019

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The Simon Nkoli Collective is a partnership with the Dean’s Office – Faculty of Humanities, the Centre of Sexualities, AIDS and Gender (CSA&G), the Centre for Human Rights (CHR), and the Sociology Department. The Collective aim is to use this exhibition to open debates on transformation, social justice and ideas of memory 25 years into democracy.  Moreover, the exhibition is also a celebration of the Faculty of Humanities Centenary through which Simon Nkoli’s memory is evoked as a site for reflecting on Black queer resilience. The desire to inhabit the past through Simon’s journey is to  map this existence within the contradictions of (in)equality.

Why Simon: The aim is to provide an interesting and engaging introduction to the history of LGBTIQ activism rooted in Black narratives. In the excavation of the earlier narratives of black queer visibility it is difficult to overlook the much-documented life of Simon. It is undeniable that he championed many efforts. When Simon Nkoli’s  memory is revisited, three images are often portrayed: his anti-apartheid, HIV/AIDS, and LGBTI activism. Some argue that he was an internationalist. Nonetheless,  Nkoli remains one of the prominent internationally celebrated South African black queers.

The photographic exhibition profiles a series of thirty images, eleven awards, one video installations and a kanga designed by Kenyan visual artist Kawira Mwirichia. The nature of the installation requires minimal narration with the material intended to solicit the participatory presence of a spectator. Visitors will absorb, critically analyse and construct for themselves the Simon they prefer.

 

Dates: 17 July to 9 August 2019

Viewing times: 9:00 to 16:00

Venue: New Student Gallery, Javett Art Centre, UP Hatfield Campus

Queries: simonnkolicollective@gmail.com

 

Nkoli poster

 

CSA&GCSA&G

In Conversation with: Prof Deidre Byrne

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The CSA&G’s Gender Justice Partnership has published the second episode of its ‘In Conversation with…’ series. In this episode they are in conversation with Prof Deidre Byrne from Unisa’s Institute for Gender Studies.

deadly medicineUSHMM

Reflections on the Deadly Medicine, Creating the Master Race Seminar: 20 September

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What follows below are reflections of the second seminar in the series of seminars that were hosted as part of the Deadly Medicine exhibition at UP. [ed.]

Text by: Pierre Brouard

DM 25 Sept 2018

Dr Rory du Plesis, Attorney Sasha Stevenson, Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng & Prof Catherine Burns

First do no harm, medics are exhorted. Yet history tells another, more complex, story.

Rory du Plessis of the Department of Visual Arts at UP started this engrossing seminar by exploring depictions, visual and textual, of two black women who were inmates at the Grahamstown “Lunatic Asylum” in the late 1800s. “How do we humanise photographic portraits, to bring into view an understanding of patients as individual subjects”? he asked. The two women had been declared insane – Boitumelo had “claimed the mealie fields as her own” and Vuyelwa was a victim of “homelessness, poverty and loneliness”. Rory noted that they were deemed by the authorities as “being unable to cope with civilisation” and were examples of “cultural and physical degeneration”.

Rory spoke movingly of the ways in which the complex subjectivity of Boitumelo and Vuyelwa was reduced to a “mugshot” of abjection, thus debasing them, in contrast to case books of white patients, which to some extent filled in the missing pieces of their lives, a partial act of “resurrection”. The texts in the casebooks allowed those described to “explode into subjectivity and personhood”, even while archival material is itself always incomplete.

For me, the role of the psychiatric professional was raised in this paper: in the execution of their duties, and in the ways in which they depicted their patients, were they guilty of a form of deadly medicine, reducing their patients’ humanity? Similar questions, over a 100 years later, arose at a recent psychology congress I attended, where we were challenged to think about what an “African” psychology could look like. In a time of land hunger, poverty and disconnection, perhaps we need to ask where the mental unwellness lies; in the individual, in the system that produces their distress, or in the discipline which labels and categorises in ways which are sometimes decontextualized?

Tlaleng Mofokeng, a medic and activist for sexual and reproductive justice, began her paper by drawing on the story of Henriette Lacks, an African-American woman whose cancer cells are the source of one of the most important cell lines in medical research, to outline one of her major theses, that gender and racial biases in medicine are well documented. Henrietta’s cells were taken from a tumour biopsied during her treatment for cervical cancer in 1951. No consent was obtained to culture her cells, nor were she or her family compensated for their extraction or use. As a black women, she was an object, not a subject.

Many examples of sexism, racism and objectification were linked by Tlaleng: gynaecological experiments performed on African American slaves; Saartjie Baartman’s treatment as an object of cruel humiliation; and black women in apartheid subjected to reproductive control as an act of racist anxiety and hatred.

Even in post-apartheid South Africa there are challenges: the role of Depo Provera, used mostly by black women, is questionable; and the agency of many black women was limited by a health system which both coerced them into HIV tests as a requirement of ante-natal care, and at the same time denied them ARVs which could save them and protect their children.

When teaching slides of sexual infections are mostly of black genitalia, poor trans youth self medicate to find some congruence between gender identity and appearance, and women still die of abortion-related complications because of state and practitioner ambivalence, we need to ask tough questions about society’s views on sexuality in general, and that of black people in particular.

Tlaleng was at pains to point out that systems of oppression are intersectional and that race and gender need to be seen through the lenses of class, ability, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Health professionals may elide these complexities, or are complicit in acts of omission or commission which limit women’s rights, produce research which is decontextualised, allow global funders to limit funds for abortion work, or develop curricula which reflect colonial notions.

Tlaleng thus made a compelling case for a form of contemporary “deadly medicine”. Yes there are systemic and structural hangovers from apartheid, but in current-day South Africa we still shame and police black women’s bodies and label and shame sexual and gender minorities. We have to look forward with imagination, she argued, holding in mind that women are navigating these intersections on a daily basis in a society steeped in patriarchy.

Catherine Burns of UP challenged us to think of the possibilities of medicine beyond binary forms of thinking; medicine does not have to be either liberatory or “poisonous”. How do we break down the split between traditional medicine and “bio” medicine? What do we do when good medicine comes out of unethical work?

The work of J Marion Sims on slave women, for example, helped to educate a generation of gynaecologists who came to work in South Africa, many of them good practitioners. In her work in the Medical Humanities, and as a historian, Catherine has been able to explore histories of medics who were complicit in acts of dubious morality or who stood up for justice: an example of the former was the use of Depo Provera as a tool of control in the apartheid state. And in the 1970s the story of Steve Biko’s brutal torture and death was an example of both. Just as Ivor Lang and others were found to have breached their ethical codes in how they lied for the state’s actions, other medics of conscience brought this to the public awareness, sometimes at great personal cost.

In the early years of HIV forms of denialism (and the relationship between medics and the state) colluded and collided with each other. Thabo Mbeki refused to acknowledge that “a virus could cause a syndrome”, supported by famous denialist and biologist, Peter Duesberg. And despite his cynicism of ARVs, his government sanctioned Virodene research at UP as an “African” cure for HIV. This research grossly flouted accepted ethical practice and the doctors concerned were dismissed by UP.

Finally, Section 27 lawyer Sasha Stevenson, using the Life Esidimeni tragedy as illustrative, spoke powerfully of how the law can be used to realise health rights, with legal advocacy and activism being enabled by South Africa’s powerful constitution.

Referencing the Treatment Action Campaign’s legal activism around PMCTC and the provision of ARVs to all who needed it, Sasha illustrated how mobilisation of affected communities was a tool to challenge abuses of political (and medical) power by those in authority. The fact that these abuses occurred in the post-apartheid state is depressing, and a sign that power needs always to be held to account, as was even more powerfully illustrated by the Life Esidimeni matter.

And this was made possible by coalitions of psychiatrists, psychologists, mental health NGOs and the families of those affected, who came together to challenge the state’s foot dragging, indifference,  bloody mindedness and callousness. Ultimately the findings of the Health Ombudsman and the subsequent arbitration under retired former Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke were scathing about the state’s actions and made provision for significant redress and the restoration of dignity to the families of those who died.

Ultimately, we are forced to ask whether Life Esidimeni shows we still debase and dehumanise the vulnerable in South Africa; whether health system inequalities are a form of violence; who classifies as human; and how we all have a role to play in ensuring medicine is not deadly but democratic.

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