Footnotes - Intersectional Strategies in (South) Africa

Queering the Stereotype

Date: 12 september
Time: 16:00 - 17:00 uur
Location: YouTube
Language: English


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Episode 4 Queering the Stereotype

In this episode of Footnotes, we’ll dive deeper into the relation between main stream cultural production and queer cultural and artistic practices. What does it mean to produce ‘queerly’? What different strategies exist to create space for queer and nonnormatively gendered voices? Does one take a stand and offer explicitly ‘different’ perspectives to what audiences would expect? Does one place footnotes in an otherwise largely heteronormatively organised society in order not to lose as sense of togetherness and cohesion? Does simply adopt a new norm and start broadcasting that as the way to go? Or does one, to speak with Mireille Rosello, ‘decline’ participating in the exclusionary feelings that stereotypes produce by refusing them, rewriting and reorienting them towards new meanings that can hold true for all? What is the power of metaphor, language and music in these questions? 

 

Mia Arderne is a Cape Town-based writer with bylines in New FrameMail & GuardianThe Vrye Weekblad, CosmopolitanMarie ClaireVISI, GQCity Press and more. Her writing explores the politics of gender, race, identity, sexuality and mental health. Her debut novel, Mermaid Fillet, published by Kwela (NB Publishers) in 2020, has been long-listed for the Sunday Times-CNA Literary Awards.

Amy Brown identifies as Queer. They consider themself a scribe, having been in love with words since they memorized Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” as a child. They were exposed to Word-Sound-Power and instantly knew they wanted to be a storyteller. Their parents’ electric taste in music set their foundation for their love of song and by age seven, they were writing and performing original concerts. Brown comments, “The joy I find in being in front of an audience is a reminder from my child self that I am magic.”

Prof. Martina Vitackovais an interdisciplinary feminist scholar in the fields of literature, gender studies and postcolonial theory, specializing in Dutch and Afrikaans literature. Her main research topics are postcolonial women’s writing and popular romance. She currently holds a position as guest professor at the Ghent University in Belgium.

Dr. Hanneke Stuit is Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and is affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Her research focuses on the narratives and metaphors generated in and about spaces that seem peripheral to modernity, but are in many ways constitutive of it, specifically carceral and rural spaces.

About the series

Intersectionality has, in recent years, rapidly grown into a buzzword in cultural, academic and political debates across the world due to the ongoing need to foreground a much wider array of voices than was formerly the case. Voices that can speak to the often troubling ways in which the various intersections of race, gender, sexual or cultural inequalities in people’s lives wreak havoc for some, but not for others. As Desiree Lewis and Gabeda Baderoon argue in their introduction to Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa, mapping these interconnected power relations, so that they can be made visible and addressed, is no easy task. Especially not in an “age of advanced capitalized globalization”(Bogic qtd in Lewis and Baderoon), where some of the power structures in place have become so large and overbearing (like the imbrications of race and gender with market mechanisms), that situated perspectives tend to be drowned out by the boom of so called progress.

It all started with And Wrote My Story Anyway : Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism, Barbara Boswell’s book that Wits University Press published in 2020. The topics discussed in this book deserve more than a book review. Black feminism, and many other subjects on the broad grid of intersectionality deserve their own airing time. It was not hard to find inspired other academics and cultural producers to join the bandwagon in this series. We’re looking forward to create fascinating episodes together with (South) African makers and theorists. Follow our website and YouTube channel, to stay updated on the coming topics and guests in our new series!

Footnotes – Intersectional Strategies in (South) Africa, is a bi-monthly online program. To make the conversations accessible to people from multiple lingual backgrounds, this series will be produced in English.

 

 

 

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