Aesthetics of South African Women’s Embodied Activism: Staging Complicity

Abstract

Feminism is a complex subject in Africa, and the relationship between gender studies scholars based in Africa and those based in North America and Europe has been strained because of 'the differences in political environments and experiences of racism as well as interpretations of feminist ideologies and different political alliances and coalitions'. 1 Many African women prefer to speak of 'African feminism' 2 or 'Africana womanism', 3 which highlights the specific legacies of colonialism in the current oppressions experienced by Africana women. 4 However, Gwendolyn Mikell 5 identifies the following issues as being of particular concern to women in Africa: political sovereignty, their nation's economies and domestic cultures, production and reproduction, motherhood, child mortality, marriage and bride-price, female circumcision, polygamy, access to education, and the clash between local and global values and identities. Like any ideology, African feminism is nuanced according to how it is formulated and negotiated within the details of a particular environment. As there are 58 countries, over 2000 languages and many more cultures, approaches to African feminisms differ according to context. For the purposes of this article, I am going to focus on how two South African women artists post-1994 are negotiating their understandings of their own sexualities, cultures, and identities in order to transcend what Jane Bennett and Charmaine Pereira call 'the beleaguered, and ever narrowing, spaces. .. of "gender and development" or "empowerment"'. 6 I begin by contextualising South African women practitioners, and this moment in feminist practice. During apartheid, Temple Hauptfleisch argued, 'most. .. women operated mainly in the private and commercial