FRINK Linked Data Fragments server

Matches in SemOpenAlex for { <https://semopenalex.org/work/W4362689953> ?p ?o ?g. }

• W4362689953 endingPage "231" @default.
• W4362689953 startingPage "228" @default.
• W4362689953 abstract "What insights can we gain about post-1994 South African national identity from queer and gender-nonconforming peoples’ artistic and everyday performances? What effects, and affects, do mediated representations of queer South Africans produce in audiences? In Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fragmentation of the Rainbow Nation, April Sizemore-Barber attempts to answer these questions. The author convincingly argues that “queer embodiments, because of their ambiguous relation to the nation-state serve as unstable and prismatic lenses on the post-apartheid moment” (18). Sizemore-Barber shows that artistic, theatrical, everyday, and mediated aspects of queer individuals’ and groups’ performances, can help us better understand the shortcomings of South African “rainbowism” and “the shifting borders of national belonging” (5). Because of their paradoxical position in the nation—constitutionally protected but culturally and sociopolitically vulnerable—the quotidian and staged performances of queer South Africans can serve as “prismatic lenses” on the failures, as well as the possibilities, of the new nation.Prismatic Performances spans over two decades, including the peak “rainbow” rhetoric years, which were between the much-anticipated 1994 elections and President Mandela's passing in 2013. The book's introduction opens with the powerful intervention staged by members of the One in Nine Campaign at 2012 Joburg Pride that commemorated the lives of Black lesbian women lost to deplorable violence and also illuminated the existing fractures within and outside of the queer community—fractures attributable to racism and significant economic disparities between Black South Africans and whites. The author then explains her mobilization of the prism, writing that it “provides an animated, multidimensional way to think through the embodied, deconstructive work performances do” (8). Next is a discussion of the book's methodologies followed by an overview of the four chapters. Prismatic Performances's important intervention lies in its sustained emphasis on the power of the performing body with the author provocatively asking, “if we were to view performance as a method of refraction—of seeing differently—allowing us to disentangle unexamined emotional responses and attachments, what do queer South African performances do and show us in this field?” (7). In this way, Sizemore-Barber contributes to the growing field of queer African studies. She skillfully mobilizes the prism as a metaphor to assert that re-presentations and performances of queer South Africans, and audiences’ reactions to them, reflect and refract the complexities and contradictions of post-colonial-apartheid society. Key to the text is embodiment, space, and audience.Chapters 1, 3, and 4 demonstrate the strengths of Sizemore-Barber's work. In chapter 1, she examines drag performances by Pieter Durk Uys and Stephen Cohen, arguing that “drag and gender subversion allowed for prismatic deconstruction of white identity in the context of political transformation” (24). Their culturally contextualized performances reflected and refracted white anxieties, mourning and feelings of displacement and while Uys's performances sought to displace whiteness in order to make it serviceable for nation-building, Cohens were more “melancholic” and invested in exploring the limitations and unbelongingness of his white male body. Sizemore-Barber writes that beyond visibility, both performances “made [post-apartheid era] contradictions palpable—that is, able to be felt, experienced, and acted upon by their various spectators” (original emphasis; 42).Chapters 2 and 3 explore everyday and staged performances by lesbians and queer and nonbinary people. Sizemore-Barber conducts ethnographic research on the Chosen FEW soccer team, a team of Black lesbian women from different townships around Johannesburg. She argues “ikultcha—Zulu-ized slang for culture—is the nebulous ground on which queer Africanness continues to be negotiated” (original emphasis; 48). Drawing on thinkers such as Ann Pellegrini, Sizemore-Barber avers that by assuming a “projected, subjunctive orientation” or living “as-if” they currently enjoyed the protections and rights to which they are constitutionally entitled, members of the Chosen FEW were able to “enact a projected ‘could be’ via a protective ‘not yet’” (72). Through their intentionally stylized and politically conscious everyday performances of self, they laid claim to, mobilized, and queered (South) African culture and citizenship. These subjunctive performances—dangerous and hopeful—went “beyond merely gesturing to a different mode of being, [but] called these new modes of being into practice” (53). It is interesting that some players made connections through their ancestral heritages to their queer presents to map out and bring into being their queer futures. A provocation that arose for me is how does the presence of our ancestors help queer (South) Africans conceptualize and enact, as José Muñoz prompts, pleasures, ways of being, and new worlds? Perhaps more than any of the other chapters, chapter 2 underscores the transformative might of sustained, embodied, culturally contextualized queer performance.Chapter 3 is one of the most compelling. It analyzes performer-choreographer Mamela Nyamza's, playright Mojisola Adebayo's, and photographer-artist Zanele Muholi's work. At its core, this chapter is about looking—it is about colonial, white supremacist, heteropatriarchal spectator viewing and how the aforementioned artists’ re-presentations, through what Sizemore-Barber calls “an aesthetic of displacement,” disrupt, “indict,” and redirect the act and process of looking (79). As Toni Morrison teaches, even a gaze can colonize. Nyamza and Muholi sensitively explore the often harmful relationship between invisibility and hypervisibility in which many Black lesbians live and, through their art, turn the gaze back on audiences, forcing them to interrogate their own desires and in/actions. As the author articulates, “this chapter takes the interplay between the body of this spectacularly hypervisible/invisible lesbian and the demanding gaze of her spectators as its central performance” (81). Through careful analysis of various texts including a theatrical production, photographs, and an exhibition, Sizemore-Barber shows how while acknowledging the realities of violence and so-called corrective rape, Nyamza and Muholi's “affectively refractive” depictions of Black queer women avoid framing them solely as victims or “hyperconsumable symbol[s]” but rather present them as human beings who matter, who love, who exercise agency, and who live (79). By disrupting the violent colonial gaze, they challenge us to see differently, which is crucial when depicting queer people's bodies and gendered violence in the so-called rape capital of the world.In chapter 4, the author discusses how a kiss between two Black male characters on the popular South African soap opera Generations affected an online community. Departing from the book's first few case studies, which illuminated how the performing queer body functioned as a prism onto which audiences “projected and reencountered” their ideas regarding national identity, this chapter focuses on an audience's response (108). Sizemore-Barber analyzes over 750 blog posts and 114,000 comments on the once vibrant Gensblog to explore how the soap opera format in particular and its conventions “refracted” through the blog, allowed audiences to relate with themselves and others, queerness, and the notion of African culture differently. Both old and new media platforms allowed members of the “Gensblog family” to reflect on, and to an extent expand, their beliefs on belonging, family, homosexuality, and Africanness.At times, issues in translation compromise the author's otherwise forceful intervention. Some words and phrases in the book do not translate appropriately in the South African context and there are a few mistranslations. In the second chapter, Sizemore-Barber states that what her interview participant is doing, describing herself, is “lithoko” or “praise poetry” (71–72). This could appear to some readers as a lack of adequate knowledge regarding the characteristics, meaning, and purpose of lithoko. Finally, the author makes some claims about townships and the use of a US racial epithet that may warrant some review.The idea of re/making the world through queer performance is not new. Prismatic Performances's intervention that emphasizes the ways in which queer South African performers draw on their local post-colonial-apartheid realities and cultural cosmologies, queer space, as well as re-present and narrate self and community provides valuable touch points for LGTBQ theorists working to bring that which we desire, groan for, but cannot yet articulate, here. Paying attention to the way Black South African lesbians embody the “as-if” every day—asserting authority over tradition and culture, time/space, and life itself—can, if we allow, animate and make productive the fractures in the rainbow and produce better praxis for an even better world.Readers will find Sizemore-Barber's arguments provocative and timely. Prismatic Performances is a lucidly written interdisciplinary text that reflects years of thoughtful ethnographic research; it is geared toward an academic audience and will be useful to scholars and practitioners in queer studies, performance studies, and theater, among others." @default.
• W4362689953 created "2023-04-08" @default.
• W4362689953 creator A5074350020 @default.
• W4362689953 date "2022-10-01" @default.
• W4362689953 modified "2023-10-14" @default.
• W4362689953 title "Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fragmentation of the Rainbow Nation" @default.
• W4362689953 doi "https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.9.issue-3.0228" @default.
• W4362689953 hasPublicationYear "2022" @default.
• W4362689953 type Work @default.
• W4362689953 citedByCount "0" @default.
• W4362689953 crossrefType "journal-article" @default.
• W4362689953 hasAuthorship W4362689953A5074350020 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConcept C107993555 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConcept C111919701 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConcept C120665830 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConcept C121332964 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConcept C144024400 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConcept C191015642 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConcept C205649164 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConcept C2776558979 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConcept C2778584255 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConcept C41008148 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConcept C95457728 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConceptScore W4362689953C107993555 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConceptScore W4362689953C111919701 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConceptScore W4362689953C120665830 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConceptScore W4362689953C121332964 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConceptScore W4362689953C144024400 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConceptScore W4362689953C191015642 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConceptScore W4362689953C205649164 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConceptScore W4362689953C2776558979 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConceptScore W4362689953C2778584255 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConceptScore W4362689953C41008148 @default.
• W4362689953 hasConceptScore W4362689953C95457728 @default.
• W4362689953 hasIssue "3" @default.
• W4362689953 hasLocation W43626899531 @default.
• W4362689953 hasOpenAccess W4362689953 @default.
• W4362689953 hasPrimaryLocation W43626899531 @default.
• W4362689953 hasRelatedWork W2024719647 @default.
• W4362689953 hasRelatedWork W2152877587 @default.
• W4362689953 hasRelatedWork W2176647214 @default.
• W4362689953 hasRelatedWork W2332679847 @default.
• W4362689953 hasRelatedWork W2339902920 @default.
• W4362689953 hasRelatedWork W2899084033 @default.
• W4362689953 hasRelatedWork W2946207566 @default.
• W4362689953 hasRelatedWork W3209674148 @default.
• W4362689953 hasRelatedWork W4235318949 @default.
• W4362689953 hasRelatedWork W4281729576 @default.
• W4362689953 hasVolume "9" @default.
• W4362689953 isParatext "false" @default.
• W4362689953 isRetracted "false" @default.
• W4362689953 workType "article" @default.