‘Disappearance’ and feminist research in the South African academy of humanities 1

Introduction

Evangelical, enraged, whimsical/ironic, the snippets above have snagged my attention in the past months. Due to the luxury of an incoming sabbatical and the simultaneous nausea of ongoing shenpa (a Buddhist term used to refer to the ways in which we become ‘hooked’ by the small conundrums generated by the desire to signify, matter, make sense), I have become unsettled by the challenge of understanding what it may mean to take the politics of gender and sexualities seriously within the life of a writer, an academic writer. In the past decade, although I have worked in a number of ‘non-university spaces’ (as an author of fiction, as a counsellor, as someone supporting diverse non-governmental organization (NGO) initiatives in different ways), the bulk of my day is spent within the grounds of the university, thoroughly enmeshed in the labour of ‘teaching’, ‘administration’ and ‘writing’ through which academics’ lives are – we are told – legible.

One of the responsibilities entailed by such a location is consistent and rigorous reflection on the roots and interests of the knowledges in which one is palpably as a ‘teacher’, ‘evaluator’, and writer invested: what genealogies does one invoke? does one accept the contract to working in ‘the future anterior’, in a tense which is not simply bold enough to claim a future, but has the chutzpah to imagine the processing of a past in the name of that future? and, given that one is, after all, a small mind, and one mind only, how should one angle oneself to the ferocious contemporary debates on the politics of knowledge-creation? Sometimes semi-contained within disciplines, sometimes deconstructive of the ‘discipline’ (a move, which of course, entails reification and caricature as often as it permits innovation), university campuses are replete with argument on ‘the value of the humanities’, ‘interdisciplinarity’, ‘engaged knowledges’, ‘Afropolitanism’, ‘deep sciences’ and so on.

My own work within the university took on, in the late 1990s in a post-flag democratic South African context and a very specific work-space, the intellectual contribution of feminisms to these debates. In 2015, although I continue to find myself provoked, intrigued and intellectually nourished by a wide range of feminist interlocutors within South Africa, on the continent and beyond, when I scrutinize the terrain beyond the solipsisms of my facebook page, e-mail and reading lists, it is indisputable that the most ordinary of feminist theoretical insights seem to struggle for recognition within contemporary South African debates on what constitute resonant, and intellectually, stimulating engagement with questions of knowledge-creation generative of insight. I think, for example, and without edge, of a recent talk by Achille Mbembe on the epistemological politics of decolonization in the South African academy, ‘Decolonizing Knowledges and the Question of the Archive’. Theorizing an epistemological approach to what he terms ‘the negative moment’, experienced by most post-colonial contexts in the aftermath of a (usually, long drawn out process of reaching ‘flag-democracy’, a condition accompanied by a new flag, and possibly new forms of political representative, but embedded into thoroughly familiar economic models and bureaucratic practices), Mbembe draws on readings of particular ideas in Fanon (notably, Fanon’s mistrust of the concept of ‘Africanization’ as espoused by a post-colonial middle class) and works with Ngugi’s exploration of time as a ‘colonized zone’, suggesting that any contemporary thinking on what may revive a university must tackle the processes of neo-capitalism at their root: ‘Thanks to the work of capital, we are no longer fundamentally different from things. We turn them into persons. We fall in love with them. We are no longer only persons or we have never been only persons’ (Mbembe, 2015: 16).

While the paper neatly represents critical dilemmas concerning the architectures (actual, ideological and virtual) of South African universities, it reads as though Mbembe is entirely ignorant of the politics of gender and sexualities, articulated in depth since before the 1990s. He writes of the importance of thinking through spatial arrangements, without the concept of the dichotomy between ‘the public’ and ‘the private’ space, a fundamental zone of feminist analysis; he reminds us of the cost of ‘the quantification of the subject’ (a practice dear to all institutional systems, including universities) without glossing feminist thinking around the potential damage of such ‘quantifications’ to research practice overall, and he invites thought on ‘decolonization in the future tense’, as his overarching approach erases the fact that to think of race as the sole categorization applicable to such work does not rehearse a colonization to which (mostly black, in South Africa) feminists have long attested.

It is exhausting. And thus, in order to write of ‘the state of the art’ of feminist writing and research in contemporary South Africa, it is valuable to commence with a few thoughts on the meaning of ‘disappearance’.

Perhaps not to be

Perhaps not to be is to be without your being, without your going, that cuts noon light like a blue flower, without your passing later through fog and stones, without the torch you lift in your hand that others may not see as golden, that perhaps no one believed blossomed the glowing origin of the rose, without, in the end, your being, your coming suddenly, inspiringly, to know my life, blaze of the rose-tree, wheat of the breeze: and it follows that I am, because you are: it follows from ‘you are’, that I am, and we: and, because of love, you will, I will, We will, come to be. (Neruda, 1959/1976)

Pablo Neruda, one of los desaparacidos under Pinochet’s regime, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971, a year before his death. He is sometimes linked to a predecessor, another Chilean poet fiercely committed to a political art; another maverick and traveller, with ideas too radical for their time; another Nobel Prize winner (1945), Gabriela Mistral. Although she retains her stature in Chile as the first Latin-American women to attain international recognition of her poetry, it took Ursula le Guin (of The Left Hand of Darkness, where people are not sexed, nor gendered, and come into a state called ‘kemmering’ in order to reproduce with one another, in myriad possible patternings [Le Guin, 1969]) to teach herself Spanish in order to produce the first English translation of Mistral’s work. Le Guin was herself astonished by the disappearance of Mistral’s voice from anthologies of ‘world poetry’, and to this day, even where Mistral is discussed, she is usually sentimentalized as writing ‘about babies’; her ferocious support for early Nicaraguan independence, her passion for women’s education and her wrestles with identity forgotten. Such forms of disappearance are more than familiar to those who work in c21 knowledge-makings but, despite their ability to ‘hook’ desolation and enraged forensic exploration, these disappearances are not intellectually provocative: they are all-too readily predictable.

More epistemologically challenging are conversations about disappearance in which, decolonial readings of colonization recognize the violence in the creation of ‘the native’ or the ‘black man’. What gets ‘disappeared’ here involves possible configurations of the human/the social/the spiritual/the animal dislocated by capitalist industrialization from the mind of any settler’ (Mamdani, 1992). It is perhaps this form of disappearance pursued by Eduardo de Castro, when he writes, ‘What would happen if anthropology could take as philosophy that which has generally been represented as myth or as the irrationality of the Other?’ (De Castro, 2013: 25) or by Harry Garuba (writing in the same collection, from the Sawyer seminars of 2011, edited by Lesley Green, Contested Ecologies). In a subtle reflection on the emerging academic interest in animism, Garuba reminds us: ‘Africa was the sign of the non-modern that was not available to disciplinary attention, except with the domain of anthropological knowledge. The fear of animism it would appear is the rise of (scientific) wisdom’ (Garuba, 2013: 48).

One of the interesting things about this characterization of disappearance is that it parallels, in an eerie way, much feminist theorization on the psychodynamic and political processes of patriarchy. Although in 2013, few would argue for any version of a ‘universalizing patriarchy’, the notion of the feminine as Other remains strongly in play. Gloria Anzaldua, the renowned lesbian Latina theorist writes in Borderlands/La Frontera of the ways in which her multilingualism, Mexican heritage and femininity ‘coagulated in the throats of the landowners like something they wanted to eat and spit out at the same time, something impossible, something longed for and hated, something they were not’ (Anzaldua, 1987: 56). And it would take more space than I have here to trace the mesh of diverse feminist writings, continentally located, exploring the politics of violence, of representation, of economic struggle as those wrapped into a battle for ‘visibility, for moving away from ‘being his prop, his stick, the tongue that blocks my tongue so he can speak and eat’ (Vera, 1996: 16).

Joan Scott argues in ‘The Fantasy in Feminist History’ that the interrogation of strategies for the production of ‘the disappeared/the Other’ is the most important intellectual work for engaging with emerging fundamentalisms, corrupt government, economically driven warfare and the ‘intransigence’ of conflicts such as the Israeli-Palestinian one:

Indeed the Other is a crucial (negative) factor for any positive identity, and the positive identity stands in superior relation to the negative …; if there is something that can be called a feminist methodology, it might be summarized by these axiomatic statements: there is neither self nor a collective identity without an Other, there is no inclusiveness without exclusion, no neutrality that doesn’t privilege an interested point of view; and power is always an issue in the articulation of these relationships … we need this feminist methodology in the current crisis. (Scott, 2011: 73)

While the forensic and often poetic quest for approaches to ‘what has been lost’, othered, remains core to much decolonial theory (note, this is not the quest FOR ‘what is lost’ – that is a different mission altogether) encompasses rereading ‘colonial intelligence’, excavations of place attuned to more than the remains of bodies or ‘artefacts’, and a willing to suspend belief in the power of repetition and rehearsal, the need to understand strategies of disappearance may entail simple reiteration of undisputed (uncontentious?) facts.

The academic location of ‘feminist knowledge-making’ in South Africa

In the mid-1990s, it would have been possible in South African universities to identify dozens of historians, sociologists, psychologists, literary studies experts, economists, political scientists, legal scholars and social anthropologists who identified as feminists, who were publishing and teaching as such, and who were in fierce debate amongst themselves (especially around questions of race and positionality, Marxism and the emerging vocabulary of transformation, connections with continental feminisms, heteronormativity, and around the possibility of Southern-oriented feminist alliances). Although there were some strong linkages between this cohort (a very diverse group of men and women) and the newly elected government, the class-divisions between university-based labour and professional engagement in ministries and civil society organizations (which would widen from rivulets into oceans, by 2010) were already clear, and those working on the establishment of ‘gender desks’ within the Ministries would, in all likelihood, not have identified wholeheartedly with the moniker, ‘feminist’ (Hassim, 2008). Nonetheless, ‘feminism’ was not a dirty word within the academy, although it was a word which entailed often tense debate on whiteness, privilege, democracy and Africa-centric interlocution.

By 2009, this had changed, especially within academic teaching. Reddy and Bennett conducted research with all 22 South African universities, looking at course curricula, interviewing faculty and students and conducting focus groups with particular disciplinary-based constituencies, and concluded that

there are diverse courses on South African university campuses that take gender and sexualities seriously, and this is, we believe, a relatively recent phenomenon. However, these are overwhelmingly located in the humanities and the health sciences, and in neither sphere do they constitute a primary zone of curricular emphasis for students. With the exception of material presented in obstetrics/gynaecology, nursing and community medicine, material on reproduction is not a core part of the curriculum, and is presented within a bio-medical model. A strong emphasis on HIV as ‘sexual risk’ does help to develop another angle to the need for sexualities education, but again, this is not generally approached as a non-medicalised area. Most other courses in which it is possible to see the presence of gender and sexualities issues from the course outline are elective courses, rarely taken within a cumulatively developed suite of curricula. There are also major areas of university education in which issues of gender or sexualities do not arise as curricular concerns. (Bennett and Reddy, 2009: 244)

The research went on to argue that the national context created dilemmas for both faculty and students on the campuses with which they worked. Such contexts include widespread degradation of strong educational opportunities at secondary level, high levels of unemployment especially for poor, black men in urban environments (and for everyone in rural environments), the legacy of a shockingly badly managed HIV-epidemic which caused massive medical and socio-economic stress in the late 1990s and early 2000s, high levels of gender-based violence, and an increasingly confusing set of party-political manoeuvres, which in the year 2008 led to the election of a president strongly supported by some, and radically mistrusted by others. Policy on higher education which had been concentrating on the management of very contentious mergers of universities, in a wholly unsuccessful attempt to neutralize the effects of the apartheid’s race-based university system, shifted to issues of massive support for science, engineering and technology projects and to the design of higher education institutions which could offer ‘further education and training’ to high school students.

By 2010, the number of departments, or institutes within the South Africa academy, offering clear cut programmes in gender studies had dwindled from 14 in 1999, to 5. Only two of the five universities strongly resourced through apartheid legacies included the possibility of courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level which drew on feminist research (these were the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN)). UNISA, the University of the Western Cape (UWC), the University of Pretoria and the University of Fort Hare still included dedicated options for feminist research and teaching, and all found themselves on the knife-edges of faculty ‘stretch’ (where faculty in (for example) a ‘Women and Gender Studies programme’ would also be expected to teach and research in another discipline), and embattled within institutional efforts to merge them into larger departments. The UCT’s African Gender Institute (AGI), arguably one of the most interesting feminist spaces in the South African academy in its amalgamation of transnational, continentally generated, research and local undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, was formally cut in half, by an institutional manoeuvre, and forced into a merger with six other research units and three other ‘teaching sections’.

This has had a palpable impact on the contribution of feminists within the South African academy to research. ² If one seeks to read this impact through accessing available writing from South African feminists employed by the academy, within a relationship to formal ‘Gender and Women’s Studies’ programmes, in 2015, the same, very few, names recur: Desiree Lewis (who has written a world-renowned critical study on Bessie Head, and published widely in the area of critical studies), Relebohile Moletsane (who works on issues of childhood education in rural areas and questions of femininity and sexuality), Tamara Shefer (a psychologist, focusing on heteronormativities and masculinities), Vasu Reddy (who works on questions of HIV, legislation and policy, and sexuality and who moved from UKZN to the Human Sciences Research Council in 2007), Mary Hames (writing from the Gender Equity Unit at UWC around questions of institutional culture and black feminist pedagogies) and Elaine Salo, whose discipline is social anthropology and has done innovative work on cultures of gender within marginalized economies.

Gender and Women’s Studies departments are not, of course, the only space within the academy from which feminist research is generated. Not only are key voices located in disciplines outside ‘gender studies’ (such as Pumla Gqola, in African Literature at the University of the Witswatersrand; Shireen Hassim and Amanda Gouws, both in Political Studies, at UWits and the University of Stellenbosch, respectively; Tanya Bosch and Nadia Sanger, in Media Studies; Meg Samuels and Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, in the English Department at the UCT; Fatima Seedat and Saddiya Shaikh, both working in Religious Studies departments; Amrita Pande, Deevia Bhana and Nthabiseng Motsemme, in Sociology; Catriona McLeod, Floretta Boonzaier, Mzikazi Nduna and Peace Kiguwa, in Psychology; Heike Becker, Patricia Hayes or Fiona Ross, all in Social Anthropology), ³ but the most interesting bodies of research under consistent production come from institutes/centres outside the main teaching/research departments of universities, or from research institutes outside the university altogether. These would be zones such as UCT’s Law and Society Research team, led by Anninka Claasens which (almost single-handedly) ensured that due to large-scale action research with rural women that the Traditional Courts Bill failed to pass (in 2013), and the Medical Research Council, where an extraordinary team of researchers (which now includes the psychologist Kopano Ratele, a leading scholar on masculinities in African contexts) headed by Rachel Jewkes has, for decades, consistently done excellent quantitative work on gender-based violence. Such work is complemented and extended by UCT’s Gender, Health and Justice programme, again a non-teaching, donor-funded programme. Independent researchers such as Nombonisa Gasa (who edited the only volume of feminist historiography in South Africa, published by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), in 2006), Debbie Budlender, an economist, and Zethu Matebeni (currently affiliated with The Institute for the Humanities in Africa) are responsible for both critical research, but also for living the kind of relationship to ‘gender studies’ research in South Africa which counteracts the notion of ‘disappearing knowledges’ within a narrow definition of the university.

This relationship is one in which the borders of the university vanish as work is generated through in-depth engagement with people in NGOs, in movement-building, and (occasionally) in government. It is, in 2015, also one characterized by high levels of social media publicity, and campaigns one could term both those of ‘advocacy’ and ‘public intellectual work’. One example of such research would be visible within Debbie Budlender’s longstanding record of research on outsourced labour, care work, time use study and gender-budgeting which has dramatically shifted SAStats’ relationship to gender and quantification, but which has also placed South Africa alongside world leadership in social policy design which takes gender seriously. A second example would be that of the NGO, GenderDynamix, based in Manenberg Cape Town, and the first NGO taking up questions of transgender justice in the country. Recent research on the issues faced by transpeople within the Southern African region is being undertaken by Tshepu Kgotisau (working as a researcher in the NGO), Tahila Pimental, with engagement by Zethu Matebeni; what will be published will not necessarily end up in an academic journal, but in a widely disseminated report.

Although South Africa currently ⁴ publishes two accredited academic journals aimed at feminist scholarship and writing, Agenda (published by a collective based at UKZN) and Feminist Africa (whose editorial team is located with the AGI), it is within e-space, rather than in academic publishing (whether e-affiliated or not), where the most contemporary and dynamic relationship to South African feminist textual (and sometimes visual) work can be found. APC-Africa (Women) runs feminist research and training projects, with a global set of connections but simultaneously with particularly South African relevance (a central co-ordinator is based in the country), and recently published research (EROTICS) which details cyberusers’ engagement with on-line sexuality, an area which offers new possibilities for both pleasure and danger. Genderlinks runs a content-rich site on questions of gender and policy, women in parliament and government, and research on e-technologies which can help to maximize access to information about gender and the state. For many years, Behind the Mask ran a website dedicated to reporting on the experiences of lesbian, gay and transgendered people throughout the continent, and it was the only credible site within South Africa from which up-to-date and accurate research on recriminalizing legislative moves, particular cases, and strategic policy debate could be found. One of the most valuable e-spaces here is the site of Inkanyiso, created through Zanele Muholi’s commitment to working with young black lesbian and transgendered photographers, who also theorize and reflect upon their diverse experiences in blogs. Clearly a zone to which only those with regular and ‘free’ e-access have room to play, e-space remains nonetheless a profound challenge to the idea that feminist theorizations have disappeared. Within the academy, however, Amina Mama’s conclusion on the meaning of feminist theorization in African academies holds:

To date, feminist gender studies has remained a separate field of endeavour largely undertaken by women, which is tolerated but ignored, while the so-called ‘core business’ of male-dominated teaching and research proceed uncontested in its incompleteness. The efforts directed towards ‘gender mainstreaming’ have so far focused on institutional matters and, as such, have not even begun to engage with the major and far-reaching challenge of intellectually engaging gender theory and analysis. (Mama, 2003: 118)

Such disappearance is dangerous, I would argue, to the life of anything boundaried as ‘the humanities’, especially in contemporary South African debates on the future of the university. The decolonial and deconstructive project of feminist work is perhaps one of the marking chromosomes in the DNA of global intellectual activist debate on the politics of knowledge which names itself ‘feminist’ across time and context. I am not arguing for a naive homogenization of radically diverse arguments, nor for the suppression of the struggles to be heard of feminist work done by those without contextually rich socio-economic privilege. My suggestion is merely that the recognition of epistemological and intellectual subjugation has been core to South African feminist engagement with the politics of knowledge-creation and this recognition has – in conversation with post-colonial thought, and with some debates in broad African studies – entailed at least the following simple ideas: (1) the production of ‘the human’ is political, interested, and deployed within a panoply of competing agendas; such production engages the politics of gender and sexuality. (2) Systemic webs of power organize what can be ‘knowable’ and commodified as ‘known’; such web-making includes the dynamics of gender. (3) The possibilities of knowledge-creation capable of reading against the grain, envisioning beyond the shadow and decolonizing the mind entail rigorous deconstruction of authorial positionality, of the genealogy of ‘received voices’, the embrace of multilingualism, and a refusal of the public/private split in creating knowledges accountable to the challenge of ‘leaving all this behind’. ‘Never again’.

These core ideas, articulated in complex and not always traceable interlocution with feminist work beyond the continent, have generated (as they have elsewhere) a range of theoretical concepts capable of interrogating inter alia contemporary historiography, notions of legal subjectivity, debates on land, sexuality, citizenship and economic theory in the interests of richer engagement with the meaning of ‘being human’. Feminist processes of knowledge-creation, which circulate in frequently difficult and conflictual conversations across context, language, organizational space, amongst ‘sisters’ and ‘brothers’ rarely 100% convinced of one another’s integrity (or right to participate in the conversation), certainly have sufficient muscularity to demand academic respect.

A dominating question, does, thus, remain around the strategies and interests of the marginalization of feminist work, whether within beleaguered ‘Gender and Women’s Studies’ departments or whether within the blindspots of knowledge-creation beyond. A different level of question remains perhaps as important (and perhaps related). In 1991, a national conference on questions of women, gender, research and activism was held at the (then) University of Natal, Durban. Tension ran very high, as the privilege of white women, and feminist, researchers whose work focused (in many different ways) on black women’s lives was challenged by black feminist writers, researchers and activists as an illegitimate, and unethical, route to credible work. Nearly 25 years, then, before questions of ‘transformation’ came into explosive view within South African universities such at Rhodes, the University of the Free State, the UCT and the UWits between 2012 and 2015, South African feminists forced, encouraged and battled against one another to imagine a practice free of racism, and free from the invidious intersections of language, class, education and race so deeply part of the country’s ‘normality’.

Twenty-five years later, although the (mostly) small Gender and Women’s Studies departments in the country involve black and white researchers and teaching faculty, leadership of these programmes remains mostly white. Overall, however, the ideas generated and the work ‘en-curricularized’ tend to prioritize black feminist research, within South Africa but often middle-class white-authored research and writing from outside the country (unless a curricular session explicity explores ‘women of color’ writing, or ‘intersectionality’). An ‘older generation’ of white South African feminist research remains powerful as ‘to-be-cited’, within the way newer research is forced to ground itself (this is especially true in critical literary studies, history, research on gender-based violence, and political studies).

Students, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, are overwhelmingly black, where ‘black’ brings into play a wide range of class and geographical contexts, and very diverse research interests. Quantifications of ‘racialized presence’ are, however, less informative than questions of South African feminist writings’ uptake within the most powerful, and stimulating, intellectual debates of the day. And here, I would argue, remains a titanic struggle. The notion that feminist thinking is ‘Western’, and ‘borrowed’, remains clad in steel in strength, especially in academic work. This last is the most insidious area of disappearance with which South African feminist work, work which uses writing and research, is affected. Generations of students are taught that ‘before 1994, the anti-apartheid struggle meant that “gender-issues”/“feminist ideas” were not as important’. An utter fabrication (and an invested one), this has become rehearsed within much contemporary intellectual and popular debate. One of the effects of this is the erasure of two decades of engaged, complex, rigorous and multi-disciplinaried research of black academically affiliated writers such as Makhosazana Xaba, Nthabiseng Motsemme, Desiree Lewis, Zethu Matebeni, Saddiya Shaikh, Hlonipha Mokoena, Pumla Gqola, Nomboniso Gasa, Zine Magubane, Gabeba Baderoon, Shireen Hassim, Lebo Moletsane, Peace Kiguwa and Mzi Nduna. To construct such erasure as one disinterested as to the maintenance of racist theorization would be very naïve indeed.

Conclusion

The words in one of the opening quotations from Anna Julia Cooper, in A Voice From the South, written in 1892 to theorize the need for black women, were penned in the decades of ‘freed-dom’ after the 15th amendment to the US constitution in 1875 (‘freed-dom’ is a term coined by Katherine Franke to describe the chaotic and often violent politico-social space into which those who formally ‘enslaved’ or ‘criminalized’ and become – by law – ‘freed’ into a ‘new citizenry’ must navigate survival (Franke, 2004)). She insists that what can be known of ‘the world’ through the gaze of the ‘one-sided hesitancy of the man with one eye’ (the man who ignores what it is that a woman’s experience might offer to vision) is segmented, born of a wobble. One of the earliest black feminists, her evangelism is direct. The transformative agenda is clear, and if some 121 years later, the desire for a holistic worldview (one generated by adding ‘women’) would be deemed simplistic, it is also true that much feminist thinking about the politics of knowledge assumes the fundamental importance of radicalizing what counts as ‘representation’ in the interests of (if not Cooper’s body of rejoicing members) the transformation of Thiam’s ‘instrument’. If, as Kentridge and Galison’s ‘Refusal of Time’ suggests, it is vital to imagine a mode of art/thought/work which can refuse the passage of a time in which all are simply pulled, one by one (‘eating soup’) into a galactic dark hole in which nothing of significance remains, what strategies of body and mind are demanded? If feminisms, bodies of work whose starting points involve ‘the refusal of (man-made) time’ and an interrogation of the processes by which ‘essences are denied’ (pace Cooper) are disappearing within South African contemporary university circles of formal teaching, as support disappears for academic programmes invested in the politics of gender and sexuality, and recognition disappears of (especially) decades of black university-based feminist research, should dominant professorial voices in our halls not be unmasked as those of lumbering zombies, the walking dead, the ones who do not know they have in fact ‘disappeared’ their own embodied future in South African humanities?