Introduction: Visual Genders

Photographing dispossession, forgetting solidarity: waiting for social justice in Wentworth, South Africa

“…But is this also a crime scene, of the stolen innocence of female, (aspiring) middle‐class leisure? In this vein, Hayes (2005, 534) writes on a photograph by Daniel Morolong of three African women at the beach in the city of East London, taken just before they would have been forced to move to the Ciskei Bantustan, that this image ‘has the capacity to pull us into their history’, to sense their ‘loss of modernity’ at the moment of apartheid’s forced removals. Nunn’s Coloured beach is from 1982–3, the moment at which the government offered Indians and Coloureds limited political voice in what would be called the Tricameral Parliament: a provocation against Africans that would launch the mass movement to boycott undemocratic ‘elections’ under the United Democratic Front.…”

“…Against this turbulent background, Plate 5 is profoundly ambivalent. This photograph cannot be salvaged in the manner that Hayes (2005) suggests, as it could as easily be a portrait of apathy, just before Robert McBride’s underground unit from Wentworth would blow up a café on the Durban beachfront, not far from Coloured Beach.…”

Gender and Visuality: Identification Photographs, Respectability and Personhood in Colonial Southern Africa in the 1920s and 1930s

“…2 Within this rich literature, one particular thread of enquiry has been related to the visual construction of the social, and more particularly the issue of visuality in codifying gendered subjectivities. 3 Histories of photography in Southern Africa have mirrored these concerns and have disclosed the complicated historical trajectories of the medium in the course of its varied deployment in colonial administration, military exploration or missionary venture and in numerous forums of institutionalised knowledge production since its introduction to the region in the 1840s. 4 By the late nineteenth century, photography -praised as it was for its capacity to record and render reality objectively -came to occupy an integral position within disciplinary fields concerned with classification, taxonomy and the empirical grounding of knowledge produced about colonised peoples.…”

“…6 As Patricia Hayes has mindfully noted, colonial photography has, though often in very disturbing ways, heightened the visibility and exposure of women in particular, which speaks to their silencing and marginalisation in other representational forms and spaces. 7 But the question of how things become visible remains complicated, and Hayes accordingly continued to argue for careful historical inquiries into visuality; that is, the specific codes and registers and the shifting discursive conditions of representing women in particular, and gender in general. 8 Visual theory has repeatedly considered the instability of photography, both materially and discursively, that troubles causal linkages of the medium to instrumentalist notions of vision: for example, in terms of an all-encompassing 'colonial gaze'.…”

“…7 But the question of how things become visible remains complicated, and Hayes accordingly continued to argue for careful historical inquiries into visuality; that is, the specific codes and registers and the shifting discursive conditions of representing women in particular, and gender in general. 8 Visual theory has repeatedly considered the instability of photography, both materially and discursively, that troubles causal linkages of the medium to instrumentalist notions of vision: for example, in terms of an all-encompassing 'colonial gaze'. 9 The role visuality played in fixing people categorically and in time and space proves complicated if contextualised carefully, and historical photographs often unsettle attempts to align them with ideologies of social, cultural or racial alterity unambiguously.…”