Papers by April Sizemore-Barber
Becoming Afriqueer: Conjuring Alternative Masculinities Through Site-Specific Performance, 2024
Excerpt:
Afriqueer begins in darkness. The sun set several hours ago and we shuffle forward, hunc... more Excerpt:
Afriqueer begins in darkness. The sun set several hours ago and we shuffle forward, hunching our shoulders against the winter chill, hurrying to follow the bobbing glass lanterns held by those who took our tickets at the gate. An audience of around ten at South Africa's 2016 National Arts Festival, we venture inwards, the paths of the botanical gardens seeming rough and unfamiliar terrain. Suddenly, a wolfishly charming sinewy man clad in aviator shades and a faux fur coat slips out of the shadows. In poetic, flirtatious and threatening tones he entreats us to follow him into a 'place of placelessness', where we will bear witness to a parable of how the stars were made through the burning love of two boys for one another. As we journey on, we come across performers tucked in hidden places, encountering both private celebrations and profound sorrows. Here, in an alcove under a tree: a blankfaced civil servant trading masculine work clothes for a filmy gown, relieved smile illuminated by lantern-light as he softly strokes its fabric. There, skating the horizon: a stately figure in a striped rainbow leotard and tutu under an umbrella decorated with fairy lights, entering and exiting the periphery of our awareness (See Figure 4.9). Following our guide's voice and escorted by five male dancers clad in traditional Botswanan skins and blankets, the experience of Afriqueer is otherworldly and at times profoundly disorienting. But our trickster guide had warned us at the gate: such magic is not gentle.
This article explores the outreach and everyday practice of the Johannesburg LGBTI archive Gay an... more This article explores the outreach and everyday practice of the Johannesburg LGBTI archive Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action (GALA), in a context where the archive – as both theoretical concept and material collection – has become increasingly central to both postcolonial and queer studies. As the only queer archive on the African continent, GALA by necessity takes on a number of roles unusual for an archive, becoming a community center, art therapy facilitator, and publisher. GALA’s innovative blended practice serves as an urgent theoretical intervention into the archive from the Global South; it restructures our understanding of what an archive can be and should do, as well as its relationship to history, memory, and political movements.
This essay analyzes the use of drag and gender subversion by two white South African performers, ... more This essay analyzes the use of drag and gender subversion by two white South African performers, Pieter-Dirk Uys and Steven Cohen, during the long decade bisected by South Africa’s political transition (roughly 1990 to 2001). While satirist Uys invented his drag alter ego Evita Bezuidenhout to critique the hypocrisy of the apartheid regime, his post-apartheid performances modeled a rehabilitated, self-critical whiteness. Breaking the fourth wall, Uys (as Evita) interviewed Nelson Mandela on live television and educated South Africa’s still racially divided communities on voting laws. Rather than embracing the narrative of the rainbow nation central to the new democratic dispensation, performance artist Cohen used his queer body to enact what he calls “monster drag,” highlighting whiteness’s simultaneous alienation and privilege in relation to the black majority state. While vastly different in objective and aesthetic, these performances allowed for what the essay calls a “prismatic” deconstruction of white identity within the context of political transformation. Through a process of categorical ambiguity and affective displacement, each performer used drag to open up a space for the whites who had formerly been classified as “European” to claim a queer form of Africanness. As time has advanced and the dream of the rainbow nation has faded, however, nonwhite drag performers have increasingly taken center stage to challenge the boundaries of both queerness and whiteness. The essay ends with an analysis of black queer South African performance artist Athi-Patra Ruga’s ongoing series The Future White Women of Azania as an example of new directions in South African queer performance.
Safundi:The Journal of South African and American Studies
This essay presents a workshop-based and process-focused community performance project through a ... more This essay presents a workshop-based and process-focused community performance project through a mad studies lens-that is, through a multi-vocal, multi-perspective knowledge creation centering on psychiatric survivors' experiences. In the performance experiments at the heart of this essay, we are strangers, meeting at the site of a working mental asylum, Bethlem Royal Hospital in Greater London-Bedlam, one of the oldest institutions of mad confinement and treatment.
Theatre Journal, May 2013
Books by April Sizemore-Barber
At his 1994 inauguration, South African president Nelson Mandela announced the “Rainbow Nation, a... more At his 1994 inauguration, South African president Nelson Mandela announced the “Rainbow Nation, at peace with itself and the world.” This national rainbow notably extended beyond the bounds of racial coexistence and reconciliation to include “sexual orientation” as a protected category in the Bill of Rights. Yet despite the promise of equality and dignity, the new government’s alliance with neoliberal interests and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic left South Africa an increasingly unequal society.
Prismatic Performances focuses on the queer embodiments that both reveal and animate the gaps between South Africa’s self-image and its lived realities. It argues that performance has become a key location where contradictions inherent to South Africa’s post-apartheid identity are negotiated. The book spans 30 years of cultural production and numerous social locations and includes: a team of black lesbian soccer players who reveal and redefine the gendered and sexed limitations of racialized “Africanness;” white gay performers who use drag and gender subversion to work through questions of racial and societal transformation; black artists across the arts who have developed aesthetics that place on display their audiences’ complicity in the problem of sexual violence; and a primarily heterosexual panAfrican online soap opera fandom community who, by combining new virtual spaces with old melodramatic tropes allow for extended deliberation and new paradigms through which African same-sex relationships are acceptable.
Prismatic Performances contends that when explicitly queer bodies emerge onto public stages, audiences are made intimately aware of their own bodies’ identifications and desires. As the sheen of the New South Africa began to fade, these performances revealed the inadequacy and, indeed, the violence, of the Rainbow Nation as an aspirational metaphor. Simultaneously they created space for imagining new radical configurations of belonging.
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Papers by April Sizemore-Barber
Afriqueer begins in darkness. The sun set several hours ago and we shuffle forward, hunching our shoulders against the winter chill, hurrying to follow the bobbing glass lanterns held by those who took our tickets at the gate. An audience of around ten at South Africa's 2016 National Arts Festival, we venture inwards, the paths of the botanical gardens seeming rough and unfamiliar terrain. Suddenly, a wolfishly charming sinewy man clad in aviator shades and a faux fur coat slips out of the shadows. In poetic, flirtatious and threatening tones he entreats us to follow him into a 'place of placelessness', where we will bear witness to a parable of how the stars were made through the burning love of two boys for one another. As we journey on, we come across performers tucked in hidden places, encountering both private celebrations and profound sorrows. Here, in an alcove under a tree: a blankfaced civil servant trading masculine work clothes for a filmy gown, relieved smile illuminated by lantern-light as he softly strokes its fabric. There, skating the horizon: a stately figure in a striped rainbow leotard and tutu under an umbrella decorated with fairy lights, entering and exiting the periphery of our awareness (See Figure 4.9). Following our guide's voice and escorted by five male dancers clad in traditional Botswanan skins and blankets, the experience of Afriqueer is otherworldly and at times profoundly disorienting. But our trickster guide had warned us at the gate: such magic is not gentle.
Books by April Sizemore-Barber
Prismatic Performances focuses on the queer embodiments that both reveal and animate the gaps between South Africa’s self-image and its lived realities. It argues that performance has become a key location where contradictions inherent to South Africa’s post-apartheid identity are negotiated. The book spans 30 years of cultural production and numerous social locations and includes: a team of black lesbian soccer players who reveal and redefine the gendered and sexed limitations of racialized “Africanness;” white gay performers who use drag and gender subversion to work through questions of racial and societal transformation; black artists across the arts who have developed aesthetics that place on display their audiences’ complicity in the problem of sexual violence; and a primarily heterosexual panAfrican online soap opera fandom community who, by combining new virtual spaces with old melodramatic tropes allow for extended deliberation and new paradigms through which African same-sex relationships are acceptable.
Prismatic Performances contends that when explicitly queer bodies emerge onto public stages, audiences are made intimately aware of their own bodies’ identifications and desires. As the sheen of the New South Africa began to fade, these performances revealed the inadequacy and, indeed, the violence, of the Rainbow Nation as an aspirational metaphor. Simultaneously they created space for imagining new radical configurations of belonging.
https://www.press.umich.edu/10192303/prismatic_performances
30% Discount with the code UMRAINBOW
Afriqueer begins in darkness. The sun set several hours ago and we shuffle forward, hunching our shoulders against the winter chill, hurrying to follow the bobbing glass lanterns held by those who took our tickets at the gate. An audience of around ten at South Africa's 2016 National Arts Festival, we venture inwards, the paths of the botanical gardens seeming rough and unfamiliar terrain. Suddenly, a wolfishly charming sinewy man clad in aviator shades and a faux fur coat slips out of the shadows. In poetic, flirtatious and threatening tones he entreats us to follow him into a 'place of placelessness', where we will bear witness to a parable of how the stars were made through the burning love of two boys for one another. As we journey on, we come across performers tucked in hidden places, encountering both private celebrations and profound sorrows. Here, in an alcove under a tree: a blankfaced civil servant trading masculine work clothes for a filmy gown, relieved smile illuminated by lantern-light as he softly strokes its fabric. There, skating the horizon: a stately figure in a striped rainbow leotard and tutu under an umbrella decorated with fairy lights, entering and exiting the periphery of our awareness (See Figure 4.9). Following our guide's voice and escorted by five male dancers clad in traditional Botswanan skins and blankets, the experience of Afriqueer is otherworldly and at times profoundly disorienting. But our trickster guide had warned us at the gate: such magic is not gentle.
Prismatic Performances focuses on the queer embodiments that both reveal and animate the gaps between South Africa’s self-image and its lived realities. It argues that performance has become a key location where contradictions inherent to South Africa’s post-apartheid identity are negotiated. The book spans 30 years of cultural production and numerous social locations and includes: a team of black lesbian soccer players who reveal and redefine the gendered and sexed limitations of racialized “Africanness;” white gay performers who use drag and gender subversion to work through questions of racial and societal transformation; black artists across the arts who have developed aesthetics that place on display their audiences’ complicity in the problem of sexual violence; and a primarily heterosexual panAfrican online soap opera fandom community who, by combining new virtual spaces with old melodramatic tropes allow for extended deliberation and new paradigms through which African same-sex relationships are acceptable.
Prismatic Performances contends that when explicitly queer bodies emerge onto public stages, audiences are made intimately aware of their own bodies’ identifications and desires. As the sheen of the New South Africa began to fade, these performances revealed the inadequacy and, indeed, the violence, of the Rainbow Nation as an aspirational metaphor. Simultaneously they created space for imagining new radical configurations of belonging.
https://www.press.umich.edu/10192303/prismatic_performances
30% Discount with the code UMRAINBOW