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Everything is beautiful, wish you were here ... I am here, wish you were beautiful

The research presented at the 2011 South African Sociological Association (SASA) conference:
Gender in question Rights, Representation & substantive Freedom

ABSTRACT
A postcard reads; everything is beautiful, wish you were here. When deviant genders, or
more politically correct, different sexualities embark they leave representations of
transcendence. Sometimes you are beautiful and sometimes I am here.
I am, are we, crossing international borders by crossing social boundaries? South Africas
Constitution (Act 108 of 1996) is hailed as one of the most democratic in the world. After
hosting the 2010 Soccer World Cup, South Africa experienced an influx of global attention
and a flood of imagery depicting the nation and the national. However, the national is
increasingly destabilised in favour of more transnational, read global, modes of
organisation.
Increased queer visibility and information has contoured to a tolerance previously
unimagined. In the advent of white-if-not light feminised lesbian chic it is necessary to
question; do we salvage national space and visibility or remain cosmopolitan nomads?
Should we assert micro-political resistances to globalised influences? This is a question
many queer, specifically self-identified lesbian, photographers, film makers, artist and
designers such as me face.
The work of Jean Brundrit, a self-identified lesbian artist, provides us with postcards of
identity, sexual orientation and gender in pre- and post-apartheid South Africa. In junction
with Brundritss postcards, this research is more than an academic inquiry. It is a personal
exploration of lesbian (re)presentation. A journey with a map of the past, resting restless on
borders, homesick in the heart and no destination ahead.

Everything is beautiful, wish you were here ... I am here, wish you were beautiful
1. INTRODUCTION
A postcard reads; everything is beautiful, wish you were here. When deviant genders, or
more politically correct, different sexualities embark in visualility they leave representations
of transcendence. Sometimes you are beautiful and sometimes I am here.
I am, are we, crossing international borders by crossing social boundaries? South Africas
Constitution (Act 108 of 1996) is hailed as one of the most democratic in the world. Our
constitution does not only protect a wide range of human rights but is also the first to
prohibit discrimination against sexual orientation. Our constitution does not only provide a
safe guard, but creates legitimised discursive spaces for queer representation and practice.
After hosting the 2010 Soccer World Cup, South Africa experienced an influx of global
attention and a flood of imagery depicting the nation and the national. However, the
national is increasingly destabilised in favour of more transnational, read global modes of
organisation. More so transnational trade is heavily in scripted by global capitalist
hegemony. South Africa has been well branded, neatly packaged and sold. Our history
almost erased in decontextulising processes of consumption.
Increased queer visibility and information has contoured to a tolerance previously
unimagined. In the advent of white-if-not light feminised lesbian chic it is necessary to
question; do we salvage national space and visibility or remain cosmopolitan nomads?
Should we assert micro-political resistances to globalised influences? This is a question
many queer, specifically self-identified lesbian, photographers, film makers, artist and
designers such as me face.
The work of Jean Brundrit, a self-identified lesbian artist, provides us with postcards of
identity, sexual orientation and gender in pre- and post-apartheid South Africa. In junction
with Brundritss postcards, this research is more than an academic inquiry. It is a personal
exploration of lesbian (re)presentation. A journey with a map of the past, resting restless on
borders, homesick in the heart and no destination ahead.

2. I AM HERE
2.1 OBJECTIVE
Feminist critic Joyce Fernandes (quoted in Lucie-Smith 1994:135) wrote in her essay Sex into
Sexuality that lesbians are invisible in the visual arts not only as woman but as gay woman
because it is nearly impossible to represent lesbianism in a way that cannot be designated
by the dominant heterosexual culture. Additionally to represent, make visible or articulate
the feminine and more so the double feminine (lesbian), in an imperial, patriarchal,
heteronormative language-law order is a perpetual negotiation.
The research aims to contextualise such a journey by looking at four works by South African
artist Jean Brundrit. Jean Brundrit is a temporal and spatial nomad, her art photography is
deeply situated in social political landscape of pre- and post apartheid. As a student and a
graduate in the 1980s Brundrits work dealt with sexuality, gender and identity imploded it
the time-space-continuum of the South African locale. Her recent work, according to Svea
Josephy (2004:[sp], deals with boundaries and the violation of these boundaries. The
intersects of Brundrits work encompasses the crossing of retrospective drag as well as
globalisation. The acts of her (in)visibility operates as a compass for lesbian (re)presentation
as a micro-political agent in an increasingly globalised South Africa.
The first postcard in the collection was sent in 1995, the year South Africa blew out its first
birthday candle celebrating true democracy. The frayed edges lies testament to the looking,
relooking the meaning in the message. Valued Families is a pictorial snapshot of a
patriarchal map etched on the skin and recalls the journey of the lesbian body as a speaking
i. Postcards do more than just account high rise adventures but also suggest an over coming,
or in some instances a be-coming. Lavender Menace (1999) provides a (self) reverent
reflection of the language landscape crossed but not crossed out. Sticky back of Reclaiming
Cape Town (2002) is Portrait of a Lesbian Couple in South Africa (1995) an image which looks
like a friendly passerby was asked to hold the camera and say smile.

These two

photographs, although one from anothertime encapsulate a panoramic resemblance of the

now.
As I flip through these images, pausing and looking again, I wander who has read these cards
and photographs before they arrived in my post-box or was stuck under my doorstep. I

wonder if they wondered about the sender, I wonder if the wondered about the receiver, I
wonder if the wander. But mostly wonder about what to what to write back.

2.2 METHODOLOGY
In writing back I make use of multiple, oppositional, intersecting and overlapping theoretical
treatments to analyses these works visually as well as semantically. I recall fireside stories of
poststructuralist Judith Butler (1999 originally 1990), the long distant dialogue of queer
psycholinguistic theorist Teresa de Lauretis (2007) and the chance meeting of Elisabeth
Freemans (2005) drag and Karen Tongsons (2005) spatially disadvantaged queer subject.
As a post-apartheid South African, the use of postmodern theory and postcolonial theory
was and remains implicit in my research. The poststructural underpinnings of
postmodernism and postcolonialism share a methodology of deconstructing the world order
of the knowing subject. The representation of Others is a central concept in the
development poststructural and postcolonial theory (Aitchison, C 2000:128). More so,
postcolonial theory uncovers the politics at play in the production of knowing which creates
and sustains censorship and visibility (Spivak, 1987:113). Additionally, the discourse of
Cultural Geographies became useful in this research in understanding concepts of space and
place in the wake of globalism. Cultural Geographies is an approach to geographies
distinguished by the central and active role it advocates the human awareness an agency
within cultured geographical, temporal and spatial localities.
This research worked from and within queer theory (De Lauretis, 1991). The reason for using
queer theory rather than feminist or a lesbian and gay approach was an effort to avoid the
distinction between, and of, women and lesbian as well as theoretical and (colour-blind)
ideological modus operandi associated with feminist, lesbian and gay theory. This was not
done in a way where either I, as researcher, or the research itself evaded responsibility;
rather it was from this perspective that these distinctions could hopefully be transgressed
and transcended. If this was not possible the use of queer theory at least problematised
such distinctions.
In addition the choice to appropriate psychoanalytic theory as a mode of inquiry should is
critical one. Although psychoanalysis may supplement art historical and visual inquiry,

psychoanalysis and feminist and lesbian theory do not always coincide harmoniously. De
Lauretis (2007:85) states that lesbian scholarship typically rejected Freud as the enemy of
women and consequently avoided consideration of Freudian and neo-Freudian theories on
sexuality. Yet de Lauretis (2007:86) argues that for lesbians whose self-definition, selfrepresentation and political as well as personal identity is constituted in relation to their
deviance from socially dominant, institutionalised, heterosexual structures, negotiated
reading of psychoanalysis proves valuable.
Perhaps more conflicting than Freudian psychoanalysis are, the contributions of Jacques
Lacan to postmodern theory, particularly in relevance to structuralism and semiotics.
Lacans re-reading of Freud assigns woman a place of absence or otherness because of her
lack of a penis which signifies phallic power in patriarchal society (Chadwick, W 1990:12).
The phallus, a privileged signifier, provides a speaking and representational position for men
and men only. Women lack not only a phallus but also access to the symbolic order of
language and meaning. Lucy Irigarays (in Butler, J 1999:25) theory of sexual difference
reiterates that women can never be understood as subject within representational systems
of western culture. She posses no agency to perform her desire, even less the desire for a
body as her own. However a negotiated re-reading of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis
provides a conceptualisation of a speaking/representing lesbian body.

3. (S)HE/I SPEAK YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL.

Brundrits self identification as lesbian over feminist and woman refers to more than just
her sexual orientation. According to Josephy (2004:[sp]) Brundrits position as lesbian is
political.The lesbian body refuses the heterosexual contract. This refusal is more than just a
practice of living but a practice of knowing. De Laurits (2007:79) introduces Monique
Wittigs lesbian as a subject of cognitive practices; a custom based in lived experiences of
body and desire. The power of the lesbian subject lies in its (or rather ones) thinking and
material disidentification from heterosexual compulsion. The economic, ideological and
political power of a man, reject by the lesbian renders the absolute obsolete and the
privileged signifier flaccid.

Figure 1: Jean Brundrit, Valued Families, 1995.

Manipulated Black and White Photograph (Josephy 2004:[sp])
Valued Families (1995) according to Josephy (2004:[sp]) celebrates gay alliances. More so
Valued Families (1995) shows two naked women's torsos, cropped at the head and legs.
Superimposed on top of the black and white photographic print is a family tree-like grid of
interconnecting names. The image is violent in nature, the bodies amputated and a map
etched on skin. The forceful removal of head, eyes and mouth are testament to the silence
of the lesbian speaking i. The title advocates the structure of family, and family itself is
heteronormative hegemony, instating and reinstating the law of the father. However,
Brundrit does what Lacans symbolic order deems impossible, she constructs herself in the
subject position and becomes a speaking i. Brundrit, like Wittigs lesbian, disregards the
patriarchal plot, exceed the words of the father, expose the breaks in representation and
trespass into the fissures of discourse (de Laurits 2007:80). Valued Families(1995) value a
different plot, a different journey, etched on the skin lays a new map. But, given all the
theoretical (im)possibilities how does the lesbian body of Brundrit negotiate the imperial,
patriarchal, heteronormative landscape of South African visibility?

De Lauretis (2007:86) identifies that traditionally lesbian sexuality has been explained by
Freuds concept of the masculinity complex. Simply stated the masculinity complex means
that a girl childs gender identity will develop exactly the same as the boy child, which is
explained by the Oedipus complex. In addition Diane Hammer (quoted in de Lauretis
2007:87) explains that classically lesbians are considered to act as if they possess a phallus
and are therefore aligned, although deceptively, on the side of masculinity. Therefore it
makes sense that within a Lacanian ideal the lesbian with her pretend phallus, or as I like to
refer to it, her talking-stick, could enter the law-language of the father.

4. WISH YOU WERE (HERE)

In The light that never goes out: Butch Intimacies and Sub-Urban Sociabilities in Lesser Los
Angeles Tongson (2005) identifies the spatially disadvantaged queer subjectas queer
communities and individuals not part of Western gay hubs such as New York or San
Francisco. Over twelve thousand kilometres away from New York and San Francisco to call
South Africa spatially disadvantaged is an understatement. In addition to the (dis)location of
the South African queer subject, is the temporal drawback faced by such queered subjects.
To understand this drawback Freeman (2005:59) conceptualised drag as retrogression; a
delay and the pull of the past upon the present. Freemans theorisation of temporal, and
one could add representational, drag reconsiders the subjective stances and identities
literally left behind in the wake of queer and meterosexual institutionalisation.

As much as apartheid legislation influenced social circumstance, it also mediated the media.
In terms of media representation of queer issues and bodies, Glen Retief (1994:101) states
that the bourgeois freedom of speech and association allowed in advanced capitalist
countries of Western Europe and North America was never applied to apartheid South
Africa. Furthermore, according to Retief (1994:101), the Publications Board and vice squad
played paternalistic moral custodians to forty million people in apartheid South Africa. The
Board acted a monumental muzzle; telling South Africans what they may and may not know
about sex, which contentment they were allowed to know and which they must be
protected from. Homosexual sex, and the unthinkable queer desire, was two of such
contentment.

Censorship is and remains a powerful weapon in state political hegemony. Retief (1994:104)
states that the censorship of gay material in apartheid South Africa was extremely severe;
magazines and books readily available in other countries were banned in South Africa,
simply because they assumed that there was nothing wrong with homosexuality. According
to Retief (1994:104) homophobic censorship irreparably harmed gay communities as it
blocked the influx of liberating and radical, or at least alternative, ideas. To Retief
(1994:104) this stifled debates and interfered with valuable intellectual growth and
consciousness-raising.
Justifiably, race, class and specific incarnations of female masculinity continue to encumber
queer articulations with obstinate attachments to certain styles, forms, histories and
narratives. Perhaps one of the most troubling priories in lesbian representation and
treatments is that of butch/femme dialect. Conceptualising lesbian desire in terms of butch
and femme reduces it to the compulsively heterosexual dichotomies of male and female
gender. Sue Ellen-Case (1993) was one of the first theorists to postulate that the femme
achieves her identity only in the presence of the butch just as women are sustained by men.
This educates the butch to the masculine and the femme to the feminine; in a sense such
concepts only reinforce the supposed appropriateness of heterosexuality.

Figure 2: Jean Brundrit, Lavender Menace, 1999.

Manipulated Black and White Photograph (Josephy 2004:[sp])

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In Lavender Menace (1999) Brundrit appears twice; once in a suit with a bowtie, secondly in
a dress holding a handbag. This image captures the menace to recast lesbian desire in a
heteronormative mould, the difficulty to escape the past inscriptions in making visible what
language would renounce to speak of a love without a name. With nothing but a
heteronormative language, how is the lesbian to explain, represent or understand he(r)?
Butler (1991:157) writes that the idea that butch and femme are replicas of heterosexual
exchange is to seriously under estimate the erotic significance of these identities as
dissonant and complex. Because the object of desire and, to this research, representation in
lesbian exchange is neither singular nor fixed, it cannot contextualise the female body or
superimpose masculine identity. Josephy (2004:[sp]) reiterates Butlers notions in stating
that by appearing twice in different gendered positions Lavender Menace (1999) points to a
fluidity of sexual identity.
Brundrit violently turns the male gaze of the camera against herself to once more become
the speaking i. Brundrit destabilises and deconstructs the very bedrocks of representation
and of visibility. In Lavender Menace (1999), she is both the subject and the object. She
fashions herself as both butch and femme and encompasses gendered inscriptive acts in
drag.
Furthermore, drag, the performance art based on cross-dressing, exaggerating gendered
clothing, appearance and behaviour, has its own particular resonance. According to Butler
(1991:174) drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space. It
mocks both the performative model of gender as well as the notions of true and natural
gender identity. In other words, to drag, according to Butler (1991:175) reveals the
distinctiveness of the facets of gender experience and performance which are falsely
naturalised through the hegemonic fiction of heteronormativity.

5. GLOBALISATION - EVERYTHING IS HERE

Ten years ago Caren Kaplan (1999:142) stated in A world without Boundaries, that the
national is increasingly destabilised in favour of more transnational, or global, modes of
social and economical organisation. From a geographical approach, theorist Paul

11

Knox and Sallie Marston (2004:508) assert that the forces of new technologies, globalisation
and time-space compression have sought to represent localised identities as historical and
regressive. In other words, global markets, communication networks and capital undermine
borders of class and racial geographies. Globalisation carries with it the potential to develop
new communities of interest and beliefs. According to Knox and Marston (2004:508) these
new communities centre on feminist, gay and lesbian activism and black political
movements.
Therefore the era of accelerated globalisation impacts meaning making of culture and
identity. However, it also mobilises dominant hegemonies. Mikki Van Zyl (2005:20)
evaluates that the global market continues to profit immensely by shaping identities
through the pleasure of consumption and sexualisation of style. This is very much the
situation faced by lesbian visibility in contemporary South Africa. Brundrits work reiterates
this sentiment. According to Josephy (2004:[sp]), Brundrit discovered early in her career
that the only images of lesbians commonly found in the South African media were porn
images designed for titillating a heterosexual male audience. This discovery led Brundrit on
a journey of visibility, a quest of showing real lesbians (Brundrit quoted in Josephy
2004:[sp]).
The advent of light-if-not-white feminised-lesbian chic has become an increasingly popular
mode of representation of lesbian bodies in South Africa and globally (Nair, S 2008, Kessler,
K 2009). Such representational structures enforce the erasure of lesbian bodies that do not
conform to heteronormative, Eurocentric norms and codes. In its wake there is nobody, and
no bodies, to disrupt (re)presentation. Sridevi Nair (2008:417) suggests that the global
mainstream is comfortable with this feminised-lesbian because she looks so much like the
familiar representations of homogenous fetishised woman. In the wake of the feminisedlesbian, the disruptive butch, futch, dyke and drag king disappears.

Furthermore, the emphasis on whiteness or Western constructs of beauty in commodity

culture creates lesbians in an aesthetic chic which pretends that ethnicity is of no
consequence in the face of global glamour. Global representational censorship postulate
that lesbianism is completely acceptable, even desirable, but only if it conforms to a very

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specific ideology. De Lauretis (2007:67) reiterates that conventions of seeing, relation of

desire and spectatorship remain fixed in a frame of visibility which is still heterosexual, still
colour blind.

Figure 3: Jean Brundrit, Portrait of a Lesbian Couple in South Africa, 1995.

Manipulated Black and White Photograph (Josephy 2004:[sp])
Portrait of a Lesbian Couple in South Africa (1995) exemplifies this erasure of bodies. This
photograph shows a lesbian as white space outlined where their identity should have been
revealed. According to Josephy (2004:[sp]) the erasure of the subject of the portrait,
pertains to their exclusion from the language of visual images. Arguable the cut-outs are a
lesbian couple unfit for display to the heterosexual male gaze. But it also suggests the
invisibility of any racial markers.

6. I WILL WRITE TO YOU NOT OF YOU

As with glamorised global modes of representation this journey has, up until this point,
negated treatments of race and colonialism. Our Brundrit postcards have also not provided
any trace of colour, except for lavender. There is a menace in Brundrits speaking voice as in

13

mine. It is no coincidence that Brundrit and I are white and westerly educated. We have
access to intelibility only through the structures of Eurocentric institutions. It is important to
note that access does necessarily equate inclusion.
According to post-structuralist feminist Cara Aitchison (2000:138) the seemingly innocent
act of selecting postcards, images, is troubled with ideological threat. Photographs, artworks
and writings (re)constructs bodies and their landscapes out of their contexts. Concurrently
these visibilities are re-inscribed with symbolic projections. This is why I wondered about
the postcards and the very journey their visibilility. This is why I wondered what to write
back, knowing fully the risk of this act. In relation Brundrit (quoted in Josephy 2004:[sp]) has
and had to consider herself as a middle class 'whitey' as well as her subject position in the
process of creating images.
The risk in our speaking is the risk of telling others into our stories. The risk taking their
voices and telling it back to them in such a way that it is no longer theirs. Bell Hooks
(1990: 152) warns against such writing, such visibility, where we remain the colonising
author and they remain the centre of our speech. It seems the problem is deeply
imbedded in the dualistic character of other-ness.
Conceptualising the other is a simultaneous construction of the same and something to be
other to. The concept of the other is complicit in the hierarchal boundaries of centres and
margins, cores and peripheries, norms and deviants, powerful and powerless. In addition
and more so, Aitchison (2000:136) states that the other is accorded a gender and this
gender is always feminine.
Within this predicament lies the potential of the South African lesbian. The South African
lesbian, as a cognitive political practices, negates engender dualism by being double
feminine, double other. Firstly, the double feminine fluidly interchanges in between the
subject/object twofold. Secondly, the temporal spatial drag roots he(r) queer agency never
fully coloniser, never fully colonised.
Therefore if I could, just for a moment, retrace trail of this story; Brundrit positions herself
as a lesbian over that of feminist or woman. In addition, I would add, over racial

14

classification. In no way is this done to negate colonial injustices and racial biases, but to add
a dissident voice to the discourse with others rather than of others.
De Lauretis (1991:5) prophetically asked whether queerness can act as an agency of social
transform and whether queer theory could create a different discursive horizon. The South
African lesbian can map another way of living and by extent (re)presenting the racial and the
sexual. The South African lesbian bravely embarks in a critical dialog to understand the
particularities of othered bodies respective histories, as well as the stakes of our common
struggles.
Brundrits photographs indicates a keen awareness of he(r) speaking risk, she skilfully
navigates our coloured history. Her black and white images drain pigment from
(re)presentation. But it seems, through the very act of negotiating Brundrits subject, the
South African lesbian, is disappearing.

7. A REST(LESS) CONCLUSION
Tongsons conceptualisation of the spatially disadvantaged queer offers profound
encounters with contemporary visibility. Tongson (2007:356) stresses that we must resist
reading the spatially disadvantage as contemptible consequence of never being where it is
at, stuck in the past or as dragging behind. Rather it is this very act of drag which offers
anachronisms of postmodern, postcolonial irony and witty self-referentiality. Additionally,
Freeman (2005:57) propagates that we must seize the temporal incongruities of dragging
queer societies. As these disadvantaged bodies provide delightful interruptions and
momentarily discharge from elsewhere and other(ed) times. And Butler (1991:175)
celebrates the temperament of these bodies to reveal naturalised fictions, both
heteronormative and queered.
But globalisation is homogenous in effect and character. The seminal work of Edward Relph
(warns that in the modern world the loss of place diversity will become symptomatic for a

lager loss of authenticity. Will the South African lesbian just become another commodified
other. Will all traces of (h)er transcendence disappear if (s)he continues on this journey of

15

visibility? Will language ever know her name? Can (s)he unveil he(r) skins? All our postcards
have led up till this point.

Figure 4: Jean Brundrit, Portrait of a Lesbian Couple in South Africa, 1995.

Black and White Photomontage (Josephy 2004:[sp])
And our final postcard writes this, our, story back. Reclaiming Cape Town (2002) is a
playfully palimpsest of troubling proprieties. The dragging dyke (re)inscribes a new map
over an old landscape. There is a telling visibility of no-bodies, they are all somewhere else.
Maybe for the South African lesbian it is about the journey itself and not about arrival.
About never finding the IT, which they/we set out for, but finding something ells and gladly
risking oblivion in the process. For Brundrit and myself the venture of the South African
lesbian is about studiously avoiding encroachments of too many somewheres and
hegemonic destinations while protecting the in betweens the South African Lesbian calls
home.

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LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 1

Jean Brundrit, Valued Families, 1995 ..............................................

Figure 2

Jean Brundrit, Lavender Menace, 1999 ...........................................

Figure 3

Jean Brundrit, Portrait of a Lesbian Couple in South Africa, 1995 ...

11

Figure4

Jean Brundrit, Reclaiming Cape Town, 2000 ...................................

14

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