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Sex, Lives and Videotape: The Transhistoricity of an Itinerant Visual Archive

Sex, Lives and Videotape: The Transhistoricity of an Itinerant Visual Archive This article investigates the politics of queer and transgender visual representation and archiving in relation to the short film Sisters (2003) and related photographs, which were produced in Maputo, Mozambique, by the Danish photographer Ditte Haarløv Johnsen in the early 2000s. Understood as a visual archive, this material represents two people, Ingrácia and Antonieta, and their group of friends, many of whom called themselves manas (sisters), but also variably self-identified as gay men, travestis, and trans. The article chronicles my engagement with this itinerant archive, and with the people who produced it, retracing the biography of these materials as they travelled between Maputo and Johannesburg, where they elicited radically different reactions from local publics and raised critical questions about the politics of in/visibility and representation in Southern Africa. In exploring this case, the article interrogates what forms of queer and transhistorical subjectivities are made visible through the film and related photographs, considering that both the materiality of the camera and the medium of the visual allow for particular modes of self-inscription and archive-making. The article suggests that Sisters engages forms of transhistoricity that cut across time and space to bind trans and queer pasts, presents, and future. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png African Studies Taylor & Francis

Sex, Lives and Videotape: The Transhistoricity of an Itinerant Visual Archive

de Araújo, Caio Simões
African Studies , Volume OnlineFirst: 22 – Mar 17, 2023
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22 pages

Sex, Lives and Videotape: The Transhistoricity of an Itinerant Visual Archive

Abstract

This article investigates the politics of queer and transgender visual representation and archiving in relation to the short film Sisters (2003) and related photographs, which were produced in Maputo, Mozambique, by the Danish photographer Ditte Haarløv Johnsen in the early 2000s. Understood as a visual archive, this material represents two people, Ingrácia and Antonieta, and their group of friends, many of whom called themselves manas (sisters), but also variably...
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Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group, on behalf of the University of Witwatersrand
ISSN
1469-2872
eISSN
0002-0184
DOI
10.1080/00020184.2023.2174076
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This article investigates the politics of queer and transgender visual representation and archiving in relation to the short film Sisters (2003) and related photographs, which were produced in Maputo, Mozambique, by the Danish photographer Ditte Haarløv Johnsen in the early 2000s. Understood as a visual archive, this material represents two people, Ingrácia and Antonieta, and their group of friends, many of whom called themselves manas (sisters), but also variably self-identified as gay men, travestis, and trans. The article chronicles my engagement with this itinerant archive, and with the people who produced it, retracing the biography of these materials as they travelled between Maputo and Johannesburg, where they elicited radically different reactions from local publics and raised critical questions about the politics of in/visibility and representation in Southern Africa. In exploring this case, the article interrogates what forms of queer and transhistorical subjectivities are made visible through the film and related photographs, considering that both the materiality of the camera and the medium of the visual allow for particular modes of self-inscription and archive-making. The article suggests that Sisters engages forms of transhistoricity that cut across time and space to bind trans and queer pasts, presents, and future.

Journal

African Studies – Taylor & Francis

Published: Mar 17, 2023

Keywords: Queer Mozambique; sexuality; itinerant archives; photography; visual history; transgender history; queer history

References

  • Queering Archives: A Roundtable Discussion
  • ‘“Gender within gender”: Zanele Muholi’s Images of Trans Being and Becoming’
  • Sex in Public
  • Trans, Time, and History
  • Through the Postcolonial Eyes: Images of Gender and Female Sexuality in Contemporary South Africa
  • Radicalizing Temporal Difference: Anthropology, Postcolonial Theory, and Literary Time
  • Archive and Method in Queer African Studies
  • Which Bodies Matter?: Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the “Hottentot Venus”
  • Editors’ Introduction: 2015 Queering Archives: Intimate Tracings
  • Intimacy, Queerness, Race
  • International Cooperation, Homosexuality and AIDS in Mozambique
  • Uma História do Movimento LGBT em Maputo
  • Mapeando as Autoidentíficações, as Construções das Identidades, e as Subjetividades das “Manas Trans” na Cidade de Maputo
  • Archive
  • The Wavering Line of Foreground and Background: A Proposal for the Schematic Analysis of Trans Visual Culture
  • ‘Zanele Muholi’s Intimate Archive: Photography and Post- apartheid Lesbian Lives’
  • Transgender: a Useful Category?