Gazing Back: Decolonial Strategies in Zanele Muholi’s “Faces and Phases”

Résumé 0

This paper seeks to offer a reading of South African photographer and “visual activist” Zanele Muholi’s ongoing project “Faces and Phases,” which consists in a series of portraits of black lesbians and transmen, mostly from South Africa. While South Africa’s legislation on LGBTI issues is remarkably liberal (for instance, same-sex marriage has been available to LGBTI people since 2006), South African society is still largely homophobic, and the practice of “corrective rape” (or rape used as an alleged means of curing homosexuality) is a widespread threat and an ordeal which numerous black lesbians and transgender people have undergone. Muholi’s work aims to give visibility to their community, but in documenting this community they are also claiming their subjects’ agency as active participants in the project and, crucially, subjects of the gaze. Indeed, while each picture is differently composed and framed, the common denominator which unites the series is the enigmatic power of the subject’s gaze, almost invariably directed at the viewer and challenging us to find our own responses to them in aesthetic, ethical and political terms. Drawing on Judith Butler’s 2015 article “Gender politics and the right to appear” and on Nicolas Mirzoeff’s notion of “countervisuality,” as developed in his 2011 book The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, this article reads Muholi’s work in “Faces and Phases” as a decolonial project which seeks to challenge the way in which we look and the structure of knowledge.