Black women artists in a monumental exhibition
Spanning six decades and featuring more than 150 Black South African women, this art curation is an important intervention between the artists and the archive.
Stories by: Pumla Dineo Gqola
Athambile Masola’s debut is a poetic tour de force
Titled Ilifa, her poetry collection breaks new ground in South African literary and feminist writing and shows a deft hand that impresses on many levels.
‘Snakes and ladders’ for women at the JSC
Mandisa Maya’s interview for the position of chief justice overflowed with patriarchal scripts and sexual innuendo that women suffer in the workplace and society.
Courts designed for women should not gag them
Misappropriating the structures meant to help rape survivors reinforces patriarchal violence and creates a social context in which gender-based abuse is allowed to thrive.
New Books | Female Fear Factory
Pumla Dineo Gqola shows that becoming fluent in the ‘women’ fear of men requires constant exposure through repetition of messages, warnings, inducements, symbolic lessons and explicit statements.
Long Read | Bheki Peterson and the art of hopeful futures
In his scholarly and creative work on performance – including popular political, cultural and literary forms – the late intellectual showed us how to move our narratives forward. But he was not done.
Nawal El Saadawi’s enduring feminist legacy
The Egyptian doctor and writer who died on 21 March never took her eye off the ways in which violent power mutates and demands constant vigilance, yet still believed that ‘hope is power’.
Penny Siopis on confronting shame
Her paintings in the Shame series and a new short film invite introspection from the viewer on the feeling in its various forms and in sites not often associated with it.
Book Review | Femicide in South Africa
Nechama Brodie’s book is a historically conscious study of gender-based violence and femicide that traces the lineage of the feminist vocabulary developed to speak about and combat the phenomenon.
The cultural impact of The Eusebius McKaiser Show
McKaiser’s show at Radio 702 became a home for many, a place to question and deeply engage with difficult aspects of South African society while shaping public culture.
On movement, human rights and Covid-19
Meditating on human rights and the coronavirus in South Africa, Pumla Dineo Gqola posits that the landscape of freedom after apartheid has cemented an old regime of movement.
The patriarchy expects you to follow these scripts
There are many scripts that women are told to follow in the machinery of patriarchal fear taught by South African society.
Gabrielle Goliath creates songs for survivors in scratched melodies
The artist’s new exhibition, ‘This is a song for…’, interrupts song recordings in the manner of a stuck record to jar audience members into experiencing how rape continues to interject itself into the lives of eight women.