https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6992-5915
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Abstract
How to access, read, and interpret queer-feminist live art from a transnational perspective? And how to account for those subjects whose geopolitical positionalities do not subscribe to the most acknowledged Euro-American canons? In this article, I will address these questions by engaging with the limits of a queer theory (or practice) that does not acknowledge its feminist co-constitution or that it is anchored to Anglo-American perspectives and genealogies. I will then propose a transnational approach to enrich this field and counteract the reproduction of abstract queer equivalences across cultures. Adopting what I call a ‘transnational queer-feminist methodology’ will therefore be essential for working with and analysing queer and queer-feminist live art that is produced and circulated across and within diverse geopolitical locations. I will describe how the latter relies on an interdisciplinary weaving of social sciences, queer, and performance studies/practices. I will use this approach in analysing Ghanaian transgender artist Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi [crazinisT artisT], unpacking the issues of cultural and linguistic translation in her work. The artist (who asks to be called with the pronouns ’sHit’ or ‘she’) engages in endurance actions that, together with challenging her own physical boundaries, also expose the limits of Western identity markers. In applying a transnational queer-feminist methodology that expands from the regional (Ghana) towards transnational Pan-African perspectives, I will then argue that her work uses the aesthetics of abjection to counteract cultural and linguistic imperialisms and become ‘illegible’ to the neo-liberal global LGBT rights formulations whilst speaking for a transversal queer African subjectivity.
Notes on Contributor
Giulia Casalini is an independent curator-artist-researcher based in London, working transnationally. Giulia is a Technē-funded PhD candidate at the University of Roehampton. Her research analyses queer-feminist live art from across the globe, in an attempt to decentre Euro-Anglo-American aesthetic canons and discourses.
Notes
1. The liquid, which looks like paint, is composed of clay diluted with food dye and other organic materials such as leaves and herbs. Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi, in conversation with the author, February 9, 2021.
2. Performance documentation and description: crazinisT artist (Va-Bene), ‘wouNded wouNd 2018’, Vimeo, February 12, 2018, https://vimeo.com/255491375 (accessed January 28, 2021).
3. ‘LGBTQ+ Bill: Rightful Ghana group meeting with committee to be held in-camera’, GhanaWeb, March 17, 2022, https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/LGBTQ-Bill-Rightful-Ghana-group-meeting-with-committee-to-be-held-in-camera-1492844 (accessed June 13, 2022).
4. For the full text of the bill, see: Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights And Ghanaian Family Values Act, 2021, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1olPbyKaTpwJkj47vaa6MQObqCdCYV1Aw/view (accessed June 13, 2022).
5. Raymond A. Atuguba, ‘Homosexuality in Ghana: Morality, Law Human Rights’,Journal of Politics and Law 12, no. 4 (2019): 113-126 (113-115).
6. Human Rights Violations Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) People in Ghana: A Shadow Report (Geneva: Solace Brothers Foundation et al., 2015), (accessed February 13, 2023).
7. crazinisT artisT has performed in Nigeria, Togo, Switzerland, South Africa, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Spain, Brazil, France, and the UK. She is the founder and artistic director of pIAR (perfocraZe International Artists Residency), a residency based in her studio-house, which aims at ‘promoting exchanges between international and local artists, activists, researchers, curators, and thinkers’. crazinisT artisT, ‘Biography’, https://www.crazinistartist.com/biography (accessed January 25, 2021).
8. crazinisT artist (Va-Bene), ‘wouNded wouNd 2018’.
9. I borrow the term ‘ugly feelings’ by Sianne Ngai, who sees them as ‘aesthetic emotions’ that can be ‘explicitly amoral and noncathartic, offering no satisfactions of virtue, however oblique, nor any therapeutic or purifying release’. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2005), 6.
10. In this text I tend to use the inclusive acronym ‘LGBTQI’ in reference to queer African activism and ‘LGBT’ when referring to identity politics-based mainstream western movements.
11. Douglas Clarke, ‘Twice Removed: African invisibility in Western queer theory’ in Queer African Reader, eds. Sokari Ekine and Hakima Abbas (Oxford: Pambazuka Press, 2013), 173-185 (176).
12. My emphasis. Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3, no. 2 (1991): iii-xviii (iii-iv).
13. The historical intersections of queer theory and feminism have been explored by various authors, such as: Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor, eds., Feminism Meets Queer Theory (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997); Tiina Rosenberg, ‘LOCALLY QUEER. A Note on the Feminist Genealogy of Queer Theory’, Graduate Journal of Social Science 6, no.1 (2008): 5-18; Annemarie Jagose, ‘Feminism’s Queer Theory’, Feminism & Psychology 19, no.2 (2009): 57–74; Mimi Marinucci, Feminism is Queer: The intimate connection between queer and feminist theory, 2nd ed (London: Zed Books, 2016).
14. O’Rourke mentions Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as exemplary: Michael O’Rourke, ‘The afterlives of Queer Theory’, International Social Science Journal 63 (2012): 25-37 (26). I would add more male names, such as Leo Bersani or Michael Warner.
15. Ibid., 26-29.
16. Annemarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 129.
17. David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz, ‘What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?’ Social Text 23, nos. 3–4 (84-85) (2005): 1-17; David V. Ruffolo, Post-Queer Politics (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 4.
18. I refer to the definition provided by the Live Art Development Agency: Live Art Development Agency, ‘What is Live Art?’, https://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/about-lada/what-is-live-art/ (accessed February 15, 2021).
19. Ibid.
20. Maria Chatzichristodoulou, ’Live Art in the UK: Shaping a Field’, in Live Art in the UK: Contemporary Performances of Precarity, ed. Maria Chatzichristodoulou (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 1-18 (9).
21. In this paper, I am mainly interested in addressing Euro-American cultural imperialism and the ways that the South speaks back to the North. However, I am grateful to Manola K. Gayatri for pointing out how South-South conversations need to take place in order to create new epistemic openings and mappings, and escape the necessity of speaking back to the European canon. I wish to further explore these dialogues in the future.
22. For instance, because of the dominance of Anglo-American paradigms in the live art field, queer and feminist art in East and South East Asia is still under-appreciated or under-explored, despite its rich proliferation.
23. Amelia Jones and Erin Silver, ‘Queer feminist art history: an imperfect genealogy’ in Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, eds. Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 1-50 (15).
24. For example, the under-representation of queer Eastern European art or native artistic productions in settler-colonial countries shows that less acknowledged perspectives also exist within culturally hegemonic geopolitical areas.
25. Browne and Nash describe methodology as ‘the logic that links the project’s ontological and epistemological approaches to the selection and deployment of these methods’. Kath Browne and Catherine J. Nash, ‘Queer Methods and Methodologies: An Introduction’ in Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theory and Social Science Research, eds. Kath Browne and Catherine J. Nash (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 1-23 (10-11).
26. See: Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 80-81; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘“Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles’, Signs 28, no.2 (2003): 499-535 (509).
27. Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar, ‘Introduction: Theorizing Transnational Feminist Praxis’, in Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, eds. Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 1-20 (4).
28. Marsha Meskimmon, Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art: Entanglements and Intersections (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 4.
29. Sonia E. Alvarez ‘Introduction to the Project and the Volume/Enacting a Translocal Feminist Politics of Translation’, in Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas, eds. Sonia E Alvarez, et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 1-18 (2).
30. Elizabeth Povinelli and George Chauncey, ‘Thinking Sexuality Transnationally: An Introduction’, GLQ 5, no.4 (1999): 439-450 (439).
31. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, ‘Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality’, GLQ 7, no.4 (2001): 663-679 (663-664).
32. Povinelli and Chauncey, ‘Thinking Sexuality Transnationally’: 439.
33. Homo-transphobic bills have recently been passed or considered in countries like Hungary, Poland, Brazil and Ghana: Rachel Savage, ‘Poland and Hungary lead Europe’s rise in homophobia’, iNews, May 17, 2021, https://inews.co.uk/news/poland-and-hungary-lead-europes-rise-in-homophobia-1005032 (accessed August 20, 2021); AFP, ‘Ghana’s President in Tight Spot Over Anti-LGBT Law’, VOA News, August 12, 2021, https://www.voanews.com/africa/ghanas-president-tight-spot-over-anti-lgbt-law (accessed August 20, 2021); Sarah Johnson, ‘“Epidemic of violence”: Brazil shocked by “barbaric” gang-rape of gay man’, Guardian, June 9, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jun/09/epidemic-of-violence-brazil-shocked-by-barbaric-gang-rape-of-gay-man (accessed August 20, 2021).
34. For a discussion on the incommensurability of African queer identity in relation to Western LGBT identities and movements, see: Ashley Currier and Thérèse Migraine-George, ‘The Incommensurability of The “Transnational” in Queer African Studies’, College Literature 45, no.4 (2018): 613-622 (614).
35. Coco Fusco, ‘The Other History of Intercultural Performance’, TDR 38, no.1 (1994): 143-167; Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case, eds., Staging International Feminisms (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar, eds., Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010); Macarena Gómez-Barris, Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018); Kanika Batra, Feminist Visions and Queer Futures in Postcolonial Drama: Community, Kinship, and Citizenship (London and New York: Routledge, 2011); Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier, eds., Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016).
36. Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14, no.3 (1988): 575-599 (589-590).
37. Browne and Nash, ‘Queer Methods and Methodologies’, 7.
38. Maya Mikdashi and Jasbir K. Puar, ‘Queer Theory and Permanent War’, GLQ 22, no.2 (2016): 215-222 (216).
39. Mia Liinason and Robert Kulpa, eds., ‘Queer Studies: Methodological Approaches’, Graduate Journal of Social Science 5, no.2 (2008): 1-179 (1).
40. Mikdashi and Puar, ‘Queer Theory and Permanent War’, 216.
41. Liinason and Kulpa, ‘Queer Studies’, 1.
42. A similar methodological approach has been explored in the social sciences in: Kath Browne, Niharika Banerjea, Nick McGlynn, Sumita B., Leela Bakshi, Rukmini Banerjee, and Ranjita Biswas, ‘Towards transnational feminist queer methodologies’, Gender, Place & Culture 24, no.10 (2017): 1376–1397.
43. I have applied to my case the three transversalities proposed by: Iris van der Tuin and Rick Dolphijn, ‘The Transversality of New Materialism’, Women: a cultural review 21, no.2 (2010): 153-171 (158-159).
44. Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘What is “transversal politics”?’ Soundings 12 (1999): 94-98 (94).
45. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 93-94.
46. The shift to the digital caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has provided me with numerous occasions for engaging with the artist’s work online, thus bringing us closer than before.
47. crazinisT artisT, ‘Biography’, https://www.crazinistartist.com/biography/ (accessed October 9, 2022).
48. crazinist_artist, Instagram, comment posted April 24, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/B_WDqYxF_au (accessed January 25, 2021).
49. The Akan language variants (known as unified written Twi) are used in over two-thirds of the country and mainly correspond to the ethnic group of the Asante empire that used to occupy the territories of present-day Ghana. Ewe, the second most spoken indigenous language in the country, has been impacted by post-colonial border divisions as it is used among populations living between Ghana and Togo. Ewe gained its strength and currency due to a proliferation of literature and a popular translation of the Bible, endorsed by German Christian missionaries in the 19th century. Akosua Anyidoho and M. E. Kropp Dakubu, ‘Ghana: Indigenous Languages, English, and an Emerging National Identity’, in Language and National Identity in Africa, ed. Andrew Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 141-157.
50. Va-Bene has been involved with Chale Wote since 2014. The festival started as a one-day event in 2011 and later grew into an international visual and performing arts festival, attracting over 50,000 people every year. Jareh Das, ‘Chale Wote: From local festival to boundary-pushing global platform’, CNN, September 11, 2019, https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/chale-wote-festival-accra/index.html (accessed January 26, 2021).
51. Performance description and images: crazinisT artisT, ‘agbanWu’, https://www.crazinistartist.com/performances/2018/agbanwu (accessed January 26, 2021).
52. Lilian Diarra, ‘Ghana’s Slave Castles: The Shocking Story of the Ghanaian Cape Coast’, Culture Trip, January 24, 2017, https://theculturetrip.com/africa/ghana/articles/ghana-s-slave-castles-the-shocking-story-of-the-ghanaian-cape-coast/ (accessed January 27, 2021).
53. Rebecca Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2011), 7-9.
54. Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi, interview by Giulia Casalini, January 16-17, 2022.
55. The work Psychopathia Sexualis, published in 1886 by Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, infamously established the labelling of homosexuality and other sexual ‘deviances’ in the popular domain. Louis van den Hengel, ‘Sexecologies’, in Gender: Matter, ed. Stacy Alaimo (Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference, 2017), 329-344.
56. Keguro Macharia, ‘belated: interruption’, GLQ 26, no.3, (2020): 561-573 (564).
57. Ibid., 564-565.
58. crazinisT artisT, ‘agbanWu’.
59. In a post the artist explains that the work was created ‘following series of mob justice and murders of some marginalized and misidentified people including the death of Captain Maxwell Mahama and the alleged witch Yednboka Keena’. CrazinisT artis.T Studio, Facebook, July 10, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yxu5kgwt (accessed January 26, 2021).
60. For a fortuitous circumstance, the president Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo-Addo appeared during crazinisT artisT’s performance: a photo reveals his stupefied expression at the spectacle of self-mortification. crazinist_artist, Instagram, September 11, 2018 https://www.instagram.com/p/BnkNFRQBxd1/ (accessed January 27, 2021).
61. Currier and Migraine-George, ‘Incommensurability of The “Transnational”’, 614.
62. See, for example, the recent publications: Sokari Ekine and Hakima Abbas, Queer African Reader (Oxford: Pambazuka Press, 2013); Zhetu Matebeni, Surya Monro and Vasu Reddy, Queer in Africa: LGBTQI Identities, Citizenship, and Activism (London and New York: Routledge, 2018); S.N. Nyeck, ed. Routledge Handbook of Queer African Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2019); Kirk Fiereck, Neville Hoad, and Danai S. Mupotsa, ‘A Queering-To-Come’, GLQ 26, no.3 (2020): 363-376.
63. Sokari Ekine, ‘Contesting narratives of queer Africa’ in Queer African Reader, eds. Sokari Ekine and Hakima Abbas (Oxford: Pambazuka Press, 2013), 78-91 (78).
64. Ibid.
65. Lyn Ossome, ‘Postcolonial discourses of queer activism and class in Africa’, in Queer African Reader, eds. Sokari Ekine and Hakima Abbas (Oxford: Pambazuka Press, 2013), 32-47 (39).
66. Alice McCool, ‘Bobi Wine’s Supporters Outed Me As Trans – But I Would Still Vote for Him’, Vice, January 13, 2021 https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vq3k/bobi-wines-supporters-outed-me-as-trans-but-i-would-still-vote-for-him (accessed February 8, 2021).
67. Zhetu Matebeni, Surya Monro, and Vasu Reddy, ‘Introduction’ in Queer in Africa: LGBTQI Identities, Citizenship, and Activism, eds. Zhetu Matebeni, Surya Monro, and Vasu Reddy (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 1-16 (2).
68. In a performative speech the artist made for Africa Union Day she stated: ‘For Africa to unite we need to embrace our diversity and dynamic experiences … ’ crazinist_artist, Instagram, May 31, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CA3kbKLl67Q/ (accessed August 31, 2021).
69. Reiland Rabaka, ‘Introduction: on the Intellectual elasticity and political plurality of Pan-Africanism’, in Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism, ed. Reiland Rabaka (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 1-32 (5).
70. Matteo Grilli, ‘Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism in West Africa’, in Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism, ed. Reiland Rabaka (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 289-301 (290).
71. Ibid., 295-297.
72. Ibid., 297.
73. Nkrumaism can be defined as ‘a Pan-Africanist ideology that included elements of black nationalism, socialism and Gandhism (at least until 1960)’. Ibid.
74. Ibid., 298-299.
75. Adriaan van Klinken, ‘Queer Pan-Africanism in contemporary Africa’, in Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism, ed. Reiland Rabaka (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 343-354 (344).
76. E. Patrick Johnson ‘‘‘Quare’’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother’, Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no.1 (2001): 1-25; Mojisola Adebayo, ‘Everything You Know About Queerness You Learnt from Blackness: The Afri-Quia Theatre of Black Dykes, Crips and Kids’, in Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer, eds. Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 131-149; H. Sharif ‘Herukhuti’ Williams, ‘Introduction to Afrocentric Decolonizing Kweer Theory and Epistemology of the Erotic’, Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships 2, no.4 (2016): 1-31; Tatiana Nascimento, ‘da palavra queerlombo ao cuíerlombo da palavra’, Palavra, Preta!, March 12, 2018 https://palavrapreta.wordpress.com/2018/03/12/cuierlombismo/ (accessed September 1, 2021); Zethu Matebeni and Jabu Pereira ‘Preface’, in Reclaiming Afrikan: Queer Perspectives on Sexual and Gender Identities, ed. Zethu Matebeni (Cape Town: Modjaji Books, 2014), 7-9 (7).
77. Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Translating the Queer: Body Politics and Transnational Conversations (London: Zed Books, 2016), 5.
78. Leticia Alvarado, Abject Performances: Aesthetic Practices in Latino Cultural Production (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018), 165.
79. Ibid., 166.
80. I thank Eleanor Roberts for pointing this out.
81. Alvarado, Abject Performances, 4.
82. Williams, ‘Introduction to Afrocentric Decolonizing Kweer Theory’, 9-10.
83. S. N. Nyeck, ‘Introduction’, in Routledge Handbook of Queer African Studies, ed. S.N. Nyeck (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 1-11 (2).
84. Evans Kafui Offori, ‘Re-Born to Die’, People’s Stories Project, July 30, 2020 https://www.psp-culture.com/projects/re-born-to-die/ (accessed 8 February 2021).
85. Currier and Migraine-George, ‘Incommensurability of “The “Transnational”’, 618.
86. Ashley Currier and Thérèse Migraine-George, ‘Queer Studies / African Studies: An (Im)possible Transaction?’, GLQ 22, no.2 (2016): 281-305 (291).
87. Adebayo, ‘Everything You Know About Queerness’, 135.