Intersectionality in Cape Town
This is a tragic story of intersections tangling instead of smoothly and lovingly intersecting.
The Rhodes Must Fall Exhibition, “Echoing Voices from Within” was disrupted yesterday by members of the University of Cape Town’s Trans Collective, a student led organisation that prioritises the rights of transgender, gender non-conforming and intersex students at the University of Cape Town.
That’s the trouble with the trans activism branch of intersectionalism right now, isn’t it – that it prioritizes its own rights instead of promoting or defending or raising awareness of them. In other words, it’s the opposite of intersectional: it says Put Us First. As it did here, by disrupting an anti-colonialist exhibition for the sake of it’s not clear what exactly.
Students smeared photographs with red paint and blocked the entrances to the Centre for African Studies Gallery with their painted naked bodies. The exhibition was shut down.
For not being about trans issues, apparently. But that’s not very intersectional, is it.
Whether the exhibition will be reinstated is still under discussion, as certain photographs have been removed, while others have been covered in red paint.
Curator of the Centre for African Studies Gallery Paul Weinberg asks a member of the Trans Collective to stop the disruption. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks
In a statement released a short while ago, the Trans Collective stated that its “role has now evolved into speaking back to RMF and keeping it accountable to its commitment to intersectionality precisely because it is positioned as a black decolonial space.”
So commitment to intersectionality means black decolonizers have to “center” trans issues? It means they can’t talk about their own issue but have to talk about trans issues instead? I’m not seeing the intersection. I’m just seeing one big highway.
Trans Collective complained that only three out of more than 1,000 images that ended up making it onto the exhibition roll featured a trans person’s face.
What?
What?
What?
How on earth could they know that?
I wanted to see how three trans people amongst “over a thousand” compared to the proportion of trans people in the general population. I googled ‘trans population’ and was most interested in the little excerpt visible before even clicking on any result:
“Another paper, published in 2011 by the Williams Institute, used survey data to attempt to count the transgender population. It estimated that 0.3 percent of the population, or 700,000 adults, identified that way. It used data from two surveys.”
Fascinating! 0.3% is exactly three in a thousand, meaning that gallery was quite close to being exactly proportional, depending on what exactly is meant by ‘more than 1000’ images. (Reading further gives a discussion of the method used.)
So even if we grant for the sake of argument that the Trans Collective is entitled to dominate all local discussions of social ills, we see that they were complaining about representation that was in fact quite fair. Proportionate representation just even enough for that lot.
A certain “entitled little shits” post comes to mind.
Perhaps it should be dubbed “Tigger’s nomenclature”?
They know because they told us.
But some people are More Proportional than others!
It’s funny you mention one big highway, Ophelia. Several days ago I began trying to depict something similar using simple PowerPoint shapes. I’m not an artist or a graphic artist, so I couldn’t make it work. The idea, though, was:
Two visuals. The title of the first visual is “Intersectionality: As I See It.” There are two, two-lane highways running almost parallel that intersect about in the center of the graphic. One highway is Feminist Rights; the other Trans Rights.
The second visual is titled “Intersectionality: As They See It.” Moving in the same direction, there is a single, ten-lane highway using up the same real estate, and more, as the two highways in the first visual. The highway is Trans Rights. There is no Feminist Rights.
Okay, so I’m not an editorial cartoonist, either, but it’s a visual that’s been in my mind for about a week. I may use this post as additional motivation to eventually get this depicted.
Unbelievable. Because only 3 in 1000 photos were a trans face?? Even if true, isn’t that in line with common estimates of the trans population? I hope they get their asses handed to them by anti-colonization activists.
… as Holms so aptly pointed out in the first comment. Oops!
There might be a little more going on than the article indicates: the picture in the OP shows someone defacing a picture of Chumani Maxwele. Another picture shows that the defacement was to write “Rapist” on the picture in red paint.
I have no idea what “Rapist” is referring to, but according to this article, Maxwele was expelled over a pretty terrifying encounter in which he harassed a lecturer (a white woman) by telling her that all whites had to go, and deserved to be killed.
This is only one datum, but it makes me suspect that there’s more subtext to all this than generically insisting that anti-colonialism must center trans people.
Oh, as for “three out of more than a thousand” being of a trans person, I’m guessing that the pictures are of actual students, and three of them are members of this trans organization.
Entitled Little Vain Shits. ELVS.
With apologies to the late, great Pterry:
So 3 in 1000 appears to be reasonable representative number, but echoing Ophelia in the OP: How on earth could they know?
Do the protestors actually claim to know the gender identity of every single person portrayed in the exhibit? Or are they also erasing trans people who are able to “pass”?
Followup:
It does appear that there’s a bit more to the story. It’s being discussed at HeJin Kim’s Facebook page. There we learn that the “3 pictures out of more than 1,000” were specifically of HeJin Kim–the person pictured in the OP.
Kim responds that the paint was “easily removable,” and was applied to the glass over the paintings, not the paintings themselves (for whatever difference that makes).
Kim also refers to “the rape that happened at Azania,” whatever that is. I’d guess that writing “Rapist” over Chumani Maxwele’s image represents some sort of accusation.
If numbers are as high as three in a thousand, that means that when I was in secondary education, there were two other trans students there. I wasn’t as alone as I felt…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Further apologies, this time to Monty Python:
tiggerthewing: I do appreciate your Pterry and Python takes on this – helps with perspective, I think.
More followup: it appears that the folks putting on “RhodesMustFall” and the people disrupting the exhibition belong[ed] to the same organization, and live at the same residence, which they’ve informally named Azania hall. Last year Zola Shokane accused Thabiso Monyakane of digitally raping her.
The case is apparently not settled; I don’t see any reports about it since last year. The source with the most information is #RapeAtAzania on Twitter. It indicates that Monyakane had bail set at 1,000 rand. There’s also a short video of the victim telling off a cop for “laughing at us for six hours” while she told her story.
It appears that this is one of the main points of contention between the trans organization and the RhodesMustFall group.
Thank you for doing that research, A Masked Avenger.
That is very helpful, getting a bit of background on this whole sordid episode.
I would be a bit hesitant on this one. RMF are basically a bunch of total hooligans noted for causing mass destruction of property and then acting shocked when they get shot by police.
Before this current exhibition of theirs, they burnt artwork they deemed “colonial” – some of which was of anti-Apartheid activists, and some of it was by anti-Apartheid activists.
They’re part of the element in the fees must fall movement that endorses messages like “Kill all whites”.
http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/kill-all-whites-t-shirt-culprit-identified-uct-20160212
I don’t have the details on exactly what the Trans activists’ beef with the movement is, but given the sort of shit I have seen RMF pull in the past, I would hesitate before knowing exactly what was going on.
Thanks Bruce and A Masked Avenger.
South Africa will soon be a second Zimbabwe. A nation of rotating blackouts, hyperinflation and food shortages.