A Photo-Biographical Project by Zanele Muholi
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Ngiyopha: A Photo-biographical Project by Zanele Muholi “Dead Bodies do not bleed.”— (hooks 1995: 213) Ngiyopha is a Zulu expression that can be loosely translated as “my blood,” “bleeding - time of the month,” or “period in time.” Additionally, there is an added meaning in the translation that there is something secretive in and about this blood/“period in time.” At one level, my project deals with my own menstrual blood, with that secretive, feminine time of the month that has been reduced within Western patriarchal culture as dirty. Moreover, it signifies a woman’s sexuality and the very pathway to her eternal downfall, as we are informed in the Judeo-Christian biblical story of Adam and Eve. Menstrual blood and a young woman’s menses culturally marks her as not only sexually available, but also as sexually irresponsible, possibly dangerous if she is not controlled by the men in her life, by her culture, and religion. In Mystifications of Female Sexuality: A Dangerous Tradition, Ketu H. Katrak argues that "patriarchal and political interpretations of traditional religion and ritual often control the expression and withholding of female sexuality." Within Orthodox Jewish religion, there are rules of family purity orthodox women must follow. They cannot have contact with their husbands while they are menstruating or for seven days after menstruation has stopped. This is something that is strictly believed, as the women are not clean while they are menstruating. (Katrak 2006:202) © Zanele Muholi, untitled, 2005 © Zanele Muholi, untitled, 2005 In my Zulu culture, a menstruating woman is not allowed to enter a kitchen or any place where people gather for fear that she will contaminate the village. It is only postmenopausal women and virgins that are allowed in the kitchen when Umqomboti— African beer—is made so that the beer will not spoil. There is also the cultural practice of ilobolo, which is the bride price a man must pay to the family of a woman he plans to marry. Her price lowers if she is no longer a virgin, even if she was raped. The rape, however, can be made ‘right’ if the rapist pays the family damages. It is even worse if a woman is barren; she is also seen as worthless. What then, of an African woman who is also a lesbian and chooses not to have children? What if she is raped and torn in her vagina because she violated the socio-cultural codes of what a good African and black woman (heterosexual wife and mother) should be like? © Zanele Muholi, ihluli, 2008 On a deeper level then, my menstrual blood is used as a vehicle and medium to begin to express and bridge the pain and loss I feel as I hear and become witness to the pain of rape that many of the girls and women in my black lesbian community bleed from their vaginas and their minds. Between 2002 and 2006, I documented 50 cases of violent hate crimes that took place over a decade involving black lesbians in townships. Over half experienced direct rape. Many of the men who perpetrated such crimes see rape as a ‘cure’ against lesbianism, and the rape act is a weapon meant to put black lesbian women in ‘their place’ in our society. South African feminist scholar Pumla Gqola states that “homosexuality is often demonized as abnormal because it is not ‘natural’, as though the natural is discernable and desirable. At the same time menstruation is ‘natural’ and yet hidden.” (Gqola 2006: 86) For this same reason, bleeding women are not allowed near the altar in Christian culture, and homosexuality is perceived as sin brought to Africa by the West. Like me, these black women exist as invisible within a heteropatriarchal post-Apartheid national African culture. Yet on the streets, in our homes, at work, or at local taverns we are at the same time hypervisible, our menstruating bodies marking us as female, but our gender presentation may conflict with that femaleness. In my own research, I have found that the majority of lesbians who are raped and have told their stories to me are butch/masculine identified. Black lesbian bodies pose a threat to localized meanings of masculinity, femininity, (hetero)sexuality and desire. Our new and constitutionally inscribed “lesbian” identities represent a danger to those who benefit from the dominance of heteropatriarchy—heterosexual men and some women who strike a patriarchal bargain by remaining silent when the act of “curative rape” is forced on us. Of course we are only protected on paper. © Zanele Muholi, Iwile, 2008 I focus on my menstrual blood, too, because it is a life force without which the human race could not reproduce. And yet, too many times our bleeding bodies feel foreign to those of us who are still raised with colonial attitudes of shame about our menses and sexualities. Janet Lee (1998) and Emily Martin (1987) have studied and researched how young women experience menses. Both authors write that many women feel a sense of alienation from their bodies, a fragmentation between conceptions of self and what is happening to their bodies when they have menses. It is this fragmentation between a bleeding body and the self—whether bleeding through menses or bleeding from a torn and raped vagina—that I am trying to capture and express by using my own menstrual blood in my work. The source of shame we feel as lesbians for being raped comes from the same patriarchal source as the shame we feel for our menses. We not only feel the shame for being raped by men on the streets and/or in our homes, but then there is the secondary shame we endure when some doctors re-victimize us by commenting that lesbians can’t be raped, or that it is a sin to be lesbian, and therefore the rape of our bodies is justifiable—our punishment. It is our living, bleeding female/lesbian/butch/femme bodies that are raped. It is our torn and bleeding vaginas that are scrutinized by male police and doctors who become experts on our bodies, our subjectivities, and our experiences. It is their “expert” knowledge that decides our fate—“yes, you were raped and deserve sympathy and justice” or “no, you were not raped and you are a liar.” bell hooks points out that “dead bodies do not bleed.” It is our living breathing bodies that endure this literal and figurative bleeding. In theorizing rape, Ann J. Cahill asks what power relations are inscribed on the feminine/female body? She cites Lynne Henderson who argues that “a primary impediment to recognition that rape is a real and frequent crime is a widely accepted “cultural story” of heterosexuality that results in an unspoken “rule” of male innocence and female guilt in law. By male innocence and female guilt, I mean an unexamined belief that men are not morally responsible for their heterosexual conduct, while female are morally responsible both for their conduct and for the conduct of males.” (Cahill 2001: 160) Katrak adds that “the silence on women's sexuality and the exiling of pleasure from women's sexuality in the context of continuing objectification of women for male pleasure and procreation has made it very difficult for any reclamation of our bodies and sexualities." (Katrak 2006: 200) It is this silencing that leaves so many of our bodies fragmented from our selves. Fear of being ostracized and judged further silence the victims of these rapes. I want to undo this silencing and fear by speaking with my blood, showing that rape and menses is an embodied experience, but will not break us. Cahill argues that “by understanding rape as an embodied experience, as an attack on the embodied subject that directly involves and invokes the sexuality of both the assailant and the victim, we perceive the phenomenon as a threat to the possibility of embodied subjectivity, a threat to the victim’s (sexually specific) personhood and intersubjectivity.” (Cahill 2001:133) © Zanele Muholi, Isibuko II, 2005 Using my period blood to signify and articulate my pain as witness to lesbian rape, I try to theorize the aesthetic of the body across space, culture, and time, highlighting the social and gendered aspects of the body, its internal functions—especially menstruation. In her discussion of the use of blood in photographer Andres Serrano’s work Heaven and Hell, bell hooks argues that Serrano’s work “pierces the screen of patriarchal denial, [demanding] that we acknowledge what we are really seeing when we look at the female nude in Western art.” Serrano’s piece features a naked woman, hands tied behind her back, blood dripping from her hands. There is no aesthetic of the body to theorize without speaking of what is the very meaning given to the female, lesbian, black body and to blood, to the life force within us women. It is through this marking of the body, that certain kinds of subjects get produced like the black lesbian, the rape victim, the butch, or the bleeding woman. In Miriam Madziwa's article Dignity Period, she relates the fate of Thabitha Khumalo, a Zimbabwean feminist who resisted patriarchy by campaigning against a critical shortage of tampons and sanitary towels in her country. So desperate is the situation that many women are being forced to use old pieces of cloths or rolled-up pieces of newspaper or banana leaves. She believed that unhygienic practices could increase the rate of infections will make women more vulnerable to HIV. The article reports that Thabitha was arrested twenty-two times, tortured so badly that her front teeth were knocked into her nose, raped by twenty-eight men, and had an AK-47 thrust up her vagina until she bled.