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the other has a very clear presence in the way in which lived relations are played out, especially in South Africa, between black and white women and also in terms generally of black women’s experience here. So I think it’s a really sensitive issue and it’s very difficult to negotiate in a way that doesn’t reduce women to an essentialist category. Do you think that there is a danger that that historical slippage then creates another kind of slippage where the differences between the power relations, between white women and black women are erased? PS: I think in a way this is almost impossible to answer. What I have tried to do is rather open up the question. The question of difference you point to is not stable. I consciously exhibited just the traces of these women, the outward signs of women who worked as nannies in white households, for example. Everyone in South Africa knows that the uniforms in Maids are the uniforms of black maids. I specifically wanted them exhibited in close proximity to Foreign Affairs (Figure 2). Foreign Affairs is a work using images of medieval restraints and scolds’ bridles together with an image of Saartjie Baartman. Her face is centred on a mirror. When you look into it, it is as if you are held there by her. The images of the scolds’ bridles are interspersed with texts from the Weekly Mail newspaper published during the State of Emergency. AC: During that period whole paragraphs and sentences in various newspapers were inked out by the censor? PS: Not exactly. The Weekly Mail chose the device of blackening out text or leaving white spaces to signal the work of suppression of information. I wanted to suggest a relationship between contemporary censorship and ideas about having the right to speak—having or not having a voice. The medieval masks are also about speaking, or not being able to speak. If women spoke too much they were punished and things put on their faces, restraints on their tongues. This brings me back to the issue of subjectivity—subjectivity in terms of how my subjectivity would be produced or changed, having had the experience of being brought up or nannied by a black woman, and how hers might be altered. So in a way that whole relationship between class, race, subjectivity and the idea of gender was for me an enquiry into all those things and the ideas that almost can’t be spoken. I wanted to try to face it, not
DOI link for the other has a very clear presence in the way in which lived relations are played out, especially in South Africa, between black and white women and also in terms generally of black women’s experience here. So I think it’s a really sensitive issue and it’s very difficult to negotiate in a way that doesn’t reduce women to an essentialist category. Do you think that there is a danger that that historical slippage then creates another kind of slippage where the differences between the power relations, between white women and black women are erased? PS: I think in a way this is almost impossible to answer. What I have tried to do is rather open up the question. The question of difference you point to is not stable. I consciously exhibited just the traces of these women, the outward signs of women who worked as nannies in white households, for example. Everyone in South Africa knows that the uniforms in Maids are the uniforms of black maids. I specifically wanted them exhibited in close proximity to Foreign Affairs (Figure 2). Foreign Affairs is a work using images of medieval restraints and scolds’ bridles together with an image of Saartjie Baartman. Her face is centred on a mirror. When you look into it, it is as if you are held there by her. The images of the scolds’ bridles are interspersed with texts from the Weekly Mail newspaper published during the State of Emergency. AC: During that period whole paragraphs and sentences in various newspapers were inked out by the censor? PS: Not exactly. The Weekly Mail chose the device of blackening out text or leaving white spaces to signal the work of suppression of information. I wanted to suggest a relationship between contemporary censorship and ideas about having the right to speak—having or not having a voice. The medieval masks are also about speaking, or not being able to speak. If women spoke too much they were punished and things put on their faces, restraints on their tongues. This brings me back to the issue of subjectivity—subjectivity in terms of how my subjectivity would be produced or changed, having had the experience of being brought up or nannied by a black woman, and how hers might be altered. So in a way that whole relationship between class, race, subjectivity and the idea of gender was for me an enquiry into all those things and the ideas that almost can’t be spoken. I wanted to try to face it, not
the other has a very clear presence in the way in which lived relations are played out, especially in South Africa, between black and white women and also in terms generally of black women’s experience here. So I think it’s a really sensitive issue and it’s very difficult to negotiate in a way that doesn’t reduce women to an essentialist category. Do you think that there is a danger that that historical slippage then creates another kind of slippage where the differences between the power relations, between white women and black women are erased? PS: I think in a way this is almost impossible to answer. What I have tried to do is rather open up the question. The question of difference you point to is not stable. I consciously exhibited just the traces of these women, the outward signs of women who worked as nannies in white households, for example. Everyone in South Africa knows that the uniforms in Maids are the uniforms of black maids. I specifically wanted them exhibited in close proximity to Foreign Affairs (Figure 2). Foreign Affairs is a work using images of medieval restraints and scolds’ bridles together with an image of Saartjie Baartman. Her face is centred on a mirror. When you look into it, it is as if you are held there by her. The images of the scolds’ bridles are interspersed with texts from the Weekly Mail newspaper published during the State of Emergency. AC: During that period whole paragraphs and sentences in various newspapers were inked out by the censor? PS: Not exactly. The Weekly Mail chose the device of blackening out text or leaving white spaces to signal the work of suppression of information. I wanted to suggest a relationship between contemporary censorship and ideas about having the right to speak—having or not having a voice. The medieval masks are also about speaking, or not being able to speak. If women spoke too much they were punished and things put on their faces, restraints on their tongues. This brings me back to the issue of subjectivity—subjectivity in terms of how my subjectivity would be produced or changed, having had the experience of being brought up or nannied by a black woman, and how hers might be altered. So in a way that whole relationship between class, race, subjectivity and the idea of gender was for me an enquiry into all those things and the ideas that almost can’t be spoken. I wanted to try to face it, not
ABSTRACT
the other has a very clear presence in the way in which lived relations are played out, especially in South Africa, between black and white women and also in terms generally of black women’s experience here. So I think it’s a really sensitive issue and it’s very difficult to negotiate in a way that doesn’t reduce women to an essentialist category. Do you think that there is a danger that that historical slippage then creates another kind of slippage where the differences between the power relations, between white women and black women are erased?
