ABSTRACT

Works of art consciously or unconsciously reproduce or reject of the societal norms from which they emerge. Reading artists and creatives as bodies which articulate the social and political experiences (affirmation or rejection implies that the body can also construct and deconstruct particular social readings of itself. In this paper, I explore feminist corporality, aesthetics and gendered performativity in the translation of selected songs ,by South African popular music icons Brenda Fassie and Busiswa Gqulu, into music videos. I argue that both artists construct “the self” and engage gendered narratives of “the self” through audio-visual form. I firstly employ the notion of homology, to compare the common thread in their articulation of black feminist discourse through their lyrics and the self-performativity of their music videos. I then focus on the aesthetic and performative elements of Gqulu’s music videos, notably the queer performativity of the Vintage Cru dancers and the staging of post-apartheid urban spaces. Through this intergenerational analysis I illustrate how popular audio-visual form participates in the representation of multiple iterations of queer and feminist performativity emerging out of the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.

摘要

艺术作品有意识或无意识地复制或拒绝它们产生的社会规范。将艺术家和创意者视为表达社会和政治经验的身体（肯定或拒绝意味着身体也可以构建和解构自身的特定社会阅读。在本文中，我探讨了女性主义的肉体、美学和性别化的表演性在选定的翻译中歌曲 , 由南非流行音乐偶像 Brenda Fassie 和 Busiswa Gqulu 制作成音乐视频。我认为两位艺术家都通过视听形式构建了“自我”并参与了“自我”的性别叙事。我首先采用了同源性的概念，比较他们通过歌词和音乐视频的自我表现性来表达黑人女权主义话语的共同点。然后我将重点放在 Gqulu 音乐视频的美学和表演元素上，特别是 Vintage Cru 舞者的奇怪表演和后种族隔离的城市空间的舞台表演。通过这种代际分析，我说明了流行的视听形式如何参与在种族隔离和后种族隔离时代出现的酷儿和女权主义表演性的多次迭代的表现。