Electronic Theses and Dissertations (Masters)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10539/37948

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    Crafting Spaces: Exploring the Potential for a Queer(ed) Curatorial Practice through Zines
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Baia, Tristan
    This research report explores the potential of zines in creating and sustaining a decentralised, affective, and queer(ed) curatorial practice; viewed through a theoretical framework of Trans Care and queer communal action that draws on the writing of Hil Malatino, Harry Josephine Giles, and other queer, trans and feminist scholars. This research report is foregrounded by a discussion on the author’s experiences and discomfort with mainstream South African institutions, specifically relating to a perceived lack of care extended towards artists and curators and an overreliance on mainstream spaces. From there, focusing on the history of zines as small-scale, noncommercial, self-published print works, the research explores how zines have been (and continue to be) used to form communal connections, mobilise anti-institutional action, and disseminate subversive material that ordinarily would not be distributed by mainstream platforms. Additionally, the research report also examines archival examples of pre-1994 South African queer print media to examine historical evidence of how queer individuals have relied on print matter to provide communal support, share information relating to queer healthcare, and engage in activism. Finally, these concepts are actualised through a curatorial engagement in the form of a zine jam, where participants gather to produce zines and engage in the communal action of crafting together. By emphasizing the punk, communal nature of zine production and distribution, the research emphasises artistic and curatorial agency and encourages a movement towards more communal ways of working together to avoid an overreliance on institutional platforms and spaces.
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    Lil_ith- A love story for South Africa’s queer, misfit youth
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-03) de Jager, Robin Claude; Wessels, Christopher
    This project takes the form of an explorative filmic investigation into and reflection on the archetype of the queer misfit in South African cinema. The film and research take the standpoint of the South African misfit archetype being a post-queer-theory subject in relation to the country’s historical, socio-economic, sexual, traditional and technological landscape. I will compare the appearance of the queer misfit through the arrival of the neon and caustic characters of the New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s to South Africa’s contemporary emergence of this archetype, positioning Queer Theory and the New Queer Cinema movement of the early as the primary emergence of a ‘true’ queer voice. I will engage with the influence of socio-economic, political and technological stimuli as well as the emergence of post-Queer Theory in the West and South Africa and its contribution to the evolution of the queer and misfit in post-colonial South African cinema. Through a practice-led, autoethnographic approach I combined these findings with core theoretical frameworks on post-modern sexuality by Queen and Schimel to inform and fuel the development of the film Lil_ith. The film stands as a creative execution expanding on the South African Misfit archetype in relation to the global history of Queer Misfit representation as well as its relationship with South Africa as a nation in the process of de-lonialisation within a digitised and globalised world.