Lliane Loots

Women, food and biopolitics: Gender debates for southern Africa

abstract Biopolitics, or to decode the term, the politics around contemporary biologys genetic manipulation/modification of life forms (human, animal and plant), is fast becoming the key global issue for the 21st century. The debates around biopolitics feed not only into ethics of science to ‘fix’ the world but key into debates around human rights, food security and sovereignty, indigenous knowledge, legal policy, trade, education, health, sexuality and reproductive rights and, of course, the relationship of the South to the North in debates around globalisation and the fair distribution of resources. All these issues are gendered and carry huge consequences for both women and men of the South. The primary intention of this article is to offer a gendered reading of some of the key issues surrounding biopolitical debates around food and genetic manipulation/modification of life forms and how this has already, and will continue to, profoundly impact on the lives of women and men in the South.

Beijing +10: women and the environment—how close are we to Earth Democracy?

abstract This article seeks to investigate the theoretical assumptions and practical application underlying the strategic objectives of the gender and environment platforms offered by the Beijing Platform for Action. Specific emphasis is placed on how these gender and environment strategic objectives have manifested in policy and procedure in the South African context, specifically in our 11 years of democracy and the greater fight for a country of equality and justice. In order for this article to offer a critique of the Beijing Platform for Action, it begins by navigating a discussion of environmental and development discourses and how they related to gender equity. The article then goes on to interrogate the way in which the Beijing documentation is all premised on a paradigm of sustainable development. This is critiqued in the light of a more radical option: the possibility of an Earth Democracy.

Post-colonial visitations: A South African's dance and choreographic journey that faces up to the spectres of ‘development’ and globalisation

Abstract Working from the personal to the political, this paper begins with a self-interrogation around notions of identity – especially the notion of my contested African identity (Hall 1990) – as it relates to the need to engage a multiplicity of histories and cultures; be this race, ethnicity, nation or gender. This is interrogated within the paradigm of artistic constructions around contemporary dance and choreography within a postapartheid climate. From this ‘southern’ perspective, and drawing on debates and theories around development praxis (De Rivero 2001), ‘cultural exchanges’ are investigated in terms of how useful cultural ‘structural adjustment’ programmes might be for Africa and Africas contemporary dance. This paper asks how possible it is for the north to truly exchange with Africa if we are endlessly being told how much ‘we need help’. This paper thus questions the northern notion of ‘free trade’ of culture and cultural products in terms of dance and choreography and whether this is ultimately beneficial to Africa. This paper argues that this cultural globalisation is a luxury that developing southern choreographers can ill afford. All of the above issues are negotiated through the theoretical writings of primarily southern based cultural theorists like Rustom Bharucha (2003), Richard Schechner (1991) and Giyatri Spivak (1990).

Flying the mythical flag of a green and inclusive 2010 FIFA World Cup in KwaZulu-Natal

abstract This Article interrogates the way in which the 2010 FIFA World Cup has acted as a catalyst for meeting the developmental objectives advanced by FIFA and the host country South Africa, and the intended aims of developing a socially inclusive, gender friendly and ‘green’ event. The Article examines these specific developmental ‘goals’ by engaging with two micro case studies in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. These include an encounter with a group of rural women (participants in womens football) from Maputoland in northern KwaZulu-Natal and, a brief review of the Buffelsdraai Landfill Site Community Reforestation Project (set up to mitigate the carbon footprint incurred by the 2010 FIFA World Cup), which provides a vehicle for exploring the gendered nature of the climate change debate.

The autoethnographic act of choreography: considering the creative process of storytelling with and on the performative dancing body and the use of Verbatim Theatre methods

Abstract This article, which takes on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) notion of the body as the prime means of knowing the world, starts with the understanding that we have a body, are a body and become a body. These are key concepts for those, like me, who tell stories with the body – the act of choreography. Arguing for the notion of the embodied ‘I’ and interrogating the politics of autoethnography (see, for example, Holman Jones 2005), this article offers an encounter with my own process of conceptualising and choreographing days like these (2015). Working with Verbatim Theatre (also called documentary theatre) methodologies I looked at the politics of memory and history, for a potential crossover between this theatremaking method and the choreographic process. The way I choreograph is essentially ‘verbatim’ in that I am constantly asking dancers to bring their own life experience – through their bodies – into the dance theatre we create. In looking at days like these (2015) I offer a critical analysis of my own choreography (beyond the encounter and analysis of the process of making). This is done as a feminist act of responding to the constructions and play of knowledge and power within and on the moving, dancing body: both my own body and those of the six dancers with whom I collaborated.

Revisiting gender ecology and eco-feminism: A profile of five contemporary women water activists

Over the last 12 months, the NTEU has worked with Deakin researchers and NTEU members, Dr Arlene Walker, Dr Lucy Zinkiewicz, Dr Shannon Hyder and Mr Nic Droste, in a study investigating the impact of intimate partner violence (IPV) in the workplace.

Embodied storytelling: using narrative as a vehicle for collaborative choreographic practice – a case study of FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY’s 2016 HOMELAND TRILOGY (South Africa and Senegal).

This article aims to interrogate and investigate the duel engagement with narrative and storytelling as a methodology towards collective and collaborative choreographic processes, and engages narrative as a theory of making meaning. Narrative theorists study how stories help people make sense of the world, while also studying how people make sense of stories. While narrative theory is generally located in the realm of literature and of words, this article starts to look at the interface of words, meaning and the embodiment of using the physical to tell stories. The article begins to push an understanding of Hélène Cixous’ ‘l’ecriture feminine’ to a feminist engagement that looks outside the word/logos and that turns to dance as a more open, fluid and multiple way of telling embodied stories. Further, this article – taking both the act of storytelling and the act of theorizing through narrative – frames my own autoethnographic engagement with a trilogy of connected dance work that I collaboratively created with Flatfoot Dance Company over 2016 which I refer to as the Homeland Trilogy – two performed separately in South Africa and the third performed in Senegal. The three works are connected by theme and choreographic intention and were made to stand alone but also to be read next to one another. Their connection from South to West Africa also become a point of navigation of meaning and narrating. This article offers a critical analysis/narrative of my own choreography (and the embodied process of making and doing); this is done as an act of one text (the Homeland Trilogy), written on the body with other bodies, being answered by another academic text of words and letters (also arguably embodied), responding to the constructions and play of knowledge and power.

Editorial: “ Decolonising Shakespeare ?” contestations and re-imaginings for a post-liberation South Africa

In 2015 South Africans experienced a seminal moment in student politics and social movements, as previously marginalised discourses around the renewed call for Afrocentrism and the decolonisation of institutions, knowledge practices and public discourse gained new prominence. It began with the toppling of Rhodes iconography at the University of Cape Town, which quickly led to the pulling down and defacing of colonial statues situated on other South African university campuses and in South African city squares.1 The #RhodesMustFall movement saw university students and state police go head to head in ways that were reminiscent of June 16 and the anti-apartheid student uprisings in 1976. This 2015 movement evolved into the 2016 #FeesMustFall campaign which prompted the shutdown of university campuses across the country. Campuses had become war zones. Invoking the 1994 era political promises of free education, students called on institutions of higher learning to re-think, reimagine and revise outdated colonial systems of learning, a rallying cry under the term ‘decolonise’. While this moment in educational politics cannot be said to have evolved in the same way on each South African university campus, for us at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) – a campus with a primarily black student body – it was a moment of confronting the intersection of race and class and financial access. The campus was shut down for over 8 weeks in 2016 at the height of teaching delivery time and we, as academic staff, became accustomed (again) to the daily smell of tear gas, to the sound of gun shots, and to the very visible presence of not only the police but also the hired private security company MI7 whose riot shields, AK47 rifles, and stun batons were highly visible when walking around campus. The aggressive presence of armed police and security for hire became yet another reminder that this ‘rainbow’ was, more truthfully, a nation in conflict. At the same time, 2016 was significant for another reason in Shakespeare studies. On the global stage, 2016 marked the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. How should a South African Drama programme respond to these two key aspects of this moment? As the Speech and Drama Department of the then University of Natal under the initial leadership of Prof Elizabeth Sneddon, Shakespeare and canonical theatre was conceived as “the tool of thought invested by man for the purpose of achieving a civilized way of life”.2 However, in its vital post-94 recurriculation, Drama and Performances Studies at UKZN has severed any major teaching relationship to Shakespeare; he appears now as a small section in a third-level module on “Postmodernism and Performance”, where students encounter a filmic interpretation of a Shakespearean text as a type of theatrical dialectic, and as the practical component of a section on Theatre in Education at level 2. However, in performance, Shakespeare’s work has had more staying power. During the years 2001 to 2010 his plays were staged annually by colleagues Mervyn McMurtry and Tamar Meskin who ran a sponsored Shakespeare Schools festival that attracted over 20 000 school learners from across the province. Performed at the Open Air Theatre, Shakespeare’s plays were made accessible and relevant to enthusiastic young South African audiences. The Shakespearean legacy of this Drama programme also includes Welcome Msomi’s uMabatha. The original poster sits in our graduate seminar room alongside the production’s archival material. Into this confluence of memory, history, politics and the call for educational decolonisation, we decided to set up a two-day colloquium at UKZN (30 September and 1 October 2016) to open up a space to talk, to talk back, to talk anew, and to talk beyond this phenomenon identified as Shakespeare. Our intention was to embrace contestation, and re-imagine what it might mean to “decolonise Shakespeare”. This special issue of Shakespeare in Southern Africa is a collection of some of the colloquium papers. We invite you to engage with this

“You don’t look like a dancer!”: Gender and disability politics in the arena of dance as performance and as a tool for learning in South Africa

abstract This briefing interrogates disability and its activist and artistic engagement with (contemporary) dance by looking at the legacies of current integrated/disabled dance programmes and companies Candoco in the United Kingdom and Remix in South Africa. This briefing links feminist engagement with critical dance studies to break male codes of reception and assumed hegemonic ‘correct’ dancing bodies, with disability studies and the politics around representations of ‘wellness’. A gendered case study of the politics and process of working in a performance and dance educational environment with young disabled dancers in a programme run by myself and FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY in Durban called LeftFeetFIRST! is shared. The core argument is that dances engagement with disability, under the right circumstances, can be a liberatory pedagogy.

‘Body Politics’ and negotiating gender violence and child sexuality through Flatfoot Dance Company's youth arts intervention programmes in KwaZulu-Natal – a case study (2003 – 2013)

abstract This Perspective offers a feminist engagement with the ‘dancing body’ and the languages which it articulates and which it inscribes, in order to examine how social, cultural and political discourse and ideology permeate the use and reading of this body. This is done through the lens of looking at Flatfoot Dance Companys dance education and youth dance development programmes run in KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa), and their focus on challenging (amongst other things) the construction of sexual subjectivity of both the male and female youth and children who dance in their various programmes. This Perspective asks that in stepping into the difficult terrain of looking at childhood sexuality and how it is constructed, normalised, challenged, gendered and expressed, there is the need to include the arena of cultural practice as a terrain that teaches, negotiates and enacts sexuality. Flatfoot Dance Company works from the critical understanding that children‘s sexuality and its expression, should not be assumed to be non-existent.