FREMAKING THE REBELLIOUS BLACK WOMAN

BY NATHAN ADAMS

Forget Beyoncé. South Africa has a packed runway of “slay queens” who embraced the notion of rebellion and paved the way for female cultural icons to take centre stage. They changed and in fluenced pop culture, music, art and design, but were often viewed as problems because they failed to conform.

University of the Western Cape (UWC) PhD graduate Mbali Mazibuko has completed her study that explores rebellious black femininities articulated through popular culture. From apartheid South Africa in the 1980s to today, the focus shifts from Brenda Fassie’s impact to Boom Shaka and Lebo Mathosa then contemporary women like Khanyi Mbau and the Slay Queen.

Mazibuko’s work was summed up by the UWC Department of Women’s and Gender Studies as “articulating the biographies of rebellious femininities that destabilise hegemonic gendered, sexual and intersecting social constructions. The study shows how they do not simply oppose notions of ‘respectable’ or ‘traditional’ femininities, but strategically resist dominant norms while surviving, recreating and co-constructing within heterosexist contexts.” The work is partly biographical but also a critical feminist discourse about rebellion and black women’s agency.

Mazibuko grew up in a creative space where her parents encouraged her to read. She attended high school at the National School of the Arts in Johannesburg, where she trained in drama and theatre, but she was more interested in the theory of the arts than the practice of it. She went on to do a BA in sociology, political sciences and international relations. She did her honours and master’s in sociology but her focus and the core of her academic work was on gender, particularly the representation of black women.

Her work builds on established literature and theories. “There’s a tendency to think about the histories of marginalised people, particularly black women, as if they end somewhere. I like to think about people’s stories and the past, or this notion of the past and history, as continuous. And (that) means I need to look at where I am and what I’m trying to make sense of in my own life.”

We should think about rebellious women as working collaboratively together … as creating and recreating alongside one another, while also subverting the dominant forms of power.

Mazibuko says more should be done to explore the issue of rebellious women because it is perceived as negative.

“It’s supposed to tell you how not to be. (But) we should think about rebellious women as working collaboratively together … as creating and recreating alongside one another, while also subverting the dominant forms of power. I think then we might be able to have a more productive conversation of what it means to be a rebellious black woman.”

How do we exist in spaces in ways that are not normative but that truly express who we are and what we want to see? Mazibuko says she looked at Fassie, Boom Shaka and Mathosa to answer this question. “Beyond them being rebellious, there are messages in their music, aesthetic and politics about how we can be the black woman that we want to be, as opposed to the black woman that our families and our societies are telling us we should be.”