Aesthetics of South African women’s embodied activism : staging complicity

I begin by contextualising South African women practitioners in South Africa, and this moment in feminist practice. During apartheid, Temple Hauptfleisch argues, ‘most ... women operated mainly in the private and commercial world, for ... the state-funded theatre organizations have hardly ever allowed women into prominent positions of power. Thus, these women were used, their creativity tapped—but their control of the system was limited.’ To some extent, this situation occurred because theatre was perceived as a public or political space in which generally men spoke and protested apartheid, which took precedence against other issues like gender. The plays of this period tended to explore male experiences of apartheid in mines, gangs or prison, with women being represented in absentia, through male memory or fantasy narratives. Very few South African women playwrights were published during apartheid, with Fatima Dike and Gçina Mhlope being two rare exceptions. Miki Flockemann argues that, ‘[w]hen women are thus represented in their absence, what is replicated is a set of female “types” and stereotypes.