Photography and Gender in África

This article introduces the photography as a structure of meaning from which to analyzes the real-literal and subjectivity. This peculiarity has been constituted as an ideal language in dealing with the specificities in the field of cultural practices, the construction of memory and gender identity discourse within the African context. We have analyzed the similarities generated by the first anthropological photo reports with the colonial continuum and posterior segregationist regimes such as apartheid in South Africa, exerting a hegemonic gaze away from the cultural and social particularities as well as race, gender, sex and sexuality differences. This has led us to the exploration and interpretation of the activist side of the current African photography, which analyzes the identity from all streams related to gender and racialist issues: racial control as biopower and social and political power over the body, sexual difference and sexuality. Under that rejection of the normative, photographs of Santu Mofokeng, Samuel Fosso and Zanele Muholi are visual demonstrations that articulate the conflicting nature of identity and gender in a scenario like the African which, rooted in a precarious political and economic order, carries systemic violence that manifests itself in terms of criminalization, marginalization and exclusion.Este artículo introduce lo fotográfico como una estructura de significación desde la que se analiza lo real-literal y lo subjetivo. Esta peculiaridad ha hecho que se constituya como un lenguaje idóneo en la especificidad del ámbito de las prácticas culturales y la construcción de la memoria y el discurso identitario de género, en este caso, en Sudáfrica. Hemos analizado las concomitancias que generan los primeros fotoreportajes con el continuum colonial, ejerciendo una mirada hegemónica alejada de las particularidades culturales y sociales, de las diferencias de raza, clase, sexo o religión. Hasta llegar a la vertiente activista de la actual fotografía sudafricana, la cual y desde un análisis discursivo coincidente con posiciones críticas como la de Judith Butler sobre el género o Gayatri Spivak y el sujeto post-colonial, cuestiona asuntos relativos al control social y patriarcal sobre el cuerpo de las mujeres o el transfeminismo, la identidad y las teorías queer