No Justice, No Peace: Collen Mfazwe in Daveyton, Gauteng South Africa

Being, or being perceived as, trans invites a barrage of volatile emotions: from curiosity to shame, from disgust to empathy. The consequences of ‘trans panics’ are dire; if not immediate death, trans living is marked by experiences akin to a slow death, “a physical wearing out of a population” in which trauma seeps into the everyday environment rather than confined to events (Berlant 2007, 754). I see that the ‘gendercide’ crisis is endemic to social life, not a confined epidemic.

In my current book project, Cherishing and Perishing in Transgender Portraiture, I draw on four years of field work with trans-identified portraitists. In analyzing artworks created within three hotspots of trans organizing for resilient communities and against (slow) death, erasure, and invisibilization across South Africa, Canada, and Germany I consider their site-specific approaches to meting out emotional justice, but also their diagnostic value of how trans living feels right about now.

For this presentation I will focus on the photography of Collen Mfawze living in the Daveyton township outside of Johannesburg. Mentored by world-famous visual activist Zanele Muholi, Collen has documented queer-trans weddings, funerals, protests and demonstrations especially pertaining to sexual assault and murder of black lesbians and gender non-conforming people. Photographed outside of courthouses and in the streets of townships, Collen’s photojournalism shifts the parameters for thinking about the space of justice. Not only are lives perishing through literal physical death and incarceration; Collen’s trans portraiture also considers the necropolitical dimensions of social suffering, political neglect, and civil death.