About Us

The New Imaginaries for a Critical Humanities Project on Gender and Sexual Justice is a five year, Andrew W. Mellon-funded project housed in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of the Western Cape. We are in our 5th year and include a group of scholars, postgraduates, postdocs and colleagues, in and outside the university.

 

The project is primarily directed at challenging dominant forms of scholarship and pedagogy related to sexualities and gender, particularly as shaped by the responses of the last few decades to high rates of HIV infection and gender-based violence. But the project is also involved in an interlinked effort to rethink and reconceptualise how we do our research and pedaogies towards gender and sexual justice.

 

To this end, we are focused on three intersecting areas: firstly, a critique of dominant local research on sexuality and gender justice, drawing attention to the ways in which this body of work has served to rationalise and reproduce dominant discourses and power relations. Not only has it reinscribed binary gender identities, it has also more implicitly bolstered racist, classist, and global-Southern ‘othering’. Secondly, generating scholarship and practice that challenges normative research and pedagogy, calling into question the authority of the researcher and teacher, and current colonial and patriarchal logics that dominate in the academy. Thirdly, and linked to the goal of reconceptualising  normative scholarship, the project troubles the divides between different forms of knowledge and the privileging of academic knowledge. In particular, the project aims to work collaboratively with artistic and activist knowledges, in affective and embodied ways, towards gender and sexual justice.

 

Many of our activities have included collaborations, creating an archival and exhibitionary space for forms of activism, performance, art and scholarship, that disrupt and destabilise everyday gender and sexual injustices, with the larger goal of contributing to or co-creating a ‘feminist South African museum’.