The return of Rosie the Riveter: Contemporary popular reappropriations of the iconic World War II image

ABSTRACT The iconic image of Rosie the Riveter played an important role in American patriotic ideological processes during World War II. Aimed at the recruitment of women for wartime work, particularly in factories and traditionally masculine occupations, this representation of a woman in overalls and head scarf, with sleeves rolled up, showing her bicep and balled fist, declaring 'We can do it', has been a contentious point of discussion for its significance in feminist agendas since its first appearance. While building on, and playing to, the suffrage agendas of first wave feminism, the popular image of Rosie was transcended by second wave concerns about depictions of women in the workplace, such as those in films like Norma Rae (Ritt 1979), Silkwood (Nichols 1983), North Country (Caro 2005) and Made in Dagenheim (Cole 2010). But Rosie is making a comeback. The image has recently been appropriated in various ways and for various purposes - naively, ironically, satirically, as bricolage, pastiche and in sexualised portrayals - to represent contemporary women's issues and concerns, as well as arguably forming part of a backlash culture against feminism. Contemporary depictions have, for example, ranged from Hilary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, Malala Yousafzai and Beyoncé. This paper considers the development and transformation of the image of Rosie the Riveter and its contradictory (re)-appropriations in various contemporary popular cultural discourses. Keywords: feminist expression, Michel Foucault, gender roles, popular culture, Rosie the Riveter.

An analysis of the intersections between race and class in representations of Black and white gay men in QueerLife

ABSTRACT This article seeks to critically analyse how intersections of race and class shape representations of Black and white gay men in QueerLife, a South African online magazine. It focuses on QueerLife's '4men' section and how its content represents classed and raced gay identities. My argument is that QueerLife forwards racialised and classed representations of the gay lifestyle, which reinforce homonormalisation within what is known as the "Pink Economy". Using Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) to read the underlying meanings in texts and images, the article concludes that QueerLife is complicit in the construction of gay identity categories that seek to appeal to urban, white, middle-class gay-identifying communities in South Africa. The article also demonstrates how, when Black bodies are represented in QueerLife, exceptionalism mediates their visibility in this online magazine. Overall, the findings demonstrate how Black and white gay bodies are mediated online and how their different racial visibilities are negotiated within the system of structural racism. Keywords: Class, gayness, Pink Economy, QueerLife, representation, racism.

All that glitters is not gold: Counter penetrating in the name of Blackness and queerness, or, Athi-Patra Ruga's camp act in the dirt

ABSTRACT In this article I engage South African artist Athi-Patra Ruga's artistic practice to flesh out the complexities that arise from the intersection of the terms Black and queer. Drawing on diverse historical, social and textual resources, I interpret Ruga's dismantling of dominant post-apartheid and postcolonial narratives vis-a-vis a close reading of some of his provocative avatars. Ruga's practices of staining, tainting and contaminating serve to expose the borders that produce conventional notions of race and gender. The article employs camp discourse in its allusion to performativity, displacement and artifice in order to 1) lay bare prevailing normative structures; and 2) dismantle conventional views of identity. To avoid being blindsided by camp's flamboyance and ostentation, I propose a view that favours an intimate embroilment with dirt - a stance I argue may furnish camp acts with political intent and so help create a more sophisticated and comprehensive view on the juncture of Blackness and queerness. Relying on Ruga's method of counter penetration as a way of fleshing out a hermeneutic view of Black queer subjectivity, I show how counter penetration in Ruga's estimation is a subversive and transgressive act intent on contaminating and infecting conventional narratives of history, identity and politics. Keywords: Black queer identity, camp, Athi-Patra Ruga, performance.

Tomboys: Performing gender in popular fiction

In the nineteenth century, new characters exploded onto the pages of popular novels: forthright, self-reliant and self-aware girls who became known as tomboys. Like Jo March storming through the pages of Little women, these brave and boisterous young women charmed and astonished readers, and profoundly influenced generations of girls. This article examines the impact of the tomboy in literature, its confluence with other, older, archetypes such as the cross-dressing warrior maid, and its development alongside other proto-feminist heroines of the nineteenth century: the Female Gentleman and the Plucky Girl. The article interrogates not only the character traits of fictional tomboys, but also the narrative arcs and tropes with which they were often associated, such as the Tamed Tomboy, who, like Jo March, comes to learn the real meaning of womanhood, as defined through her mother and sisters, in marriage; and the Incorrigible Tomboy, like George in the Famous five books, who resists all efforts to be treated "like a girl". The article further explores the continued relevance of these famous nineteenth- and twentieth-century tomboys, whose performances of gender and sexuality echo in recent fiction for children and young adults through characters such as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger games trilogy, the genderfluid Micah in Justine Larbelestier's Liar, or overtly queer heroines such as Kaede in Malinda Lo's Huntress. What has the tomboy in literature meant to twenty-first century understandings of gender performativity? And, importantly, what stories about gender - what possible lives - do these characters construct for the young women who read them?

Rethinking gender and conduits of control: A feminist review

ABSTRACT The South African Constitution has been hailed as one of the most progressive in the world and has received high acclaim internationally (Mkhwanazi 2016:6). However, the war on women, their bodies and their right to self-determination persists, irrespective of the Constitution. Literature reveals experiences of brutal rapes and killings of black lesbian women, as well as mistreatment and hate speech in the name of morality against sex workers, women seeking abortions and HIV-positive women (Strode et al. 2012:64). Based on a desktop review of images and audio-visuals of women's narratives in South Africa, this paper finds that many of the country's contemporary social institutions, such as the state, family, church and culture, amongst others, normalise forms of gendered violence, such as the policing, control and exploitation of women's lives and bodies through cultural practices like ukuthwala and ukuhlolwa kwobuntombi. Research findings also include narratives of women, who - in spite of prevailing social and institutionalised violence - have leveraged personal agency to declare autonomy and make personal choices regarding their bodies and lives. Keywords: gendered violence, LGBTI people, patriarchal societies, rape, ukuhlolwa kwobuntombi.

Female impersonation and gender ambivalence: Does drag challenge gender norms?

ABSTRACT This article explores the question of whether drag, in the form of female impersonation, unsettles gender norms. Some scholars and analysts of drag performance, such as Rusty Barrett (1998), James Scott (1990), Verta Taylor and Leila J. Rupp (2003), argue that drag is a form of resistance to dominant gender norms. I depart from these assertions and maintain that such a perspective overlooks the complexity of drag. While it can be argued that drag highlights the performative attributes of gender (see Butler 1996), drag queens in many ways affirm the stigmatised effeminate stereotype of gay male sexuality. It is thus too simplistic to posit drag performance as either subversive or reaffirming of heteronormative gender models. Building on the insights of scholars such as Judith Butler (1990; 1996), Lila Abu-Lughod (1990), Keith McNeal (1999), Carol-Anne Tyler (2013) and Caitlin Greaf (2015), as well as drawing on some of Andre Charles RuPaul's drag race shows, I argue that drag does not aim to challenge dominant gender norms. Rather, I maintain that drag highlights the inherent ambivalence of gender generated by heteronormativity, simultaneously playing with the inconsistencies between gendered cultural paradigms and actual experience. It is in this interstice that drag performance, as an art of irony and parody, opens up possibilities for gender multiplicity. Keywords: Drag performance, gender ambivalence, gender anxiety, gender norms, gender performance, RuPaul.

'Quiet Dream': Vietnamese women and marriage migration

ABSTRACT The photographic essay, 'Quiet Dream', by photographer and lecturer Oh Soon-Hwa, represents the culmination of years of work with young Vietnamese women during a "bride phase" in Vietnam, which refers to a period of waiting before leaving home and kin to travel overseas in order to marry foreign men, usually in Taiwan and South Korea. This series was taken on and around a small island in the region of the Mekong Delta (one of the poorest areas in Vietnam), nicknamed "Taiwan Island", where many young women are pressured to marry foreigners for various complex reasons, which the author discusses. Oh's photographic essay focuses on the beauty and serenity of the environment surrounding these women while they have to deal with diverse expectations, which includes leaving behind part of their identity, the familiar landscape, climate, language, family, friends, traditions, and way of living. Until recently, studies on marriage migration have tended to focus on remittances and the economic impact of migration. New studies adopt a more comprehensive social perspective, examining the effects of migration on the social fabric of the migrants' home community. Placed in the context of these ongoing studies, Oh's work is important in drawing attention to the lives and identities of these women (what they give up) before entering into marriage migration. My article focuses on two aspects of Oh's photographs: 1) the technique of stitched photography; and 2) the compo-sition of the photograph, particularly the choice of dress worn by the subject. Half of the portraits are stitched photographs, which is a technique that merges together several photographs to form a unique piece, with the aim of providing a wider view of the environment of the subject. This method of stitching also bears testimony to the stitched futures of these women; the hopes and dreams they harbour as foreign brides, as well as the familiar landscapes and identities they leave behind, all "stitched" together as it were, to constitute a hopeful, but also unsure, resigned and imagined future. Keywords: cross-border marriage, ocular ethic, Oh Soon-Hwa, re-visioning, vision as critique.

The spectre-image: A hauntology of Skoonheid and Kanarie

The aim of this paper is to interrogate and trace the ghosts of heteronormative whiteness - and thus the spectres of queerness and blackness, specifically racial erasure through gendered foregrounding - in two recent motion pictures dealing with white, Afrikaner homosexuality, namely the 2011 film, Skoonheid {Beauty) and the 2018 film Kanarie {Canary). My aim is to look beyond the ostensible strengths of these films in terms of their representations of Afrikaner homosexual masculinities, both during and since the disbandment of apartheid, in order to see whether these films are indeed as politically progressive as they seem to be. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's cinema books and Jacques Derrida's notion of hauntology - a wordplay on 'haunting' and 'ontology' - I investigate here the ways in which subjectivities and geographies (place/space) in Skoonheid and Kanarie produce and reproduce knowledges about race, gender and difference, and map some ways in which these are assimilated into socio-political, geographical and temporal configurations through what I call the spectre-image.