“Wherever I Could Move Around”: The Worldmaking Work of Gays and Girls in the Archived Photographs and Testimony of Kewpie of District Six
“Wherever I Could Move Around”: The Worldmaking Work of Gays and Girls in the Archived Photographs and Testimony of Kewpie of District Six
LGBT History Month
Date: Thursday 24 February 2022
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Venue: Online
Category: Academic events
Speaker: Ruth Ramsden-Karelse
Website: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-worldmaking-work-of-gays-girls-in-the-kewpie-archives-tickets-251911152037
Thursday 24 February 2022
3pm, online
Book: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-worldmaking-work-of-gays-girls-in-the-kewpie-archives-tickets-251911152037
The Kewpie Collection, as this collection of photographs and testimony is known, was created by a group of people who described themselves as gays and girls and who lived and worked as hairdressers and on-stage performers in Cape Town’s densely populated and multicultural District Six. Classified “Coloured” under apartheid, the girls were forcibly removed from the District after it was declared “Whites Only” in 1966 and demolished by the Nationalist government. Notwithstanding its intentions and successes, one effect of the Kewpie Collection’s archivalisation has been to obscure the work that gays and girls undertook to survive, imagine otherwise, and, ultimately, transform the world around them. It is this necessarily collaborative labour that Ruth will discuss.
Speaker Bio: Ruth Ramsden-Karelse recently completed her DPhil in English at the University of Oxford, where she held the inaugural Stuart Hall Doctoral Scholarship. She is a Research Associate at the University of Manchester’s Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE). Her writing has appeared in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
Photo Credit: Image from the Kewpie Collection. GALA, Johannesburg. Reproduced with permission of the GALA Queer Archive.