Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Social media networks have provided several platforms for queer visibility within the public sphere. These media can be seen as significant modalities by which queer subcultural practices of self-expression, consumption, and world-making take place. They facilitate, indeed encourage, the construction of various queer identities and practices – albeit in hyperreal form. This paper examines the online practices of self-styling and branding undertaken by three Black gender non-conforming performance artists from Johannesburg, South Africa. The Instagram profiles of three female impersonators and beauty queens will be herein investigated. These performance artists are, namely, Muzi Zuma, Alexis BlackPearl Kubeka, and Eva Motaung. By undertaking a semiotic and critical discourse analysis of images from these three Instagram pages, this paper explores each artists’ curatorial practices of self-branding. Borrowing from the analytical model of visual consumption, this study interrogates the intersecting discourses of “queerness,” race, sexuality, gender, class, cosmopolitanism as foregrounded in these digital images. Each artists’ responses to interview questions about their curatorial choices, styles, and modes of self-representation will also be analyzed. Borrowing from queer, critical feminist and post-feminist theoretical frameworks, it shall be herein argued that these Instagram posts serve as vital documentary queer archival material. Moreover, I posit in this paper that these visual modes of digital self-representation and branding function as semiotic iterations of contemporary politics and tensions post-apartheid public visibility and queer consumer culture in South Africa.