Sex, Lives and Videotape: The Transhistoricity of an Itinerant Visual Archive

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article investigates the politics of queer and transgender visual representation and archiving in relation to the short film Sisters (2003) and related photographs, which were produced in Maputo, Mozambique, by the Danish photographer Ditte Haarløv Johnsen in the early 2000s. Understood as a visual archive, this material represents two people, Ingrácia and Antonieta, and their group of friends, many of whom called themselves manas (sisters), but also variably self-identified as gay men, travestis, and trans. The article chronicles my engagement with this itinerant archive, and with the people who produced it, retracing the biography of these materials as they travelled between Maputo and Johannesburg, where they elicited radically different reactions from local publics and raised critical questions about the politics of in/visibility and representation in Southern Africa. In exploring this case, the article interrogates what forms of queer and transhistorical subjectivities are made visible through the film and related photographs, considering that both the materiality of the camera and the medium of the visual allow for particular modes of self-inscription and archive-making. The article suggests that Sisters engages forms of transhistoricity that cut across time and space to bind trans and queer pasts, presents, and future.