Abstract
In this study, I analyse selected examples of South African art practice that represent black female domestic workers, focusing on works of portraiture and performance produced in the post-apartheid years. I argue that this liminal figure is often fetishised or positioned as uncanny because the trope of the domestic worker or servant is a site for the interpellation of self and other and family and nation, serving both material and ideological ends.
A domestic worker in her employer’s home and family circle, and the reproduction of labour that she facilitates and the child-care that she provides, stirs up layers of memories and emotions that speak to historical and structural traumas that constitute South African subjectivities. Post-apartheid culture continues to seek language to express the consequences of migration, urbanisation, racialised and class-based separations and inequalities, community fragmentation and new supportive networks, lost and new opportunities, petty power manipulations, and emotions such as love, anger, resentment, loneliness, anxiety and fear. The art-makers of multivariate backgrounds whom I have selected have sought to facilitate visual rapprochements across these lines of socialised difference, reflecting critically on issues arising from the processes and consequences of representation in their own practice. Informed by feminist analyses of representation, I draw on a socio-historical methodology as well as psychoanalytic work to examine various rhetorical, textual and pictorial elements. These interpretative tools allow me to coalesce a hermeneutics that explores not only the socio-historical context for institutionalised, paid domestic labour, indicating why it is such a potent issue in South Africa, but also why the figure of the ‘servant’ recurs as an archetype in cultural narratives.
D.Litt. et Phil.