Sequins, Self & Struggle: Performing and Archiving Sex, Place and Class in Pageant Competitions in Cape Town

This project is a collaboration among the Departments of Drama at the University of Exeter and Queen Mary, University of London (UK), The Centre for Curating the Archive and the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town (South Africa), Africana Studies at Brown University (US) and the District 6 Museum. The primary aims are to research, document and disseminate archives of the Spring Queen and Miss Gay Western Cape pageants performed by disparate coloured communities in greater Cape Town. The Spring Queen pageant is a unique event where coloured female factory workers from the clothing and textile industry in the Western Cape of South Africa compete each year to be crowned "spring queen" of the Southern African Clothing and Textile Worker's Union (SACTWU). Public resistance to apartheid often resulted in violent racial conflict and for the first time in the garment industry in the 1970s there were acts of retaliation to low wages in the form of strikes. It is within this climate of dissent and harsh backlashes that the Spring Queen pageant emerged around 1978. Local trade unions devised the pageant as a mode of alleviating rising tensions amongst workers. A highlight on the Cape-Town social calendar, up to 30000 supporters attend the final event at the Good Hope Centre in Cape Town. This project will situate the Spring Queen as a moment of significant cultural shift. As textile manufacturing increasingly moves to China, this is perhaps the last opportunity to document garment and textile workers in Cape Town. The pageant bears testimony to the lives of Cape factory workers both during and after apartheid. The contestants, who live in the marginalised and impoverished areas, primarily in Atlantis and the Cape Flats, travel into the predominantly "white" city centre for the pageant. Important to these performance events is the figure of the "moffie", a queer coloured male, often a transsexual, who has traditionally choreographed and designed the pageants, but who is forbidden from competing in them. Miss Gay Western Cape, which grew out of the Spring Queen pageant and the new South African constitution that was the first in the world to include protection for sexual minorities, is a platform for queer non-white persons to perform in a secure environment without exploitation. This project will investigate the significance of these pageants and the performances they engender. By creating an alternative to apartheid-era archives that marginalized these communities, we will engage in the wider democratic practice of reimagining South Africa, first initiated by the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. We will consider: the disruption of categories of representation engendered by performance in the pageants; the performance of emancipation and self-determination in the figure of the "queen"; constructions of gender, beauty and alternative sexuality in minority communities; and the continued segregation of space in Cape Town. The project aims to provide a unique perspective on marginalised lives, through an interdisciplinary lens; focusing on visuality, performativity and orality, it will offer a space for previously disavowed narratives to be articulated, which will not only be of benefit to these communities, but to post-apartheid South Africa and postcolonial Africa at large. Collaborative workshops will bring together scholars from performance studies, visual culture, cultural geography, gender and queer studies, digital humanities and African studies. In-depth archival research, the gathering of new and 'ordinary' archival material from public and private sources, oral histories and interviews will be made available as a public online archive. The forms of dissemination will have an extensive audience. These will include journal articles, interdisciplinary academic workshops, performance and curation workshops for pageant participants, a documentary and a digital archive.

We have identified four main groups to be impacted by this research:
(1) coloured women factory workers in the Western Cape;
(2) LGBTI communities in South Africa;
(3) archivists and curators.

(1) The project aims to benefit local coloured women factory workers in the Western Cape by considering their past history and taking pride in their cultural and performance heritage at the pageants since the late 1970s, and reflecting on the link between their culture and personal and communal identity, which is grounded in both their work at clothing and textile factories, their homes in townships and their performances and/or participation in the Spring Queen pageants. The digital archive will create an oral and visual history which will document the memories of the community, ensuring this history is passed on to subsequent generations. Potential benefits to this group also include: (a) enhanced awareness of this particular performance practice and its larger cultural value; (b) a forum of discussion and reflection; (c) enhanced understanding of the broad social outcomes, intended and unintended, by the Spring Queen pageant and its relation to the women's labour; (d) performance workshops that offer alternatives to and developments on the pageants. The choice of location for the workshops is directly related to impact. As factories close down the Spring Queen is likely to disappear. Workshops in the townships will relocate this community performance work to the area where these participants live, outside of the predominantly white city centre. The workshop at University of Cape Town has been scheduled for the co-participation of Miss Gay Western Cape participants, who have expressed anxiety about performing in the Cape Flats and Atlantis given the potential for homophobic attitudes in these areas. The curator workshops will directly involve these women in the selection and curation of material that represents their practice.

(2) LGBTI communities in South Africa in general, but those in the outlying communities of Cape Town in particular, will benefit by participating in a forum for discussion and reflection on non-white queer identities. The documentation of their practice and related queer performance histories in District Six will give crucial exposure to Miss Gay Western Cape, and its HIV education programmes, both in LGBTI communities and South Africa at large. As many studies have focused on exclusively white or black homosexuality, this study will also give voice to a coloured LGBTI community that has been underrepresented.

(3) As we intend to directly include those represented in the exhibition in its curation, this will function as an important example for archivists and curators alike. This project will develop an archive of pageants that does not exist in a mainstream guise, given that these images and narratives are scattered across the Western Cape. This will allow for research along several platforms. Archivists at various institutions including museums, libraries and galleries will be able to access and link to this collection. In the same vein, curators in galleries and educational institutions will be able to creatively make use of the images and texts (according to Creative Commons guides) and in so doing further extend the impact of the project. These men and women from the pageants will be curators-in-training on this project, fulfilling a crucial role given that there are very few, if any, 'curators-of-colour' from this group.

By addressing these key user groups in ways specified in the Pathways to Impact, the proposed project seeks to strengthen relationships between the academy, archivists, curators and coloured and LGBTI communities in South Africa.