Drama researchers interrogate masculinity

Drama lecturer Dr Myer Taub spoke about his work titled “The Skin of Memory”, which foregrounds the performance of identity as related to power and difference. With a video recording of the work to illustrate, Dr Taub explained that “the performer is able to load and shed identity”.

Another Drama lecturer, Mr Chris Broodryk, presented a paper on the quest for sex and the prevalence of masculinised scatology in the cinema of Willie Esterhuizen. From Lipstiek Dipstiek to Stoute Boudjies, Esterhuizen’s films frame masculinity as sexual overcompensation in the face of white anxieties about socio-political change.

MA student Selogadi Mampane presented a paper on Caster Semenya’s masculine performance of sex, interrogating the manner in which discourse around Semenya’s masculinity and femininity occurred, thereby exposing what Mampane refers to as “the fantasy of gender essentialism”.