Zanele Muholi's Intimate Archive: Photography and Post-apartheid Lesbian Lives
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper focuses on the work of South African black lesbian photographer Zanele Muholi and raises the question of how experience that is deemed unspeakable can enter representation. If we always read images through ‘‘codes of connotation,’’ through what Roland Barthes terms the ‘‘studium’’ of our knowing, how is it possible to overturn ways of seeing that render lesbian subjectivity invisible?2 And if lesbian subjectivity is made visible through suspending the structures of recognition, what are the political implications of occupying such an ‘‘outlaw’’ position? How does being beyond recognition open or close the field of political possibility? The paper makes two theoretical claims: one, that Barthes’ influential concept of the ‘‘punctum’’ can be understood as a mode of queer reading, and two, that Muholi’s work constructs an archive that insists on the specificity of lesbian lives and loss through a complex strategy of ‘‘passing.’’ My reading of Muholi’s portraits that constitute her ‘‘Faces and Phases’’ series explores how her photographs work with the ambiguities of ‘‘passing’’—passing away, passing between states of gendered being, and passing through the prohibitions against making lesbian experience visible and mourning lesbian loss. In this way, the paper argues that Muholi’s most recent body of work ‘‘queers’’ both the conventions of memorial photography and her own earlier representations of lesbian subjectivity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it