Africa's Feminist Thinkers | Gugu Mary Tizita McLaren | Publications and Presentations

Gugu

My engagement with issues of identity began long before I became part of the AGI. I grew up in a household that was simultaneously a mixture of worlds and cultures, and a coming together of shared experiences, between my father and mother. Having left South Africa because of the Mixed-Marriage and Immorality Act, plus my father's political involvement they eventually found a home in Zimbabwe, a perfect place to raise a family.My father was involved in theatre and from that I also became part of the performing arts, through an organisation my father helped found, Chipawo. I didn't realise it then, but the plays and performances, songs and music were charged with political meaning.Even my school plays carried strong messages of gender equality, with productions of Adamant Eve and Olivia Twist.

It was at the AGI were these floating and subtle beliefs were channelled and grounded. It was at the AGI that I met incredible and challenging women, where I grew the most in my own thoughts and beliefs around identity and gender.These thoughts, often different to my peers more radical ones, are what has shaped me.

Today I work for an NGO that tackles the very real lived realities of women as labourers, targets of abuse and exploitation. And it has been a negotiation, between the academic world I inhabited for several years and this one – where flowery language and theoretical debates are not at the forefront of the agenda. So, it continues to be a negotiation.

Publications and Presentations

2008   Speaker at “Negotiating the field and back again” Workshop at the University of Cape Town

Presentation title: Working on the margins: Negotiating identity in the field

2007   Postamble. Pleasure and Danger: Women, alcohol use and dance in club Spaces

2007    Panellist at Centre for Sustainability in Mining and Industry; Women in Mining Colloquium, University of Witwatersrand.
           Presenter at Civil Society Mining Network Conference, Lilongwe, Malawi.

2006    Department Seminar, University of Cape Town.

Presentation title: Sweetie my baby: Impact of the “culture of music” on the constructions of gender identity of young black women in Langa.

Presentation title: Dancing with Dangerous Desires: The performance of Femininity and the experiences of pleasure and danger by young black women within club spaces.