Challenging Ciscentric Feminist Margins: A South African Study on Gender-Based Violence in the Lives of Black Trans Women

Feminist discourses around the scourge of gender-based violence (GBV) have historically prioritized the voices and contextualities of cisgender heterosexual women, often to the exclusion of trans persons. In light of the continual invisibility of black trans persons and in particular black trans women in anti-GBV activism, this paper explores black trans women’s experiences of violence in post-apartheid South Africa. The study was undertaken from a transfeminist framework that asserts that the stories and histories of trans persons are central to the development of trans epistemologies within an inclusive gender liberation framework. The study followed anarrative methodological approach. Unstructured individual interviews were conducted with eight black trans women living in South Africa. Narratives of gender policing and punitive sexual violence in addition to narratives of cissexism as well as of the paradoxical hypervisibility and invisibility of black trans positions revealed violence meted against black trans women in South Africa as structural, grounded on a patriarchal matrix of cisgender power representing trans women as devalued others. Apartheid legacies of racialisedeconomic marginalisation manifest as bearing a strong mediating role in shaping black trans women’s sustained vulnerability to violence. By addressing anti-trans violence as a feminist concern, this paper disrupts the ciscentricism of feminism, enabling more nuanced and inclusive constructions of GBV

Centring healing: reflexivity, activism and the decolonial act of researching communities existing on the margin

This paper introducing innovative, creative, and decolonial research methodology is part of the ongoing reflexivity of a PhD currently underway. I provide insight into the development of the research through which I reflexively present my thoughts, as a decolonial feminist psychology researcher conducting research with African LGBT individuals seeking asylum in the UK. I engage with concepts of reflexivity, activism, decolonisation, and autoethnography, as they are played out within the research process. The paper reflects on three integrated theories underpinning the study, Trauma Theory (Mollica, 2006), Structural Intersectionality Theory (Crenshaw, 1989; Brotman 2013), Afrocentric Decolonizing Kweer theory (Sharif “Herukhuti” Williams, 2016), and the decolonial methodologies proposed for the PhD research. The theories used are a deliberate effort to depart from a Eurocentric way of conducting academic research. Foregrounding reflexivity, I offer my research as a deeply political, ethical, moral, and decolonial act that can remedy researched communities. It is uncommon for PhD scholars to offer, for journal publication, meditations about a PhD project that is still underway. Yet such knowledge is also valuable. Thus, the reflexive paper serves as a demonstration of a social justice agenda for conducting the doctoral research, a decolonial act in itself