UNTHERE: Recent Episodes
Kneo Mokgopa
The UNTHERE podcast is a meditation on the unthere and to unthere hegemonic subjectivities. The host, KNeo Mokgopa, explores recent South African history and illustrates how these histories continue to enjoy a half-life in contemporary society. KNeo also explores gender, sexuality, race, class and politics, through the lens of Unthere.
In this episode, we take on the "New Normal" marketing discourse and explore its phoney and insincere declarations of newness and rupture. The “new normal” discourse is concerned with the means by which skilled labour is delivered and has driven the stock prices of Zoom, Google Meets, Slack and Outlook Planner. Meanwhile, global protests have erupted in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, Femicide in Turkey and South Africa, in support of action against the climate crisis and growing inequality. At the same time, all while hundreds of thousands of people die due to lack of access to proper healthcare. The cultural insensitivity and myopia of the “new normal” discourse are astonishing yet understandable. In times of crisis, we seek catharsis, as we did in 1994 when we ushered in the “new South Africa” and declared a clean break from the past.
This episode draws from the research of Tshepo Madlingozi's Social Justice in a Time of Neoapartheid Constitutionalism, Stellenbosch Law Review (2017) 1 and is supported by the Toyi Toyi sounds of the ZPRA cadres at the Bulawayo airport who actually originated the Toyi Toyi as a means to boost morale in the struggle camps.
In this episode, we further explore queering queer discourse and promote 'Queering the State".
The contemporary methods of advocating for queer equality is premised on anti-discrimination language, using the very linguistic and archival resources that have historically made queer people invisible. Here, we contend to bring an end to queerness as a protest, and unthere the state's cisgender heterosexual agenda.
Checkout the Unthere article on Daily Maverick, based on this episode: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2019-10-31-queering-queer-discourse-advocating-for-recognition-of-the-existence-of-queer-people/#gsc.tab=0
In this episode, we explore the hyperinvisibility of black bodies in contemporary fine art scenes.
William Kentridge is a phenomenal and legitimately celebrated fine artist in South Africa. However, he also represents a site of the social and ontological death of Black people in his way of flattening Black experiences as absurd Vaudeville antics.
Checkout Unthere's Daily Maverick article based on this episode: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-03-10-black-bodies-and-white-people/#gsc.tab=0
In Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Kate Manne differentiates sexism from misogyny: “Misogyny rewards women who reinforce the status quo and punishes those who don’t.” I find myself resonating particularly well with that description, especially because of the ways queers are policed and managed as queer. There’s a value-laden spectrum of queers; from dominant, precarious, to ambivalent queers; from those who strongly identify as queer to those who are unsure if the term includes them; from those that reinforce the ideology of heteronormativity and binaries to those who are totally at odds with the categorisations of gender and sexuality; dominant queers who are complicit in gatekeeping the institution of gender to insurgent and precarious queers whose very existence is an assault on the nomos of gender itself; queers that are complicit and compatible with capitalism and queers that short-circuit advertising algorithms; queers that can be absorbed and integrated into the world as we know it to queers that signal the end of this and beginning of that. Queers that do not participate in newly preset configurations of queer social practice are punished with social death and/or vanquished.
What is 'Black Life' and how can it matter? In this episode, we explore the rhetorical and ideological paradoxes of 'Black Lives Matter' and unthere 'Black Life'.
Checkout Unthere's Daily Maverick article based on this episode: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-06-22-unthere-blackness-is-where-language-comes-to-die/#gsc.tab=0