Browsing by Author "Shaikjee, Mooniq"

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    Drag kings in Cape Town: space and the performance of gendered subjectivities
    (University of the Western Cape, 2014) Shaikjee, Mooniq; Stroud, Christopher; Milani, Tommaso
    The last few decades have seen the development of a large body of scholarly work on drag queens and performances of femininity by men (see Barrett 1995, 1999). However, performances of masculinity by women have largely been overlooked. Research by scholars like Judith Halberstam (see Halberstam 1997, 1998) on female masculinity and the drag king performer has attempted to address this imbalance, but the phenomenon has yet to receive any attention from sociolinguists. This study aims to bring attention to performances of masculinity by women in the South African context through a multi-sited ethnography of the country�s first known drag king troupe, Bros B4 Ho's. The study will examine not only the group's stage performances, but also their activity on the online social networking platform of Facebook, using multimodal critical discourse analysis. The internet has revolutionised the way we communicate and share information, and has provided interesting new arenas for individuals to explore identity performance. In extending the investigation to include the group's online activity, the study will give a more complete picture of the negotiation of drag king subjectivities across different spaces.
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    Drag kings in Cape Town: The performance of gendered subjectivities online
    (University of the Westen Cape, 2015) Shaikjee, Mooniq
    The last few decades have seen the development of a large body of scholarly work on drag queens and performances of femininity by men (see Barrett 1995, 1999). However, performances of masculinity by women have largely been overlooked. Research by scholars like Judith Halberstam (1997, 1998) on female masculinity and the drag king performer has attempted to address this imbalance, but the phenomenon has yet to receive any attention from sociolinguists.
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    Fanon in drag: Decoloniality in sociolinguistics?
    (Wiley, 2017) Shaikjee, Mooniq; Stroud, Christopher
    In focus in this paper is the genre of drag, and the uses to which it is put by its proponents in subverting conventional and repressive (Western) models of gender, sexuality and race. We raise the question of to what extent performances of drag, while arguably disrupting gender stereotypes, nevertheless continue to reproduce colonialities of race and sexuality. Framing an analysis of a drag king performance in a sociolinguistics of subjectification inspired by the work of Frantz Fanon, we offer an account that recognizes how, rather than subverting or challenging conventional images of gender, the performance is one part of a complex circulation of textual and corporeal semiotics that enregisters racialized categories of male and female cut to the cloth of coloniality/modernity. On the other hand, the analysis also reveals that there are moments of interruption and slippage in the reproduction of colonial constructs of race, gender and sexuality that may offer more complex and multifarious understandings of what may comprise the exercises of decoloniality. We conclude with a discussion of what a decolonial Fanonian approach to subjectification might offer sociolinguistics.
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    The semiotics of the mosque and its impact on self-perceptions of the feminine body
    (University of the Western Cape, 2023) Shaikjee, Mooniq; Stroud, Christopher
    From its inception, the primary focus of the field of Linguistic Landscape Studies has been the interplay between language and space, or language on display. Recently, however, scholars have begun to consider the human element of linguistic landscapes (LLs), and include the body in their work [See for example Stroud and Jegels (2014), Peck and Stroud (2015), Peck and Banda (2014)]. This thesis aims to contribute to the ongoing development of the field of linguistic landscape research from focusing primarily on text and signage to looking at linguistic and semiotic landscapes in relation to the body. The study does so by investigating how the semiotic and linguistic landscapes of the South African mosque influence Muslim women's perceptions about their bodies, their feelings of belonging in the mosque, and their ideas about Muslim womanhood. Several methodological tools are used to achieve this, including walking interviews with South African Muslim women, photographs of signage and architecture from thirty South African mosques, and autoethnographic narratives and reflection.