Embodied pedagogies: performative activism and transgressive pedagogies in the sexual and gender justice project in higher education in contemporary South Africa

Abstract

In this chapter, responding to the call to rethink "the fundamental concepts that support such binary thinking" and to recognise "the agential possibilities and responsibilities for reconfiguring the material-social relations of the world" (Barad, 2007: p.35), I explore a number of performative and activist events that have been part of the contemporary student decolonialisation movement in South Africa to think about the disruption and disturbance of 'business as usual' in the patriarchal, colonial and neoliberal project of the academy. Three inspiring occasions of performative activism of feminist and queer activists are shared here as providing powerful pedagogical interventions through the deployment of particular bodies in particular spaces. I argue the importance of acknowledging and "intra-acting" (Barad, 2007) with such 'disturbances' within a critical post-humanist social justice pedagogical project.