While we are busy reading the amazing abstracts we received, we wanted to spark your interest as well by introducing another exciting speaker: Zethu Matebeni!
Zethu is a visiting professor at Yale University’s Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her scholarship and activism on African sexuality and gender diversity is well cited. Since 2011 she has been at HUMA (Institute for Humanities in Africa) at the University of Cape Town as a senior researcher and lecturer in the Sociology department. Zethu received a PhD at WISER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) at the University of the Witwatersrand on Black Lesbian Sexualities and Identity in South Africa. She is skillful in multidisciplinary approaches and is attentive to the idea and meaning of the public humanities. As a scholar, public intellectual and activist, she is invited regularly to give key note lectures in various fora. She has been deeply involved with the #RhodesMustFall Movement and the Black Academic Caucus in South Africa. Zethu’s contribution towards developing the field of African Queer Studies has been through an ongoing annual series, Queer in Africa which connects human rights issues, social justice struggles, creative arts, and artistic activism, and scholarship. She is the curator of Reclaiming Afrikan: queer perspectives on sexual and gender identities (2014); Jo’burg TRACKS: Sexuality in the City (2010) and director of the film Breaking Out of the Box: stories of black lesbians in South Africa (2011). Zethu’s work appears in numerous journals, edited books, newspapers and magazines. Her current co-edited book projects (forthcoming, 2018) are Queer in Africa: LGBTQI identities, citizenship, and activism as well as Queer Cape Town.
See also
Find her on twitter: https://twitter.com/zethu_matebeni
Or watch these two short videos featuring Zethu: https://youtu.be/4pFkWPGU4VY and https://youtu.be/EO6av4knhUs
