by Sabine Neidhardt

July 22, 2005: Constitution Hill, Johannesburg, SA
Most of the research done on Africa, on African people, women, gender, culture, and sexuality is not done by Africans themselves. Worse still, the data collected is presented around the world, in various academic and NGO spaces, but rarely if ever is there a benefit for the ‘researched.’ In fact, most times the researched appear as mere subjects.

In order to work against this disempowering and colonialist trend, the Coalition of African Lesbians (CAL) has set a mandate aimed at democratising the knowledge producing process on the continent. The mandate works toward increasing African lesbian visibility through informed, sustainable, localized research. As a result, here in South Africa, FEW initiated the first in a planned series of women-centred research forums on July 22/05 at its offices in Women’s Jail, Constitution Hill, Braamfontein. The forums are designed to coordinate and facilitate a collective process of research on lesbian and bisexual women’s lives and experiences .in Africa, one that will focus on information and data sharing both between researchers and between researchers and the community of lesbian, bisexual, transsexual men and women around the continent.

The aim here is to democratise the research process by reclaiming the activity of research and its information and results from the privatised, inaccessible domain of academia, for the very people whose everyday/every night lives are the subjects of ‘research’. The visibility of non-heterosexual women’s experiences and realities of living in a postcolonial Africa is the end goal here.

The initial session was attended by 15 women: female researchers, lesbian and bisexual identified people who are either currently conducting research on sexuality and/or non-heterosexual women in South Africa, or who are looking to begin the research process. After formal introductions were held, Fikile Vilakazi (FEW’s new Training, Advocacy, and Support Programs Officer) facilitated the session by asking us, the participants, to come up with an agenda for the kind of research that needs to be done. As such, we discussed at length what research is currently being done, what needs to be done, and where are the gaps. We identified different categories of research, everything from sexual rights, reproduction, and pleasure, to research on poverty, spirituality, and xenophobia within non-heterosexual women’s lives.

Interestingly, what came up in the discussions over and over again is the point of ‘methodology’—how do we, as researchers, go about doing research? How do we even decide what research needs to be done? How do we go about deciding on the questions that need to be asked? How is the research process and its intended results shaped by how we choose to enter the research process in the first place, whether as ‘feminists’ or as anti-capitalists, etc? In other words, it very quickly became clear that even setting an agenda for research cannot take place in any kind of open and democratic way unless we simultaneously also speak about issues surrounding methodology, ideology, and ethics. As such, it was decided that a second forum will be held on August 5/05 at the same venue, in order to work towards a more holistic approach to research and to not get caught in artificially separating “research” from the social, political, economic and cultural context in which that research takes place.

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