(Dis)Appearance As Disruption: Gender As a Tool in Protests

In September 2019, Cape Town, South Africa, became the epicentre of two pivotal moments, each representing a rupture in the public consciousness and igniting a nationwide reckoning. The first was the rape and murder of Uyinene Mrwetyana, a young university student whose death became a symbol of the pervasive violence faced by women and gender non-conforming individuals in South Africa. The second was the rise of collective protests, primarily led by women and non-binary individuals, who transformed their personal experiences of gendered violence into public demonstrations of resistance. These protests quickly spread across the country, with gender becoming a central tool for disruption—a medium through which vulnerability, power, and solidarity were expressed.

This paper explores how gender operates as a fluid and disruptive force within protests against gender-based violence, not only by amplifying the visibility of the female and non-binary body, but also by dissolving into the larger, collective protest ‘body’. In these moments, the individual body merges with the collective, moving between states of visibility and invisibility. This fluidity of gender allows for both an assertion of identity and a challenge to traditional power structures. These assemblies of bodies—whether in public spaces or digital platforms—operate in an ever-liminal state, where the "I" and the "we" co-exist, allowing for a collective voice to emerge while maintaining the significance of individual experiences.

It is within this liminal space that gender becomes flexible—simultaneously represented and fractured, embodied and disembodied, appearing and disappearing as a tool for disruption. By examining how protests across the global South destabilise traditional gender roles and challenge heteronormative structures, this paper explores how protests against gender-based violence confront systems of oppression by allowing gender to both appear and disappear as an act of resistance.