Jordache Ellapen

Undergraduate Appointment: Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Department of Historical Studies, UTM
Graduate Appointment: Women and Gender Studies Institute (St. George)
Affiliations: Bonham Center for Sexual Diversity Studies (St. George)
Cross-appointments: Department of Visual Studies, UTM

Biography:

Dr. Jordache Ellapen is an assistant professor of Feminist Studies in Culture and Media. A native from South Africa, living and working in Toronto, he is interested in the relationship between aesthetics, race, and politics in South Africa and the African Diaspora. As an interdisciplinary scholar, he is interested in transnational theories and methods informed by Black studies, African studies, Diaspora studies, Gender studies, and Sexuality/Queer studies. His research and teaching interests include Black queer performance and aesthetic practices; Afro-Indian cultural production; Afro-queer-diasporic film and photography; aesthetics, archives, and affect; Black Sexual Cultures; and race, pleasure, and pornography. He has also published on South African cinema and Nigerian video-films. His research and teaching are invested in examining the relationship between aesthetics, visuality, and decolonization.

He is currently writing a book tentatively titled Against Afronormativity: Afro-Indian Intimacies and the Queer Aesthetics of Race in South Africa, which examines Afro-Indian intimacies and the shifting nature of South African Blackness through a queer studies lens. This book curates an archive of aesthetic practices by feminist, queer, femme, and gender non-conforming Afro-Indian and Black South African artists in order to confound how we understand the categories Indian, African, and Black in South Africa. This book seeks to understand how marginalized artist-activists are taking up the incomplete project of freedom in South Africa and reframing what constitutes the political through a radical African queer imaginary. As a curatorial project, this Afro-Indian archive unhinges South African Indianness and Blackness from the normative, directing us to practices of freedom through which we can radically imagine South African society otherwise.

His research eschews disciplinary boundaries in a quest to produce new frameworks and methods to understand culture and society from the perspectives of those most marginalized and vulnerable.

Dr. Ellapen is currently a Martha LA McCain Faculty Research Fellow in the Bonham Center for Sexual Diversity Studies, which is part of the Queer and Trans Research Lab.

Education:

PhD in American Studies (Indiana University, Bloomington)
MA in Cinema Studies (New York University, Tisch School of the Arts)
MA in Film Studies (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg)
BA in Dramatic Art (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg)

Recent publications include:

• (2021) “Performing Blackness as Transgressive Erotics: African Futurities and Black Queer Sex in South African Live Art,” in Feminist Formations, 33, no. 2. (Summer): 52-78.
• (2021) “Siyakaka Feminism: African Anality and the Politics of Deviance in FAKA’s Performance Art Praxis,” in Feminist Studies, 47, no 1: 114-146.  
• (2020) “The Brown Photo-Album: An Archive of Feminist Futurity” in Kronos: Southern African Histories, SI titled “The Other Life of the Image,” 42, no. 1 (November): 94-128.
• I have also coedited (with Haseenah Ebrahim, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg) a special issue of Black Camera: An International Film Journal titled Perspectives on South African Cinema (Spring 2018)
• I am also the co-editor (with Jyoti Mistry, University of Gothenburg) of the book we remember differently: Race, Memory, Imagination (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2012).