“I Don’t Want to Die with My Hands Up, or Legs Open”: Public Protests as Public Potentials

Abstract

In August 2019, a 19-year-old student, Uyinene Mrwetyana, was brutally raped and murdered in the local post office of Claremont, a suburb in Cape Town, South Africa. Mrwetyana was but one of countless names of victims who had lost their lives due to gender-based violence, all within weeks of one another. Mrwetyana’s death, therefore, served as a final catalyst in the collective consciousness of a country. South African society became enraged, and a collective response was mobilised with thousands of bodies taking to the streets —bodies of different genders, races, classes, religions, and sexual orientations all emerged with the hopes that a public outcry could draw attention to the crisis at hand. Using an intersectional performative approach, calling on Judith Butler’s theory of assembly (2015), Victor Turner’s seminal work on liminality (1979), and the German theatre scholar, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s writing on tragedy (2016), this paper argues that the moment of protests against gender-based violence following Mrwetyana’s death, also known as the #AmINext protest, functioned not only as a public performance of the tragic, calling for societal and political change, but in itself enacted it, allowing for a public recognition and reimagination to emerge, in search of what Jill Dolan calls “utopian performatives” (Dolan 2005, 7), or one could argue, public potentials.