In defence and embrace of ourselves: black women intellectual activists, self-love and technological interventions

Abstract

The only second lesbian conference in South Africa, and the first that brings together so many people from the LGBTi community. When women make history do not usually consciously reflect on this as what women are doing. Our foremothers did not consciously think they were making history fifty years ago, this month, when they took whatever form of travel was available to them in order to march on the Union Buildings. “We are making history here today, and it gladdens me to see so many young Black women in this room, and in many ways I feel like that fifty year old act of assertion and self-defence by Black and white women has come full circle”. It is quite fitting as well that the first people to march in honour of the 9 August 1956 anti-pass woman's march choose to do so as a public declaration of our right to love women sexually and/or politically. Sexuality is at the forefront of the most pressing concerns in contemporary South Africa. “I hope that like Sophia Williams de Bruyn, the sole surviving leader of the 1956 march, we will live to see a day when we no longer need to march for freedom from discrimination and victimisation because of sexual orientation and identity”.