Gabriella is a writer and filmmaker from Cape Town. Traversing art and journalism, she is interested in telling stories about the human condition. Her website includes several examples of these – a documentary about a prosthetic leg maker, a short documentary on the artist Amy Ayanda, and a PSA about child trafficking.
Gabriella has worked as an arts writer for the online publication Between 10 and 5, where she has written about everything from sneaker exchanges to the #MeToo movement. She also hosted an art and culture show on Cape Town TV. She is also an actress appearing in the films Eye in the Sky, American Monster, and Jamillah and Aladdin and as a writer on Stag Knights.
Currently, she is very busy working on two feature films, developing a play as part of the University of Johannesburg's 2020 playwriting laboratory, and is a contributor to Politically Aweh, a South African infotainment satire show.
Gabriella’s piece in Living While Feminist is titled ‘You Look Like a Lesbian’. In it she says:
‘It’s almost as though when a certain type of heterosexual man (and a certain type of heterosexual woman) comes into contact with a straight woman with power, who wears the shirt/sneaker/jeans combo, their brains short circuit. They equate women with power, and in particular lesbian women with power, as a threat to their very way of life.
The piece is short but it explores relationships, the silencing effect of derogatory language, the power of clothes and performance, and the male gaze, and that’s what we’ll be talking about today.
