Department of Women & Gender Studies

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https://hdl.handle.net/10566/7

Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) is an interdisciplinary programme which aims to promote scholarship on gender issues in South Africa, and to contribute to the challenge of gender transformation in the university and in society at large.

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Accidental feminists? Recent histories of South African women
(History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2007) van der Spuy, Patricia; Clowes, Lindsay
This article reviews Helen Scanlon's book, "Representation and reality", and Nombonisa Gasa's "Women in South African history", and locates each against the historiography of South African women's history
�Because they are me�: Dress and the making of gender
(Taylor & Francis, 2018) Shefer, Tamara; Ratele, Kopano; Clowes, Lindsay
Young people in contemporary South Africa inhabit a multiplicity of diverse, often contradictory, economic and socio-cultural contexts. These contexts offer a range of possibilities and opportunities for the affirmation of certain identities and positionalities alongside the disavowal of others. Dress � clothes, accessories and body styling � is one of the key components through which, within specific social conditions, people perform these identities. In making statements about themselves in terms of these multiple and intersecting group (or social) historical identities, the meanings soaked into people�s dress simultaneously speak to the present and their aspirations for the future. This article reports on a study that explored how a group of third year students at a South African university use dress to negotiate the multiple and intersecting identities available to them in a context characterised by neoliberal democracy and market ideologies that continue to be mediated by the racialised legacies of apartheid. The study employed a qualitative feminist discourse analysis to consider 53 semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted by third year students with other students on campus as part of an ongoing project exploring gender productions and performance. The discussion focuses on student understandings of ways in which contemporary clothes and dress signal gender. The research suggests that while there are moments in which clothes are acknowledged as expressions that can reinforce or challenge inequalities structured around gender, participants are also strongly invested in neoliberal consumerist understandings of clothes as accessories to an individualised self in ways that reinforce neoliberal market ideologies and reinstate hegemonic performances of gender.
Body positive �healthy� women: Representations of health and femininities in women�s health magazine South Africa, 2013-2018
(University of the Western Cape, 2022) Samaai, Shirmeez; Clowes, Lindsay
This research explores how representations of healthy femininities are constructed through narratives of Body Positivity in the South African version of Women�s Health magazine from 2013 to 2018. In my thesis, I examine how the magazine romanticises certain bodies and subtly pathologises others. By conducting a thematic analysis, I focus on the magazine�s presentation of women�s bodies and how these representations are linked to femininities, health, and sexuality. From a Body Positive lens, I argue that the magazine represents certain bodies as normative and �healthy� and other bodies as unhealthy and undesirable.
Coercive sexual practices and gender-based violence on a university campus
(Taylor & Francis, co-published with Unisa Press, 2009) Clowes, Lindsay; Shefer, Tamara; Fouten, Elron; Vergnani, Tania; Jacobs, Joachim
When a 22-year-old University of the Western Cape (UWC) female student was stabbed to death by her boyfriend (another student) in her room in the university residence on 25 August 2008, the entire campus was left reeling. Bringing the stark reality of gender-based violence (GBV) so close to home, the tragedy was a powerful reminder of the limits of more than a decade of legislative change, concerted activism, education, consciousness-raising and knowledge production aimed at challenging gender-based power inequalities. This article reflects on the relationships between violence, coercion and heterosexuality on a specific campus by drawing on data generated by a qualitative study at UWC that explored student constructions of heterosexual relationships in the light of national imperatives around HIV/AIDS and GBV. Involving 20 focus groups with male and female students over the course of 2008 and 2009, the study revealed that unequal and coercive practices are common in heterosexual relationships on this campus. The study underlined the necessity of understanding these relationships as produced through power inequalities inherent in normative gender roles, and also drew attention to ways in which gender power inequalities intersect in complex and sometimes contradictory ways with other forms of inequality on campus � in particular, class, age and geographical origin. While both men and women students appeared to experience pressure (linked to peer acceptance and material gain) to engage in (hetero)sexual relationships, it seems that first-year female students from poor, rural backgrounds are particularly vulnerable to the transactional and unequal relationships associated with coercive and sometimes even violent sexual practices. Alcohol and substance abuse also appear to be linked to unsafe and abusive sexual practices, and again it is young female students new to campus life who are most vulnerable. This article draws on the data from this larger study to explore experiences and understandings of the most vulnerable � young female students � in unpacking connections between (hetero)sexuality and violent and coercive sex in an educational institution.
Experiences of rural girls in a historically dominated organisation: scouts in Mpumalanga, Western Cape and Eastern Cape
(University of the Western Cape, 2006) Van Staden, Maria; Clowes, Lindsay; Women and Gender Studies; Faculty of Arts
This study explores the experiences of young rural girls in scouting practices, who reside in the rural areas of Mpumalanga, Western and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa. This exploratory study draws special reference to their participation in Scout programmes in what in observed as a predominantly male-dominated organisational alignment. This exploratory study uses a qualitative feminist investigation, through focus groups and semi structured interviews to investigate the impact of these organisational change initiatives on the experiences of girls in scouting. Although the aim of the study was to explore the experiences of rural girls, boys were included in the study to explore gender dynamics and to problematise how gender inequalities can be understood and addressed in scouting.
An exploration of the gendered constructions of �stoner� identity on a Western Cape campus
(University of the Western Cape, 2019) Brown, Natasha Carmen; Clowes, Lindsay
This study employed a social constructionist understanding of �identity� to identify key markers of gendered �stoner� identity and to consider how gendered �stoner� identity is performed on a Western Cape campus. The aim was not simply to consider how they see themselves, but also how they are considered through the lenses and perception of non-smoking students at campus. In trying to understand the gendered experiences of �stoners�, this research was grounded in a feminist theoretical perspective and feminist methodological approaches to explore gendered constructions of �stoner� identity at this Western Cape campus. The data for this study was collected through conducting two focus group discussions, and six semi structured, in-depth interviews with six male and six female students from a range of locations across campus. The participants in this study who smoke marijuana/weed did not reject the term �stoner�, rather, they claimed this identity, labelling themselves �stoners�. My research shows that �stoner� identities both transgress and reinforce normative femininities and masculinities.
An exploration of women's experiences in senior management in the petroleum industry South Africa
(University of the Western Cape, 2017) Nefdt, Anthea Carol; Clowes, Lindsay
There are relatively few women in senior leadership or management positions in South African industry. The oil industry is no exception to this and could in fact be considered to exemplify the ways in which women are marginalised. This small-scale qualitative project aims to explore challenges and experiences women face when entering senior management positions in the Petroleum Industry in Cape Town. The main objective of the study is to explore how gender (and other relevant subject positions) impacts on women's career development and opportunities. I used a qualitative feminist methodological framework and conducted a total of 12 semi-structured interviews with women employed in upper management positions in the 8 oil companies in the greater Western Cape area including the South African Petroleum Industry Association and Department of Energy (SAPIA). A thematic data analysis was then utilised to interpret the data. My findings show that many women perceive the route to success as difficult yet possible suggesting that the popular ''glass ceiling'' conceptual scheme should be replaced by the ''labyrinth of leadership'' model discussed in Early and Carli 2007 with relation to the oil industry. Further findings suggest that although the oil industry provides unique challenges to women as a gendered organization, it also incorporates various progressive initiatives for their advancement.
An exploratory study of women's experiences and place in the church: a case study of a parish in the Church of the Province of Southern Africa (CPSA), diocese of Cape Town
(University of the Western Cape, 2006) Sparrow, Isabel; Clowes, Lindsay; Ryan, Mary; Women and Gender Studies; Faculty of Arts
This mini-thesis is a small-scale exploratory case study into the experiences of eight mature women members of a particular parish in the Church of the Province of Southern Africa (CPSA) situated in the Diocese of Cape Town. Using qualitative feminist research methodologies, this study sets out to explore how this group of non-ordained women perceives their roles in the church structure. The study examines what initially attracted the participants to this parish and what motivates them, despite the challenges, to continue performing their voluntary licensed and unlicensed roles in the church. It then goes on to consider the contradictory ways in which their roles as individuals, gendered as women, serve to simultaneously reinforce and challenge the patriarchy of the church. In this respect the participants often held conflicting views within themselves, thus demonstrating the complexities surrounding such issues. Upon reflection the researcher acknowledges that, similar to the participants, she also holds contradictory views on some of these issues. The research therefore identifies and explores three main themes in this regard, firstly the reasons why women originally joined the parish church, secondly the ways in which these women are active in the church and lastly the ways in which women’s activities simultaneously challenge and reinforce the patriarchy and continued male domination of church.
'Family comes in all forms, blood or not': disrupting dominant narratives around the patriarchal nuclear family
(Taylor & Francis, 2016) Gachago, Daniela; Clowes, Lindsay; Condy, Janet
After nearly 25 years of democracy, lives of young South Africans are still profoundly shaped by the legacies of apartheid. This paper considers how these differences are produced, maintained and disrupted through an exploration of changing narratives developed by a small group of South African pre-service teachers, with a particular focus on the narratives developed around discourses of fatherhood generally and absent fathers in particular. We draw on interviews conducted with three students in which we discussed their digital stories and literature reviews. In this paper, we draw attention to the limitations of digital storytelling and the risks such autobiographical storytelling presents of perpetuating dominant narratives that maintain and reproduce historical inequalities. At the same time, in highlighting ways in which this risk might be confronted, the paper also aims to show the possibilities in which these dominant narratives may be challenged.
Gender and small-scale enterprises following economic reforms: a case study of Dar-Es-Salaam
(University of the Western Cape, 2002) Iddi Mangi, Namini Scholasticka; Clowes, Lindsay
This study is about Gender and small-scale enterprises following recent economic reforms in Tanzania. It deals with a case study of women entrepreneurs in Dar-es- Salaam, focusing on their prospects and problems, and the mechanisms they use to survive in a competitive free market. There is concern among policy analysts and gender activists that the economic reforms have negatively affected women entrepreneurs more than their male counterparts (Tibaijuka, 1992). However, these concerns have not yet been substantiated through detailed empirical evidence. The findings of my study reveal that it is a combination of factors which lead women entrepreneurs to establish small-scale enterprises. These motivating reasons are to fulfil the needs of their families such as school fees of their children. Similarly, Tanzanian women entrepreneurs start a small business so as to supplement their insufficient incomes, achieve independence and as a substitute to paid employment. However, they experience a variety of problems, such as the lack of business premises, high rental costs at commercial areas, competition, lack of start-up and working capital from banks and micro-financial institutions, lack of information, and bureaucracy around business licenses. Women entrepreneurs have developed various tactics to handle such difficulties they encounter in their businesses. These are: locating their enterprises in near or around their homes, employing relatives and other people, charging competitive and differentiated prices, diversifying their businesses, working for extra hours, and establishing informal credit associations. The recommendations are: the government should clarify and shorten the procedures of licenses and business premises acquisition, provide more commercial areas with cheaper rentals. Similarly, the government should be sympathetic towards women when it formulates and implements its developmental policies, women should be informed about available training opportunities. Future studies should investigate a larger sample of women entrepreneurs in small-scale enterprises involved in other sectors using the feminist research methods.
'I act this way because why?' Prior knowledges, teaching for change, imagining new masculinities
(Scandinavian University Press, 2015) Clowes, Lindsay
This article begins by outlining some of the prior knowledges brought by undergraduate students to an introduction to gender studies class in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. I show that, at the beginning of the course, students clearly understand gender to refer to women and femininity, imagining femininity (but not masculinity) to be responsive to social change. I suggest that, in the face of these prior knowledges, it is important to focus on masculinity as performance, as a cultural artefact and one that is deeply harmful to South African men. Student experiences of this teaching and learning suggest that it offers possibilities for imagining men as allies and beneficiaries - rather than enemies - in the struggle for gender equity.
�It�s not a simple thing, co-publishing�: challenges of co-authorship between supervisors and students in South African higher educational contexts
(UNISA Press, 2013) Clowes, Lindsay; Shefer, Tamara
Knowledge production in South Africa remains framed by the legacies of apartheid. Developing emerging authors and local knowledges through co-authorship between supervisors and post graduate students is an important strategy aimed at challenging these legacies. This paper draws on in-depth interviews with students and supervisors to explore their experiences of co-authorship. Findings indicate that while insisting that co-authoring has value, several students also note their discomfort with elements of the process. While insisting students� work be disseminated, and expressing willingness to engage in the mentoring that this requires, supervisors also articulate discomfort with processes offering opportunities for personal career development. Given increasing emphasis on co-authorship we suggest the power inequalities expressed through the supervisor/student relationship be made more transparent. Knowledge production through co-authorship is best served by collaborations between authors who are more equally empowered and who are more critically aware of the challenges such collaborations are likely to present.
Lesbians and the right to equality: Perceptions of people in a local Western Cape community
(University of the Western Cape, 2001) Sanger, Nadia; Clowes, Lindsay; Women and Gender Studies; Faculty of Arts
When lesbians, as women divert from social norms and reject the compulsory heterosexual norm, they are either punished through legal systems for transgressing patriarchial structures or not recognised at all. As women, lesbians suffer at the hands of a homophobic society which believs that women have stepped out of line through challenging the hegemonic discourses stipulating that they have specific and distinct roles to play - that of wives, mothers, homemakers and sexual partners to men. Because lesbians do not fit into this construct, their behaviour is socially and legally condemned for diverting from the "natural order". This study aimed to identify and explore the various ways people construct and perceive lesbians and to reveal how sexuality, as a product of history and culture, determines the ways lesbians are treated in their own communities. This study attempted to explore how, despite the democratic stance of the new constitution, South African lesbians still experience discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation.
The limits of discourse: masculinity as vulnerability
(UNISA Press, 2013) Clowes, Lindsay
For many, gender equity being fair to women and men is a zero sum game in which men should be willing to give up their privileges for the creation of a more equitable and just society. The idea that men might benefit from gender equity seems, for many, unthinkable. This was brought home a few years ago in a gender studies test, when students answering a question on what men might gain from gender equality explained instead how women would benefit. In this Perspective I reflect on the ways in which popular discourses around gender may inadvertently undermine movement towards gender and social justice. Dismissing my students' answers as the result of poor teaching or learning misses a key point: It seems to be extraordinarily difficult for most people to recognise how gender creates masculine vulnerabilities or how gender equity could benefit men. I suggest that if we are to improve women's lives through the reduction of violence, feminist teachers and activists need to think creatively about how to help men and boys understand that performances of masculinity deeply compromise their own lives.
'A living testimony of the heights to which a woman can rise�: Sarojini Naidu, Cissie Gool and the Politics of Women�s Leadership in South Africa in the 1920s
(Taylor & Francis, 2012) van der Spuy, Patricia; Clowes, Lindsay
A leading force in the Indian National Congress, Sarojini Naidu arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the end of February 1924 after receiving an invitation to support South African Indian political organisations in their struggle against the Class Areas Bill. Intending to leave South Africa after two weeks, Naidu remained for several months. In this paper we explore Naidu�s relationship with �the Joan of Arc of District Six�, Cissie Gool. We suggest that Naidu�s visit was significant for South African women�s political histories in general and Gool�s in particular. Insisting that women be respected as political activists, Naidu�s visit redefined the place of women, not only as participants in politics, but also as leaders. She provided a role model for women, such as Gool, who might otherwise not have imagined it possible to exercise power and authority within South Africa�s profoundly patriarchal political mainstream. Against the broader context of South African women�s activism Sarojini Naidu�s South African visit expands our vision to encompass the doubly marginal: women acting at the margins of women�s political history and at the margins of patriarchal politics - and further marginalised within the historiographies of each.
Masculinity, matrimony and generation: Reconfiguring patriarchy in Drum 1951-1983
(Routledge, 2008) Clowes, Lindsay
In this article I discuss some of the ways in which Drum tended to ascribe �modernity� to particular practices and processes in opposition to other practices and processes portrayed as �traditional�. In mid-twentieth-century South Africa, dominant discourses tended to signal (white) male adulthood through independent decision making alongside financial autonomy. In contrast African discourses tended to signal male adulthood through proximity to family members, through respect for age and seniority and through deference to the praxis of �tradition�. In the representations of black men in its pages, Drum magazine negotiated a somewhat disorderly path through these competing racialised discourses. I suggest that Drum�s claim that black males were indeed men was made through highlighting and condoning practices that demonstrated similarities and continuities between subordinate black and dominant white versions of manhood. In challenging the racial discourse the magazine paradoxically found itself simultaneously reinforcing western rather than African versions of manhood.
Men and children: Changing constructions of fatherhood in Drum magazine, 1951-1965
(HSRC Press, 2006) Clowes, Lindsay
This chapter explores changing representations of fatherhood and masculinity in Drum magazine over the course of the 1950s. In the early 1950s men were portrayed in close proximity to their children and adult masculinities were tied to being a father. Over the course of the 1950s this changed such that by the 1960s adult masculinities were portrayed outside the home and disconnected and distinct from their offspring.
Men in Africa: masculinities, materiality and meaning
(Elliot & Fitzpatrick Inc., 2010) Shefer, Tamara; Stevens, Garth; Clowes, Lindsay
At a public lecture in Cape Town earlier this year, Professor Sandra Harding, an internationally renowned feminist author, spoke to the question �Can men be subjects of feminist thought?� (1 March 2010, District Six Museum, Cape Town). In her talk, Harding called on men to elaborate critically on their subjective experiences and practices of being boys and men � from childhood to adulthood, and through fatherhood to old age. She argued that while androcentric thinking has dominated knowledge production globally, men�s self-reflexive voices on their own experiences of being boys and men have been relatively silent, particularly through a profeminist and critical gender lens. Harding thus drew attention to an important challenge confronting contemporary psychology, a challenge that underpins the rationale for this Special Edition of the Journal of Psychology in Africa. However, much of our knowledge within the discipline of psychology has been and remains uncritically based on boys� and men�s experiences and perspectives. More specifically, as Boonzaier and Shefer (2007) argue, most psychological knowledge is not only predominantly based on research with men, but also in most cases, middle-class, white, American men. Studies that problematise and foreground masculinity itself, that challenge masculinity as normative, and that apply a critical, gendered lens, are still relatively marginal in the social sciences and particularly in psychology. This is however beginning to change.
Narratives of transactional sex on a university campus
(Taylor & Francis, 2012) Shefer, Tamara; Clowes, Lindsay; Vergnani, Tania
Given the imperatives of HIV and gender equality, South African researchers have foregrounded transactional sex as a common practice that contributes to unsafe and inequitable sexual practices. This paper presents findings from a qualitative study with a group of students at a South African university, drawing on narratives that speak to the dynamics of reportedly widespread transactional sex on campus. Since many of these relationships are inscribed within unequal power dynamics across the urban-rural and local-�foreigner� divides, and across differences of wealth, age and status that intersect with gender in multiple, complex ways, it is argued that these may be exacerbating unsafe and coercive sexual practices among this group of young people. The paper further argues for a critical, reflexive position on transactional sex, pointing to the way in which participants articulate a binaristic response to transactional relationships that simultaneously serves to reproduce a silencing of a discourse on female sexual desires, alongside a simplistic and deterministic picture of masculinity underpinned by the male sexual drive discourse.
Participating unequally: Student experiences at UWC
(UNISA Press, 2017) Clowes, Lindsay; Shefer, Tamara; Ngabaza, Sisa
This paper uses Nancy Fraser�s concept of participatory parity to reflect on data gathered by and from third year students in a final year research module in the Women�s and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape in 2015. During the course students developed a research proposal, collected and shared data with other students, and then used this data to write a final (externally examinable) research report. Employing a participatory photovoice methodology, the students� research focused on ways in which social and group identities had shaped their experiences of feeling empowered and disempowered on campus. Each student took two photos representing experiences of feeling empowered and two of feeling disempowered on campus and wrote narratives of about 300 words explaining and describing the experience foregrounded by each image. Students shared these narratives and accompanying images with each other, their teachers and the wider university community through a public exhibition in the library. In the paper we draw on Fraser�s concepts of maldistribution, misrecognition and misrepresentation to highlight constraints to equal participation identified by students.

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