Research Articles (Women & Gender Studies)

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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.
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.
'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.
'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.
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.
Perceptions of staffriding in Post-Apartheid South Africa: the lethal thrill of speed or the masculine performance of a painful past?
(Elliot & Fitzpatrick Inc., 2010) Sedite, Dimakatso; Bowman, Brett; Clowes, Lindsay
Staffriding, or train surfing, involves taking life threatening physical risks by moving around the outside of moving trains. In aiming to better understand this risky practice, this small scale qualitative study used three semi-structured interviews and three focus discussions to understand perceptions of train surfing in South Africa�s Gauteng province. Semi-structured interviews comprised general station staff (n=2), and a station manager (n=1). The first two focus group discussions held were with ticket marshals (n= 6 per group, with a total of 12), and the last focus group discussion was with commuters (n=4), security personnel (n=6), and a station manager (n=1). Findings revealed that the majority of staffriders were perceived to be young, urban, black boys/men attending suburban schools. Tracing these identity co-ordinates against possible configurations of masculinity, we argue that train surfing represents a particular performance of risky, heteronormative masculinity forged within and against the historical, political and economic legacies that contoured apartheid versions of �black� manhood.
Pregnant girls and young parents in South African schools
(UNISA Press, 2008) Bhana, Deevia; Clowes, Lindsay; Morrell, Robert; Shefer, Tamara
Since the promulgation of the South African Schools Act in 1 996, it has become illegal to exclude pregnant girls from school. Influenced by feminist research, policy has sought to assist pregnant girls and young parents to continue and complete their schooling on the understanding that having children often terminates school-going, limiting future employment and work opportunities. This focus seeks to examine how the new policy has been understood and implemented. The authors focus on the views and experiences of principals and teachers, as they are the authorities at school with the responsibility for ensuring that the policy is implemented. The paper draws on qualitative data collected by a larger study on being and becoming a parent at a diverse group of schools in KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape Province. The authors investigate the extent to which schools' responses to pregnancy and parenting reflect and/or reproduce normative gender roles and practices with respect to schooling and parenting in contemporary South Africa. The paper also shows that despite familiar stereotypes about young parents and pregnancy both teachers and principals take their educational responsibilities seriously. They do care and do try to help. But many teachers are judgmental and moralistic, particularly in response to young girls.
Risk and protective factors to male interpersonal violence: Views of some male university students
(Medical Research Council, Tygerberg, 2010) Clowes, Lindsay; Lazarus, Sandy; Ratele, Kopano
This article reports on a study that sought to elicit the views of male university students on risk and protective factors to male interpersonal violence. The participants were 116 third-year students who participated in a final year research project in the Women�s and Gender Studies (WGS) Programme at the University of Western Cape (UWC). Each of the students conducted six semistructured face to face interviews with male students. Following initial analyses of the interviews, a video-recorded class discussion was held to discuss the research findings. The data from the class discussion was captured under the four levels of individual, relationship, community and society, utilised by the World Health organization (WHO) in its World Health Report on Violence and Health. The analysis of the class discussion and the students� own research reports revealed that at the individual level, risk and protective factors primarily revolve around the challenges of constructing a viable masculinity in specific social and economic contexts; at the relationship level, the key factors appear to be the experiences and expectations around gender roles and family dynamics; at the community level, it seems that weak or non-existent community networks and activities feed into increasing the risk of male community members becoming involved in violence. Each of these three levels needs to be understood against the historically specific backdrop of the societal ecological level: the gendered cultural values expressed in and reflectedby the wider social, economic and political contexts.
Risk and protective factors to male interpersonal violence: views of some male university students
(Medical Research Council, 2010) Clowes, Lindsay; Lazarus, Sandy; Ratele, Kopano
This article reports on a study that sought to elicit the views of male university students on risk and protective factors to male interpersonal violence. The participants were 116 third-year students who participated in a final year research project in the Women�s and Gender Studies (WGS) Programme at the University of Western Cape (UWC). Each of the students conducted six semistructured face to face interviews with male students. Following initial analyses of the interviews, a video-recorded class discussion was held to discuss the research findings. The data from the class discussion was captured under the four levels of individual, relationship, community and society, utilised by the World Health Organization (WHO) in its World Health Report on Violence and Health. The analysis of the class discussion and the students� own research reports revealed that at the individual level, risk and protective factors primarily revolve around the challenges of constructing a viable masculinity in specific social and economic contexts; at the relationship level, the key factors appear to be the experiences and expectations around gender roles and family dynamics; at the community level, it seems that weak or non-existent community networks and activities feed into increasing the risk of male community members becoming involved in violence. Each of these three levels needs to be understood against the historically specific backdrop of the societal ecological level: the gendered cultural values expressed in and reflected
School principals and their responses to the rights and needs of pregnant and parenting learners
(HSRC Press, 2012) Clowes, Lindsay; D�Amant, Toni; Nkani, Vuyo
South African schools' responses to pregnant girls and young parents: a study of some Durban and Cape Town secondary schools
(Unisa Press and Taylor & Francis, 2008) Bhana, Deevia; Clowes, Lindsay; Morrell, Robert; Shefer, Tamara
Since the promulgation of the South African Schools Act in 1996 it has become illegal to exclude pregnant girls from school. Influenced by feminist research, policy has sought to assist pregnant girls and young parents to continue and complete their schooling on the understanding that having children often terminates school-going limiting future employment and work opportunities. This paper seeks to examine how the new policy has been understood and implemented. We focus on the views and experiences of principals and teachers as they are the authorities at school with the responsibility for ensuring that the policy is implemented. The paper draws on qualitative data collected by a larger study on being and becoming a parent at diverse group of schools in Kwazulu-Natal and the Western Cape. In the paper we investigate the extent to which schools� responses to pregnancy and parenting reflect and/or reproduce normative gender roles and practices with respect to schooling and parenting in contemporary South Africa. We show also that despite familiar stereotypes about young parents and pregnancy, both teachers and principals take their pastoral responsibilities seriously. They do care and do try to help. But many teachers were judgemental and moralistic particularly in response to young girls.
Student accounts of space and safety at a South African university: implications for social identities and diversity
(SAGE Publications, 2018) Shefer, Tamara; Strebel, Anna; Ngabaza, Sisa; Clowes, Lindsay
Transformation efforts in South African higher education have been under increased scrutiny in recent years, especially following the last years of student activism and calls for decolonization of universities. This article presents data from a participatory photovoice study in which a group of students reflect on their experiences of feeling safe and unsafe at an urban-based historically disadvantaged university. Findings highlight the way in which historical inequalities on the basis of social identities of race, class, and gender, among others, continue to shape experiences, both materially and social-psychologically, in South African higher education. However, and of particular relevance in thinking about a socially just university, participants speak about the value of diversity in facilitating their sense of both material and subjective safety. Thus, a diverse classroom and one that acknowledges and recognizes students across diversities, is experienced as a space of comfort, belonging and safety. Drawing on feminist work on social justice, we argue the importance of lecturer sensitivity and reflexivity to their own practices, as well as the value of social justice pedagogies that not only focus on issues of diversity and equality but also destabilize dominant forms of didactic pedagogy, and engage students� diverse experiences and perceptions.

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