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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Browsing by Subject "Activism"

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    Embodied pedagogies: performative activism and transgressive pedagogies in the sexual and gender justice project in higher education in contemporary South Africa
    (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) Shefer, Tamara
    In this chapter, responding to the call to rethink "the fundamental concepts that support such binary thinking" and to recognise "the agential possibilities and responsibilities for reconfiguring the material-social relations of the world" (Barad, 2007: p.35), I explore a number of performative and activist events that have been part of the contemporary student decolonialisation movement in South Africa to think about the disruption and disturbance of 'business as usual' in the patriarchal, colonial and neoliberal project of the academy. Three inspiring occasions of performative activism of feminist and queer activists are shared here as providing powerful pedagogical interventions through the deployment of particular bodies in particular spaces. I argue the importance of acknowledging and "intra-acting" (Barad, 2007) with such 'disturbances' within a critical post-humanist social justice pedagogical project.
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    "Yes madam, I can speak!'': A study of the recovered voice of the domestic worker
    (University of the Western Cape, 2018) Mcwatts, Susheela; Shefer, Tamara
    Events in the last few years on the global stage have heralded a new era for domestic workers, which may afford them the voice as subaltern that has been silent until now. Despite being constructed as silent and as subjects without agency, unionised domestic workers organised themselves globally, becoming more visible and making their voices heard. This culminated in the promulgation of the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) Convention No.189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers (or C189) in September 2013, and the establishment of the International Domestic Workers' Federation (IDWF) in October 2013. This broadening of the scope of domestic workers' activism has not yet received sufficient attention in academic research. These two historic events on their own have the potential to change the dominant discourse around domestic workers, by mobilising workers with agency to challenge the meaning of the political ideologies informing their identity positions of exploitation and subjugation.