Magister Artium - MA (Women and Gender Studies)

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https://hdl.handle.net/10566/10215

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Browsing by Subject "Cape Town"

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    Exploring the dualisms of 'belonging': Young women's performances of citizenship in Cape Town
    (University of the Western Cape, 2016) Van Vuuren, Monique; Lewis, Desiree
    My research involves a nuanced exploration of 'citizenship', through examining the liberatory potential of young women's use of social media and performance of embodied subjectivities in the post-Apartheid imaginary. By tracing expressions of self, specifically women�s highly imaginative efforts to represent what selfhood means to them and how it shapes their realities, I question conventional understandings of civic participation. The forms of communication and self-expression that many young women in Cape Town pursue are often considered apolitical, frivolous or trivial. By comprehensively exploring self-expression as a participant, I show that it is often richly but complicatedly politicized. My analysis is based on four women�s narratives and meaning-making processes, although my methodological approach involves detailed attention to my own location and interactions with participants. Guided by feminist explorations of the relevance of standpoint theorizing, I seek to understand the various visual and textual ways in which a small group of young women in Cape Town is currently making sense of their social identities, understandings of freedom and potential as social actors. I also draw on methodological work that questions the tendency, even among many feminist researchers, to reduce the knowledge of their participants to manageable data. In so doing, my aim is to try to make sense of the content and forms of young women's knowledge making on their own terms.
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    The evolution of feminist politics: the life and times of a rape crisis organisation
    (University of the Western Cape, 2024) Davids, Juliana
    The Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust (RCCTT) was established in 1976 at a time when South Africa experienced extensive turmoil, and the country was under heavy military rule. This study critically examines the evolution of feminist politics within Rape Crisis (RC) from the 1970s to the present day (RCCTT, 2019). Drawing on personal narratives, organisational dynamics, and different feminist theoretical frameworks, the research explores intersecting power relations, feminist leadership, and the organisation's response to violence against women. It highlights ways in which changing political circumstances- from the 1970s to the present day - have affected and intersected with the work of an organisation, which drove the first systematic and organisational responses to widespread violence against women in the country. This critical study, shaped by the author’s personal locations and standpoint, seeks to raise and explain the political tensions experienced by an organisation that was both bold and proactive in confronting violence, as well as challengingly situated within the country’s changing racial, class, ideological and neoliberal dynamics.