Magister Artium - MA (History)
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Item The 1945 General Strike in Northern Nigeria and its Role in Anti-Colonial Nationalism(University of the Western Cape, 2014) Yohanna, Stephen; Rousseau, NickyThis thesis follows the course of the Nigerian general strike of 1945 in the Northern provinces, a previously under-researched region. It examines some of the many ways in which the strike has been understood in the academy, focusing in particular on the works of Alkasum Abba, Kazah-Toure and Bill Freund who have regarded the strike as well supported and successful. By employing Ian Phimister and Brian Raftopoulos's analysis of the 1948 general strike in colonial Zimbabwe, this thesis re-reads the narrative of success by bringing to the fore previosuly ignored issues relating to questions of planning, tactics, propaganda, solidarity, leadership, and execution of the strike. This re-reading reveals a considerably more varied and uneven response across and within the different categories of workers than has been previously assumed by scholars. Such unevenness challenges notions of "solidarity" and "steadfastness" attributed to the industrial action, with implications for how workers struggles have been incorporated into wider narratives of decolonization and anti-colonial nationalism.Item The African child and the hidden curriculum at Blythswood Institute: Three snapshots(University of Western Cape, 2021) Nogqala, Xolela; Rousseau, NickyThis mini-thesis seeks to understand how the colonial and apartheid state imagined the African child in South Africa through education policies and their associated hidden curriculum. It asks what educational project was deemed suitable for the African child and how did this project configure her future? At the core of this enquiry is a preoccupation to understand how institutions, their curricula and objects rid themselves of colonial precepts. In working through this, I employ Blythswood Institute as a provocation to think and to historicise the education of African children, such as those at Blythswood, in three moments: colonialism and the founding of Blythswood in 1877; apartheid and the passing of the Bantu Education Act of 1953, and the post-apartheid times of democratic South Africa.Item Anthropology and literature: Humanistic themes in the ethnographic fiction of Hilda Kuper and Edith Turner(University of Western Cape, 2021) Shaik, Zuleika Bibi; Bank, AndrewThis mini-thesis makes an argument for the significance of a female-dominated hidden tradition of experimental ethnographic writing in British social anthropology. It argues that the women anthropologists who experimented with creative forms of ethnography were doubly marginalised: first as women in an androcentric male canon in British social anthropology and American cultural anthropology, and second as creative writers whose work has been consistently undervalued in sombre scholarly circles. The study proposes that Hilda Beemer Kuper (1911-1995) and Edith Turner (1921-2016) should be regarded as significant in a still unexcavated literary tradition or subgenre with Anglo-American anthropology. It showcases the narrative craft of Kuper through a detailed textual analysis of her two most accomplished experimental ethnographies A Witch in My Heart (written in 1954, performed in 1955, and published in siSwati in 1962 and English in London in 1970) and A Bite of Hunger (written in 1958 and published in America in 1965). I highlight Kuper?s multiple literary techniques in evoking of the fraught position of young Swazi co-wives, modern women and women accused of witchcraft in a patriarchal culture with particular attention to her gifts in creating dramatic plots, complex characters and dialogue rich in vernacular metaphor and proverbs. It then celebrates the even more experimental creative writing of Edith Turner. While Turner has sometimes been acknowledged for her hidden contributions to the co-production of her deeply loved and more famous husband Victor, she has not been given her due as an experimental ethnographer, also placing the experiences of African women centre-stage. In what she overtly advertised as �female literary style�, Turner?s belatedly published 1987 novel The Spirit and the Drum. A Memoir of Africa is analysed with meticulous attention to the literary techniques by which she seeks to explore an anthropology of experience and empathy. These accomplished but under-acknowledged women creative writers sought to explore what they both explicitly conceived of as gestures of humanist cross-cultural engagement.Item Anthropology and literature: Humanistic themes in the ethnographic fiction of Hilda Luper and Edith Turner(University of Western Cape, 2020) Shaik, Zuleika Bibi; Bank, AndrewThis mini-thesis makes an argument for the significance of a female-dominated hidden tradition of experimental ethnographic writing in British social anthropology. It argues that the women anthropologists who experimented with creative forms of ethnography were doubly marginalised: first as women in an androcentric male canon in British social anthropology and American cultural anthropology, and second as creative writers whose work has been consistently undervalued in sombre scholarly circles. The study proposes that Hilda Beemer Kuper (1911-1995) and Edith Turner (1921-2016) should be regarded as significant in a still unexcavated literary tradition or subgenre with Anglo-American anthropology.Item Artistic Interventions in the Historical Remembering of Cape slavery, c.1800s(University of the Western Cape, 2020) Lewis, Mischka Jade; Mnyaka, PhindiThis mini-thesis thesis intends to grapple with silences by looking the possibilities of reconceptualising archives through notions of �traces,� �absence,� and �fragments.� Examining archives as bodies of knowledge, a window to telling us something about pastpresent- future representations is to think about navigating archives of colonialism and slavery as sites of historical memory. The aim of this paper is to enter the pedagogical problem of remembering and gendered representational voids by seeking to explore how artistic representations offer insights in the absence of detail in the colonial archives. In exploring the relationship between bodies, remembering and the historical trauma of slavery and colonialisation, specifically in relation to historical corporeal and flesh narratives attached to indigenous black women, and how women negotiate these meanings through embodied interventions in (post-) slavery South Africa. The positioning of the body as an archive probes questions on how the memory of traumatic wounding in a (post-)slavery South Africa body politics are inscribed to convey meaning, memory and identity. The notions of embodiment that this thesis is concerned with asks in what ways can we creatively and imaginatively re-construct, outside of conventional historiographies and knowledge(s), that which has been disembowled through colonial dominating narratives of enslaved subjects?Item Being / becoming the "Cape Town flower sellers" The botanical complex, flower selling and floricultures in Cape Town(University of the Western Cape, 2010) Boehi, Melanie Eva; Rassool, Ciraj; NULL; Faculty of ArtsThis mini-thesis is concerned with histories of flower selling in Cape Town. Since the late 19th century, images and imaginings of the flower sellers in Adderley Street and to a lesser degree in other areas of the city attained an outstanding place in visualisations and descriptions of Cape Town. The flower sellers were thereby characterised in a particularly gendered, racialised and class-specific way as predominantly female, coloured and poor. This characterisation dominated to an extent that it is possible to speak of a discursive figure of the 'Cape Town flower sellers'. In tourism-related media and in personal memoirs, the 'Cape Town flower sellers' often came to represent both the city and the inhabitants of Cape Town. The images and imaginings of the 'Cape Town flower sellers' can partly be traced back to representations of 'flower girls' in fictional stories, paintings, photographs and film in Europe, particularly in Great Britain. In Cape Town, this European discourse about flower selling developed in a specific way within colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid contexts.Item Being and neoliberalism: A conceptual history of the subject(University of the Western Cape, 2022) Naidoo, Kiasha; van Bever Donker, MauritsThe idea of neoliberalism, as both a guiding principle for economic policy decisions and a governing rationality, is a pertinent issue of our time. The concept itself is often used to describe the contemporary mode of political economy but when we look closer, it is notoriously elusive. Scholars such as Michel Foucault and Wendy Brown seek to conceptualize neoliberalism as a governing rationality. What these scholars share is a reading of neoliberal governmentality in terms of the subject. In social and political philosophical critiques of neoliberalism which inherit from this Foucauldian line of thought, the subject is a central figure. However, thinking on the subject did not begin with a consideration of neoliberalism, it has a long philosophical history. I discuss this through a conceptual history of the subject and in doing so, understand the neoliberal subject as another iteration of subjectivity.Item Biography in and of an archive : the Shelagh Gastrow Collection and South Africa(University of Western Cape, 2012) Kwao-Sarbah, David; Rassool, CirajThis study is about the recent political history of South Africa. It examined the crucial period of late apartheid, through the political transition into democracy. The study was conducted through the lenses of Shelagh Gastrow's work, whose series of publications titled Who�s Who in South African Politics traversed the spectrum of a severely polarised South Africa, and earned her the accolade as a "leading authority" in the biographical enterprise of Who's who. Gastrow had interviewed people in political office, those in opposition, those hiding from political persecution and even those in exile outside South Africa. It involved about 100 personalities for each of her five volumes. The study involved examining archival collections, documentary analysis, desktop research and interviews with Shelagh Gastrow. It also examined the Mayibuye Archives, where the Gastrow collection was eventually transferred, as an archive of resistance to apartheid. The study showed that from its origin as a research project about personalities in South Africa�s resistance and transition history, the Shelagh Gastrow collection was transformed into a heritage resource. The study examined political collections as heritage resources in the process of remaking the nation, and the contributions they make in the national re-engineering process. The study drew on the convergence of two theoretical claims. First, Achille Mbembe, among others, has asserted that there is no state without its archives. An indispensable, symbiotic, socio-political relationship exists between the state, actors in the state, and related archives. The second, posited by the likes of Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff, is to the effect that objects have social lives, and that they are formed and transformed through interactions with their related societies. Between the objects and their societies, meanings and values are transmitted, exchanged and retained. Thus, a careful analysis of the formation and transformations (a biographical study) of such objects can reveal the obscure about the societies they relate to. Consequently, socio-political collections do reveal much about the individuals, groups, and societies they represent. In the case of South Africa, the analysis showed the corpus of Shelagh Gastrow's collection (the object in this study) which included transcripts of political interviews, manuscripts and Who's who publications, revealed the transition from apartheid into democracy as a critical historical juncture. Political collections constitute important heritage resources, which contribute to the production of national narratives. They may originate in the past, but their analysis in the present has resonance for the collective future of the nation.Item Cape-�Helena: An exploration of nostalgia and identity through the Cape Town -� St. Helena migration nexus(University of the Western Cape, 2018) Samuels, Damian; Hayes, PatriciaFor an Island measuring merely 128 square kilometers, and in spite of its remote location in the mid-�South Atlantic, St. Helena �punches way above its weight in history�, earning and occupying a privileged place in British scholarship of its imperial thalassocratic age. However, prior to this period in which the Island was indispensible to British Empire formation, it had passed through the hands of at least two former European naval nations before it was eventually laid claim to and effectively colonised by the British. The Portuguese, who were the first to stumble upon the uninhabited Island in 1502 -� naming it St. Helena in honour of Roman Emperor Constantine the Great�s mother -� managed to keep its existence a closely guarded secret for over eight years. For nearly a century, the Island was reserved for exclusive use by the Portuguese as a port for recuperation, replenishing and re-�provisioning, which they usually visited on their homebound journey from trading (and conquering) in the East Indies. This Portuguese monopoly of use of the Island, however, ended during the last decade of the sixteenth century when other maritime nations, particularly Dutch and later English traders, became aware of and started frequenting the Island. The initial overlap period, constituting the first three decades of the seventeenth century when mostly the Dutch and Portuguese shared use of the Island, was cause for occasional hostile encounters between the two nations. Apparently, continued Dutch and English harassment of Portuguese (and Spanish) ships made visiting the Island untenable for the Portuguese who opted to avoid St. Helena and instead make use of a number of their other port �possessions� along the West African coastline to replenish and repair their ships.Item Cape-�Helena: An exploration of nostalgia and identity through the Cape Town -� St. Helena migration nexus(University of the Western Cape, 2018) Samuels, Damian; Hayes, PatriciaIn the following two chapters I will attempt to offer a more systemic account of St. Helena immigration to South African between 1838 and 1948. To date, no such study has been undertaken, despite a vibrant oral tradition amongst the descendants of St. Helena immigrants celebrating their St. Helenian heritage and often, in peculiar fashion, romanticise their Island of provenance. The commencement date for my chosen timeframe emerges from a need to authenticate rather tenuous historical accounts of St. Helena�s first mass emigration for the Cape of Good Hope in 1838. Where cases of migration are discussed, these are either incidences of large-�scale 41, often aided, migration and settlement, or of those St. Helena migrant workers initially employed under temporary contacts to work in South Africa, specifically within burgeoning industrial sectors of the late-�nineteenth or early-�twentieth century South Africa.Item Christianity, education and African nationalism: an intellectual biography of Z.K. Matthews (1901-1968)(University of the Western Cape, 2013) Nombila, Ayanda Wiseman; Bank, Andrew; Pillay, SurendrenMy study begins by looking at the ways in which ZK Matthews has been remembered. I raise questions about his legacy in the post-apartheid period, in relation to the limited ways in which he has been studied and in relation to the broader politics of memory. What follows this is an analysis of ZK�s political and educational writings, as a new way of thinking about his intellectual contributions to nationalist thought. Chapter one of this thesis will raise questions about the legacy and memory of ZK in the postapartheid moment. I analyze both the popular and the scholarly representations of ZK as have been attempted by people and organizations to remember him. The popular representations of ZK have been produced by the University of Fort Hare, through an exhibition of his life and legacy and an Annual Memorial Lectures. ZK we must recall, was once a student, a lecturer and Rector of the university. On the scholarly side there is only one existing attempt to produce an auto/biography, one by ZK himself and edited with memoirs by Monica Hunter Wilson. The name of the book is Freedom For My People published in 1981. I analyze the circumstances of the production of this book. And secondly I point out that the interest here was on the liberal-Christian view of ZK. It focused on ZK�s relationships with people of different kinds, his service at Fort Hare and the public society, and the ANC. I also provide an analysis of two seminar papers by Paul Rich (1994) and Cynthia Kros (1990), and one long essay by William Saayman (1996). All these studies so not attempt to produce a discourse on the nationalist thought of ZK, rather they focus on limited archival work and they rely on the ambit of liberalism and Christianity to understand ZK.Item Conserving spaces of memory and heritage: the complexities, challenges and politics of the stone wall project on bluestone quarry at Robben Island(University of the Western Cape, 2016) Lusaka, Mwayi Woyamba; Dhupelia-Mesthrie., UmaThis thesis is a critical study of a conservation project on restoration of a Stone Wall at Bluestone Quarry on Robben Island, a world heritage site. The Stone Wall was built by the ex-political prisoners, in the early 1960s, as part of their hard labour. The thesis mainly focuses on the contestations that arose during the twelve year period of the project (2002 to 2014) among the stakeholders that included the ex-political prisoners, the environmentalists, the heritage managers and South African Heritage Resource Agency. Central to this study was the question, when a restoration project of a significant heritage site is informed by oral history and memories how are the concerns of diverse range of interest groups addressed and resolved? The thesis is grounded in the theoretical frameworks of sites of memory, heritage and conservation. The study involved both archival research and oral history as its research methodologies. The thesis shows that during the restoration project of the Stone Wall, the proposed designs had impacts on authenticity and biodiversity of the site. The various stakeholders that were involved debated and sought ways to influence decisions in resolving these impacts. Where necessary compromises were made. The thesis argues that during the project, oral history and memory work, and by extension the ex-political prisoners, had a significant role in influencing some of the important decisions. Among other things, the thesis seeks to provide a critical understanding of issues of heritage and conservation management on sites that are of cultural/historical significance.Item The construction of public history and tourist destinations in Cape Town's townships: a study of routes, sites and heritage(University of the Western Cape, 2002) Dondolo, Luvuyo; Witt, Leslie; Rassool, Ciraj; Karp, Ivan; Kratz, Corinne; Dept. of History; Faculty of ArtsThis paper seeks to explore a number of issues in relation to tourism, particularly cultural tours, in Cape Town from the apartheid era to the new political dispensation in South Africa. Cultural tourism is not merely about commerial activities. It is an ideological framing of history of people, nature, and culture, a framing that has power to reshape culture and nature for its own needs. In the South African context, this can be seen from the early decades of the twentieth century, but for the purposes of this study it will focus from the 1950s onwards to the present political period. The dominant ideology and political conditions at a given time shape cultural tourism.Item The cox collection, the museums of Malawi and the politics of repatriation, 1892-2016(University of the Western Cape, 2016) Mtotha, Comfort Tamanda; Witz, LeslieA wide range of scholarly inquiries have engaged with how museums all over the world deal with societal issues and the way the public interacts with the museum as a space of transaction and knowledge production. In Malawi, only a small proportion of literature deals with the museums and their relationship to the wider understanding of the country's history and the question of nationalism. However, as modern museums are transforming and reconfiguring themselves in dealing with histories of collection and calls for repatriation of ethnographic objects and human remains from their European counterparts are being made, there is no scholarly work or a nuanced representation on these issues for the Museums of Malawi. This study engages with a biography of a collection to think about museums, nationalism and the politics of repatriation. This biography begins when this collection of objects was collected from the tea plantations of Malawi and how it metamorphosizes from souvenirs to artifacts of rarity and then to "national treasures." The life of the collection is analysed and understood through its multiple journeys from Malawi to Europe and then to the United States of America where it attains a new meaning in a museum before its return to Malawi for a nationalist cause.Item The everyday life and the missing: Silences, heroic narratives and exhumations.(University of Western Cape, 2020) Mendes, Ros�lia; Rousseau, Nicky; Moosage, RiedwaanThis mini-thesis draws on the biographical materials of activists; Zubeida Jaffer, Nokuthula Simelane and Siphiwo Mthimkulu in order to investigate their representation as South African Anti-Apartheid activists. Within Post-Apartheid South Africa there seems to be a strong tendency to focus on the spectacular violence that occurred between the National Party government and Apartheid activists. This almost singular focus has led to an overwhelming promotion of the heroic narrative and as a result the structural violence of daily life under apartheid has been side-linedItem Exhumations, reburials and history making in post-apartheid South Africa.(University of the Western Cape, 2018) Karating, Robin-lea; Witz, LeslieThis mini-thesis, �Exhumation, Reburial and History Making in South Africa�, is concerned with an analysis of the practices of exhumation and reburial through discussing the case studies of the Iron-Age archaeological site of Mapungubwe, the Vergelegen Wine Estate in Somerset West and the reburials carried out by the Missing Persons Task Team (MPPT) from the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), particularly its unsuccessful attempt at exhumations at the Stikland Cemetery, in an attempt to understand how they form part of the production of history. These case studies conceive of the times of the precolonial, slavery and apartheid, and are all linked temporally to an envisaged future through ideas of nation building and nationalism. As narratives produced through these exhumations and reburials, they contribute to the notion of making the post-apartheid by remaking history and reconstituting nation. Each of these case studies are significant as they in some way have been utilized in a manner that is relevant to us in the new democratic South Africa. This mini-thesis aims at rethinking the role of archaeologists, the exhumation and reburial processes, the construction of ethnicity, how the dead are used to construct narratives of struggle against apartheid and in general the implications each of these have on the re-making of history. It also thinks about what the practices of exhumation and reburial mean conceptually and how they relate to the concept of missingness, which I refer to as the process of making absence or invisibility. Thinking about exhumations and reburial in this way has allowed reflection on the purpose of the practices, in terms of who it�s for and how it�s perceived by the stakeholders involved in each case. Through dissecting each of these issues one may be able to trace how the remains to be reburied become missing. Therefore, the question of exhumation and reburial is essential in thinking about what it does for the human remains and how their identity is either shaped or lost. This thesis mainly argues that the remains in each of the case studies go through various phases of missingness and that their reburials and memorialization, or in the case of Stikland the spiritual repatriation, inscribes them further into narratives of the times that they emerged from.Item From homestead to roadside to gallery: The social life of late twentieth century and early twenty-first century Zulu ceramics(University of the Western Cape, 2018) Buss, Julia Louise; Bank, AndrewMy research considers the vessels of select women ceramists in and from rural KwaZulu-Natal and reflects on the changing contexts in which their work is utilized, consumed and displayed. The emphasis of my research is on the significance of ceramics in cultural practices and how this has changed or been maintained due to altered social and political circumstances and the changing dynamics of research. Additionally, when ceramic vessels are purchased by tourists, collectors and patrons they are subjected to a range of dialogues between maker and buyer. Finally, vessels may be selected to be displayed in exhibitions or held in collections of museums and galleries; once again, then they will be spoken about and they will speak to us on different terms. Each one of these movements in the life of a pot is reflected in the artist�s consideration of form, pattern, balance, shape, colour and symmetry of the vessels. Similarly, each one of these steps in the process engages with a different type of audience in a dynamic and significant way. I investigate how the authors of these vessels become involved in and negotiate a dialogue between themselves, their work and an exterior context that always projects its own voice about the artists and their work.Item From Volksmoeder to Igqira: Towards an intellectual biography of Dr Vera B�hrmann (1910-1998)(University of the Western Cape, 2020) Landman, Andre Louis; Bank, AndrewThis biography of Dr Vera B�hrmann is an intersectional and interdisciplinary investigation of an unusual Afrikaner woman who occupied several unusual places in South African society. Through rigorous archival research and a wide reading of English and Afrikaans secondary sources, I examine the mythology that has grown up around Dr B�hrmann and expose contradictions and inaccuracies inherent within these myths. I adopt a chronological approach but focus on certain key motifs. I dwell on her family background in order to demonstrate the depths of the Afrikaner nationalist tradition to which she was heir. I uncover the impact that physical anthropology had on her during her initial medical training at Wits and UCT in the 1930s. I highlight the intensity of her commitment to, and leadership roles in, the Ossewa-Brandwag and Dietse Kinderfonds, both extremist right-wing Afrikaner nationalist organisations. Vera�s marital crises reveal something of her �human� side but are an important component of her story because she reinvented herself following her divorce in the early 1950s, furthering her medical qualifications as well as training as a Jungian analyst. I investigate the various fields in which she worked following her return to South Africa in late 1959 but focus on her cross-cultural psychiatry research with a Xhosa igqira in the 1970s and 1980s since much of the mythology that surrounds her is based on publications that flowed from that research. I engage critically with her published works and associated archival records and present evidence which shows that the view that she underwent a �Damascus Road� experience with respect to her racial politics is unfounded. The racial politics of her ancestors and the ideology of the radical right-wing Ossewa-Brandwag remained with her throughout her life, despite attempts (by Vera and others) to camouflage it. In addition, I show that her use of Jungian depth psychology as a framework for cross-cultural psychiatry research contributed to the reification of apartheid racial politics. This study draws attention to the many pioneering achievements of this remarkable woman but argues that a more nuanced approach to her legacy is needed in light of the evidence of her persistent racial prejudice.Item The function of marked word order in Biblical Hebrew prose: An evaluation of existing theories in the light of 2 Kings.(University of the Western Cape, 1996) Jackson, Leolyn M.; Van der Merwe, C.H. J.This thesis .investigates the function of a topicalized constituent .in the narrative non-direct speech texts .in 2 Kings. Many traditional BH grammarians described the :function of a topicalized constituent as "emphasis". Recent BH grammarians pointed out that extralinguistic factors like the total communicative context should also be considered in the description of a function for a topicalized constituent. The shift from the structural to a more pragmatic approach is illustrated in this study. The pragmatic approach proved to be not only possible, but also advantageous to the study of function in BH. The aim of this study was to test the viability and results of the various theories and categories of the BH linguists. This study also researched whether their linguistic approaches are indeed an improvement on the descriptions as defined by the traditional grammarians. In other words, to see whether and in which way more recent studies of BH could aid the understanding of the function of a topicalized constituent in BH word order. The methodology utilized in this study is briefly outlined as follows: 1. This study examined the description of word order in terms of the traditional and more recent approaches. The categories used to describe the function of a topicalized constituent were our main focus. At the end we compiled a theoretical frame of reference that we regard as representative of modem attempts to acquire a more refined comprehension of BH word order. A theoretical linguistic framework was formulated which could be used in our description of a sentence in BH in 2 � Kings. This attempt could be described as eclectic because it used the diverse perceptions from the various linguistic approaches. Richter's theoretical linguistic framework (with its limitations) together with contributions of Van der Merwe, Buth and Gross were used as a basis for the description of the sentences. 3. Sentences were analysed systematically and holistically at the different levels of description, namely morphology, morphosyntax, sentence syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Because of the difficulty in defining semantics and with pragmatics still in disarray, this study defined some semantic-pragmatic concepts it worked with. 4. In the description of sentences we incorporated and tested the viability of the different categories of various grammarians. By carefully considering the context of each sentence, this study posed the question: which, if any; of the categories could adequately describe the semantic-pragmatic function of a topicalized constituent in 2 Kings.Item Gender politics and problems in Southern Africa: KwaZulu-Natal, Swaziland and Namibia in the post-colonial/apartheid era.(University of Western Cape, 1997) Mngomezulu, Bhekithemba Richard; Hayes, PatriciaThe study of gender is crucial for the achievement and sustainability of the democratic ethos in Southern Africa. The substantial�literature in this field attests� to this notion1 '. It could help us understand why certain gender stereotypes are viewed by societies as given.rat could also help us explain such problems as the unequal representation in most political structures, and the gendered labour system!. In addition, as the quotation a~ove suggests, the way we talk has gender connotations of which most people are unaware. Many males however, distance themselves from public debates on gender issues on the grounds that gender is about women.