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
'And I have been told that there is nothing fun about having sex while you are still in high school': Dominant discourses on women's sexual practices and desires in Life Orientation programmes at school
(University of the Free State, 2015) Shefer, Tamara; Ngabaza, Sisa
Young women's sexuality is a contested terrain in multiple ways in contemporary South Africa. A growing body of work in the context of HIV and gender-based violence illustrates how young women find it challenging to negotiate safe and equitable sexual relationships with men, and are often the victims of coercive sex, unwanted early pregnancies and HIV. On the other hand, young women's sexuality is also stigmatised and responded to in punitive terms in school or community contexts, as is evident in research on teenage pregnancy and parenting in schools. Within both these bodies of work, women's own narratives are missing, as well as their agency and a positive discourse on female sexuality. Female desires are absent in heteronormative practices and ideologies, as pointed out by feminist researchers internationally. A body of work on young women who parent at school has shown that a key component of the moralistic response to women's sexuality hinges on the way in which childhood, adolescence and adulthood are popularly understood, together with dominant notions of masculinity and femininity within heteronormative and middle-class notions of family. Such discourses are also salient in the responses and understandings of sexuality education in Life Orientation, particularly the way in which young women are represented. This paper draws from qualitative research conducted with teachers, school authorities and young people on sexuality education in the Life Orientation programme at schools in the Western and Eastern Cape. Key findings reiterate disciplinary responses to young women's sexuality, often framed within 'danger' and 'damage' discourses that foreground the denial of young women's sexual desire and practices within a framework of protection, regulation and discipline in order to avoid promised punishments of being sexually active.
Be a little careful: Women, violence, and performance in India
(Cambridge University Press, 2019) Arora, Swati
In this article Swati Arora analyzes a contemporary Indian feminist performance, Thoda Dhyaan Se (A Little Carefully, 2013), by framing it in the spatial ecosystem of the city of Delhi and exploring its engagement with feminist discourse and the national imaginary of India. It highlights the workings of the cultural economy of the city, which is defined by its spatial contours as well as the privileges of caste, class, sexuality, and ethnicity, and at the same time explores the heterogeneous nature of the country's feminist movement through an intersectional perspective. Swati Arora argues that the concerns raised by Thoda Dhyaan Se are limited to urban, middle-class, and upper-caste women and overlook the oppressive realities of women from non-urban, lower-class, and lower-caste backgrounds. With conversations around gender focused through campaigns like #MeToo and #TImesUp, it is important to contextualize the voices that are articulated and those that are excluded. Swati Arora is an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape.
�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.
Contestations of the meanings of love and gender in a university students' discussion
(UNISA Press, 2013) Ngabaza, Sisa; Daniels, Dominic; Franck, Olivia; Maluleke, Rhulani
Love is a fluid and complex concept that is difficult to define comprehensively. Its expressions, however, show that love is not only gendered but also influenced by one's social and economic positioning. Family upbringing, friends, race, culture and religion shape and constrain experiences of love. Third year students in a women's and gender studies class carried out a qualitative feminist study to explore how university students understood rights and responsibilities in romantic love. In a class of 127 students, each student conducted two semi-structured interviews with two university students of either sex. The findings were discussed in class through a panel discussion steered by five students. The students' findings revealed that contextualised relational power issues, economic factors and the role of sex had importance in the way romantic relationships were understood. This Briefing presents the discussion in which multiple issues are raised on the dynamics of love among some university students, as they strive to find the meaning of romantic love.
A conversation with Anne Phillips on multiculturalism
(Unisa Press, 2015) Phillips, Anne; Byrne, Deirdre; Gouws, Amanda; Lewis, Desiree; du Toit, Louise; Viljoen, Stella
During March 2015, Professor Anne Phillips of the London School of Economics was a visiting fellow at Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS). On 13 March a group of nine gender scholars from different disciplines held a one-day workshop to explore the notion of multiculturalism with her. At the end of the workshop it was suggested that Gender Questions should conduct an electronic interview with Professor Phillips and that the scholars who attended the workshop would write responses to the interview. What follows are the interview with Professor Phillips and responses from four of the gender scholars who attended: Professor Amanda Gouws (Political Science, Stellenbosch University) Professor Desiree Lewis (Women's and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape), Professor Louise du Toit (Philosophy, Stellenbosch University), and Dr Stella Viljoen (Fine Arts, Stellenbosch University). The other scholars who attended were Professor Shireen Hassim (Political Studies, University of the Witwatersrand), Professor Kopano Ratele (Unisa/Medical Research Council), Professor Cherryl Walker (Sociology, Stellenbosch University) and Dr Christi van der Westhuizen (HUMA, University of Cape Town).
Deconstructing the 'sugar daddy': A critical review of the constructions of men in intergenerational sexual relationships in South Africa
(Routledge, 2013) Shefer, Tamara; Strebel, Anna
Since a recent Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) prevalence study highlighted the relationship between intergenerational sex and risk of HIV infection, a range of studies in Southern Africa have documented the commonality of sexual relations between older men and young women. For the most part, these studies have focused on the material and status benefits for the young women, and on their vulnerability to HIV, violence and unwanted pregnancies, within the context of gender power inequalities to negotiate safe and equitable sex. In this Focus we review this literature and argue that there is a relative absence of focus on attempting to understand the older men's positions. We suggest the need for research that offers a more nuanced account of the complexities of men's performances of sexuality, which will move beyond depicting older men as inevitable perpetrators of unequal sexual relationships with younger women. In order to better understand and address the complexities of intergenerational sexual relationships, men's constructions of their sexuality and their gains and investments in such relationships require more critical analysis.
Editorial: reflections on men, masculinities and meaning in South Africa
(Psychology in Society, 2008) Shefer, Tamara; Bowman, Brett; Duncan, Norman
This special issue embodies a contribution to what we consider to be a critical academic and political debate on the contours and expressions of masculinities in South Africa and how these intersect with the lived realities of South Africans.
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.
Empowering young people in advocacy for transformation: A photovoice exploration of safe and unsafe spaces on a university campus
(UNISA, 2015) Ngabaza, Sisa; Bojarczuk, Erika; Masuku, Michelle Paidamwoyo; Roelfse, Rudolf
Globally and locally, research conducted with young people about safety on university campuses focuses primarily on risk and danger, particularly sexual danger. In this body of scholarship, the voices of young people are often elided. Our study intends to address both of these concerns, firstly by foregrounding the voices of students themselves through a photovoice method, and secondly by emphasising the ways in which safe and unsafe spaces are mediated by group and social identities. The aim of the study was to explore how students' perceptions of safe and unsafe places are mediated by group and social identities. A group of third-year students at an urban South African university used photovoice, a methodology that encourages participation and empowerment of young people in transforming their communities, to conduct a study identifying and photographing spaces they perceived safe and unsafe in and around campus. Narratives explained these photographs. The paper draws from this project, whose findings show that the construction of safety on campus is mediated by different factors of marginality within the student body including gender, class, citizenship and race among others. These findings are not only significant in raising concern about issues of safety on campus, but they also draw the attention of university stakeholders to these concerns, giving students a voice to be agents of transformation.
Experiences of mentorship with academic staff doctoral candidates at a South African university
(Taylor & Francis, 2016) Strebel, Anna; Shefer, Tamara
Given the growing emphasis on academic research output and the challenges encountered in expediting completion of doctoral studies especially, mentorship is increasingly being utilised as a capacity development strategy for supporting scholars to complete post-graduate studies. This article reports on a mentorship project aimed at academic staff enrolled for doctoral studies in a health sciences faculty at a South African university, based on reflections drawn from annual feedback from the mentees and the annual report of the mentor, as well as a focus group conducted with mentees by an independent researcher. Participants found the mentorship, with its combination of individual and group meetings, as well as regular residential writing retreats, to be extremely helpful. A number of key features that enable the mentorship process emerged, and issues relating to supervision and mentorship were highlighted, especially regarding power dynamics.
Exploring new media technologies among young South African women
(African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town, 2013) Lewis, Desiree; Tigist, Shewarega Hussen; van Vuuren, Monique
This article reflects on how the use of digitised communication and social media among young black South African women can be situated and assessed within the current context. The authors focus especially on nuanced explorations of �civic participation,� �empowerment� and �identity politics� in acknowledging the liberatory potential of young women�s use of information and communication technology (ICTs) and seeking to assess its effects in realistic ways. We therefore speculate about how the uses of ICTs can both open up new possibilities for activism and agency and reveal the difficult formation of what Nancy Fraser has called �subaltern counterpublics� (1992: 109�142) among socially marginalised young women.
'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.
Food shaming and race, and hungry translations
(Taylor & Francis, 2023) Lewis, Desiree
Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America by Psyche A. Williams-Forson (2022) and Hungry Translations: Relearning the World Through Radical Vulnerability by Richa Nagar (2019) deal with food and hunger in relation to the very different geo-political regions of North America and India. At the same time, they enter into dialogue with each other in exploring how socially situated bodies � othered in gendered, raced and neoliberal systems and discourses � navigate and resist oppressive food politics. As both authors also show, critical approaches to food politics should entail much more than attention to who gets to eat well, or why certain groups are able to waste food obscenely while most of the world�s population starves, cannot make informed and healthy food choices, or inhabits food deserts, those foodscapes of near-starvation created by the corporate food industry�s hunger for profits. As the authors show, exploring the politics of food, eating and hunger should focus also on the languages and attitudes surrounding how these are connected to radical struggles for human freedom. By focusing on the represented and imagined connections between human desires and experiences on one hand and food and hunger on the other, Williams-Forson and Nagar also encourage us to interrogate and re-imagine our relationships to both humans as well as nature and other living beings. These books� perspectives from different continents invite us to consider the trans-continental context of multiple subaltern struggles through the lens of food.
Gender, feminism and food studies
(Taylor & Francis, 2015) Lewis, Desiree
Policy research and scholarship on food has rapidly increased in recent decades. The attention to 'gender' within this work appears to signal important practical and academic efforts to mainstream gendered understandings of food consumption, distribution and production into expansive conceptualisations of human security. This article argues that the gender-related work on food has wide-ranging and often troubling political and theoretical foundations and implications. Often growing out of knowledge regimes for managing social crises and advancing neo-liberal solutions, much gender and food security work provides limited interventions into mainstream gender-blind work on the nexus of power struggles, food resources and globalisation. A careful analysis of knowledge production about gender and food is therefore crucial to understanding how and why feminist food studies often transcends and challenges dominant forms of scholarship and research on food security. This article's critical assessment of what food security studies in South Africa has entailed at the regional level and in global terms also focuses on the methodological and theoretical feminist interventions that can stimulate rigorous conceptual, research and practical attention to what has come to be understood as food sovereignty.
Gendering disability and disabling gender: Critical reflections on intersections of gender and disability
(UNISA Press, 2015) Mohamed, Kharnita; Shefer, Tamara
Discourses of normalcy are deeply imbricated in the construction of the social world and organise relations between persons, persons and the State, persons and institutions and intra-psychic relations. Conversely, discourses about pathology and the abnormal underpin the regulation and disciplining of subjectivities intersected with ideas about race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicities, nationalisms, and other identity vectors.
�Girls need to behave like girls you know�: the complexities of applying a gender justice goal within sexuality education in South African schools
(Taylor & Francis, 2016) Ngabaza, Sisa; Shefer, Tamara; Catriona, Ida Macleod
Sexuality education, as a component within the Life Orientation (LO) programme in South African schools, is intended to provide young people with knowledge and skills to make informed choices about their sexuality, their own health and that of others. Key to the programme are outcomes relating to power, power relations and gender. In this paper, we apply a critical gender lens to explore the ways in which the teaching of sexuality education engages with larger goals of gender justice. The paper draws from a number of ethnographic studies conducted at 12 South African schools. We focus here on the data collected from focus group discussions with learners, and semi-structured interviews with individual learners, principals and Life Orientation (LO) teachers. The paper highlights the complexities of having gender justice as a central goal of LO sexuality education. Teaching sexuality education is reported to contradict dominant community values and norms. Although some principals and school authorities support gender equity and problematize hegemonic masculinities, learners experience sexuality education as upholding normative gender roles and male power, rather than challenging it. Teachers rely heavily on cautionary messages that put more responsibility for reproductive health on female learners, and use didactic, authoritative pedagogical techniques, which do not acknowledge young people�s experience nor facilitate their sexual agency. These complexities need to be foregrounded and worked with systematically if the goal of gender justice within LO is to be realised.
Governmentality and South Africa�s edifice of gender and sexual rights
(SAGE, 2021) Lewis, D
Leading feminist scholars and activists have critiqued the current impact of South Africa�s provisions for gender equality and sexual rights. The country boasts one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, and its formal mechanisms for gender transformation and sexual citizenship are � at a global level � pathbreaking. At the same time, however, violence against women, gender non-conforming people and gays and lesbians or ongoing gender-based injustices in workplaces, educational institutions and many homes testify to the fact that such measures have not transformed ideological beliefs, institutional cultures and power relations in many public and domestic contexts. This article confronts the disjuncture between the formal provision of rights and actual practice, by analysing the effects of provisions devoid of transformative impact. It is argued that the country�s seemingly democratic arrangements for gender justice and sexual citizenship reproduce new forms of governmentality, biopolitics and biopower. By drawing on the work of Jasbir Puar, the article argues that South Africa�s imagining as a democratic state is based largely on its provision of rights around sexuality and gender, and in relation to peripheries that are �measured� by the absence of these. In the global imagining, gender equality and sexual citizenship currently serve as tropes for definitive freedoms and democracy. The recognition of gender equality and sexual citizenship ratifies a particular international understanding of �democracy�, one that is congruent with global neoliberal standards, and that actively reproduces the gendered, heteronormative, classist and racist status quo.
Greener on the other side: Tracing stories of amaranth and moringa through indenture
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023) Naidoo, Pralini
My research, with its focus on women and food seed through the lens of indenture, has led me into the world ofleafy green vegetables and their intimate connection to women who had been brought to South Africa to servicecolonial plantations. Leafy greens are currently buzzwords in thefitness, health, vegan, and vegetarianvocabulary. Occasionally, another leaf isdiscoveredby the doyens of fancy cuisine, researchers orexperts,elevating anunknowndark green leaf to superfood status. In the past few decades moringa and amaranthhave gained popularity in scientific and culinary circles. This sudden spurt of interest in a food that has been traditionally eaten for years in ex-indentured communities, among many others, has often elicited from this community, wry amusement, confusion at its celebrity status or pride at its recognition. Delving into research transcripts and fieldwork notes, I observe, not only, how these communities consume moringa and amaranth, but the variety of ways the human and other-than-human stories are entangled. I also consider the impact/benefits of the commodification of foods and seeds such as moringa and amaranth, on the many invisible people who have been propagating, consuming and storying the plant before its discovery.

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