Research Articles (Women & Gender Studies)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10566/8

Browse

Now showing 1 - 20 of 71

Masculinity, matrimony and generation: reconfiguring patriarchy in Drum 1951-1983
(Taylor & Francis, 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.
In conversation with Erin Manning: a refusal of neurotypicality through attunements to learning otherwise
(SAGE Publications Inc., 2024) Manning, Erin; Bozalek, Vivienne Grace
This paper documents a conversation with Erin Manning in the first webinar of the series doing academica differently: In conversation with neuroatypicality. Drawing on her scholarship, teaching experience, as well as the more recent 3ecologies project, Manning shows how systems serve to pathologize by framing difference from the angle of typicality and as a divergence from the norm. She argues, therefore, that it is necessary to move beyond the ontological presuppositions enacted by systems of whiteness/neurotypicality. She proposes that academic work must continue to remain open to the differential within difference, and value slow and convivial practices that texture qualities of existence as a mode rather than as gridded individual identities. By focusing on the crucial notion of value in higher education and how it might be reworked in experimental ways, Manning suggests ways of attuning for learning otherwise beyond a neurotypical frame
Doing academia differently: In conversation With neuroatypicality
(SAGE Publications Inc., 2024) Bozalek, Vivienne
This special issue originated from a webinar series made possible through a tri-continental (3C) partnership between the University of the Western Cape, the University of Missouri, and Ghent University. These universities organized a series of webinars on the theme “doing academia differently: In conversation with neuroatypicality.” The tri-continental (3C) partnership is a trilateral agreement that set out to promote partnership between the three institutions during a time of travel restrictions due to the global pandemic.
Affective oceanic seaswimming and encounters for care-full environmental communication
(Routledge, 2024) Shefer, Tamara; Bozalek, Vivienne; Romano, Nike
Our oceanic swimming practice began as part of the project of doing scholarship differently in contemporary South African post-apartheid contexts. Swimming-writing-reading not only enables different ways of doing inquiry but also prompts new ways of communicating environmental injustices as we face them in/with/through the ocean. We argue the value of this practice, and the writings we generate and share, for a rethinking and reframing of environmental communication through practices of care. “Slow swimming” in the ocean brings one into intimate, affecting encounters with the ocean and its multiplicities. Porous to fluid temporalities, oceanic swimming-writing-reading becomes a hauntological place-space-time-mattering practice of swimming as we become aware of sedimented crimes of slavery and colonization, and confront the ghosts of apartheid and colonial violence. As we meet disasters of present and future, polluted and violated seas, our affective relational watery encounters with more-than-human species sharpen our response-ability to and responsibility for anthropocentric damages to the ocean and planet. We suggest such practices of affective wit(h)nessing, relationality, and care as a productive resource for communicating current environmental challenges that are consequences of certain human hands, as well as our mutual entanglements and response-abilities on planet Earth.
Book symposium: men, masculinities and southern urbanism
(Routledge, 2025) Hearn, Jeff; Chowdhury, Romit; Matlon, Jordanna
This book symposium is a multilogue on four books Migrants and Masculinity in High-Rise Nairobi: The Pressure of Being a Man in an African City, by Mario Schmidt; City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport, by Romit Chowdhury; Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony, by Shannon Philip; and A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism, by Jordanna C. Matlon. The discussion, held between the four authors, along with Jeff Hearn and Kopano Ratele, addresses: the background to the books based in Kenya, India and Côte d’Ivoire respectively; main contributions around men, masculinities and urbanism; ethnography and other methodologies; relations to Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities, Feminist and Human Geography, and kindred disciplines, and ways forward.
‘This thing that we do’: in pursuit of hope-full renewals through hydrofeminist scholarly praxis
(Routledge, 2024) Bozalek, Vivienne; Osgood, Jayne
In this paper, we dwell amongst what was agitated from enacting Neimanis' (2012) hydrofeminism in an ‘aqueous-body–writing–reading’ experiment that unfolded in discrete but entangled locations (London and Cape Town) to actively disrupt and reformulate ideas about what it is to do scholarly work. We consider how we might dislodge anthropocentric ways of knowing, being and doing through our swimming–writing–reading. Aligned with emergent hydrofeminist scholarship, our unruly writing experiment has–over 7 months of alternating seasons on two continents–involved exchanging, diffracting and curating words that e/merge together. The multiple, interwoven stories told in this paper are a direct challenge to what and how knowledge gets produced, by whom, where and for what purposes. Working with wit(h)nessing; contact zones; and radical openness, our speculative, enmeshed, multispecies praxis offers glimpses into the possibilities that exist in porous spaces to generate knowledge differently in the spirit of hopeful renewal.
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.
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.
Parents resist sexuality education through digital activism
(SAGE Publications, 2022) Ngabaza, Sisa
South Africa has high rates of HIV infection among its young population, high rates of unintended pregnancy among the youth, and extremely high rates of gender-based violence. Given all this, it is essential that young people be taught skills that will enable them to manage their sexuality. Schools have been shown to be best placed to provide accurate and relevant information on young people�s sexualities. Through the Life Orientation (LO) curriculum, the Department of Basic Education (DBE) offers age-appropriate sexuality education as a response to these concerns. However, research in sexuality education shows that there is a lack of guidance and preparedness by educators, and this hampers how sexuality education is delivered in South African schools. A recent attempt by the DBE to upscale and strengthen the sexuality education curriculum in South African schools was met with resistance from parents and other lobby groups. This resistance was driven across many different media platforms, and particularly through an online hashtag #LeaveOurKidsAlone, largely on Facebook and Twitter. Through this resistance, we are introduced to parents/adult response to the teaching and learning of comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) in South African schools, a voice that has been missing to a great extent in this debate.
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.
Under construction: Toward a theory and praxis of queer peacebuilding
(Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, 2023) Ritholtz, Samuel; Serrano-Amaya, Jos� Fernando; Judge, Melanie
| This article explores what queer as a concept brings to peacebuilding, presenting a guiding framework and introduction for a special issue on queer peacebuilding. It offers an initial approach to the topic, which means to center queer and trans perspectives of peace and bring queer epistemologies to bear on how peace is constituted so as to rearticulate the concept both in theory and praxis. In doing so, it addresses an unexamined gap in peacebuilding efforts to achieve gender justice and inclusive security in conflict-affected societies, namely the unique experiences of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer) individuals and their collective efforts to achieve social justice in these contexts. The authors approach the topic of queer peacebuilding through three questions: What is queer peacebuilding?, �Why is queer peacebuilding important? and What can queer peacebuilding contribute? While the impacts of queer peacebuilding in sites of contentious politics around the globe are visible, it remains an emergent and somewhat elusive concept, still under construction within peace and security scholarship and practice.
Participatory relationships matter: Doctoral students traversing the academy
(SAGE Publications, 2022) Veronica, Mitchell; Gredley, Susan; Carette, Lieve
In this article, we take our thoughts for a walk through our three different doctoral journeys and experiences with the Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry Webinar Series (2020�2021). The webinars presented an example of Slow scholarship, enabling us to think deeply and differently from others and develop new ideas to take further. The online connections offered opportunities for extending learning spaces beyond traditional bounded structures. Here we explore the rich learning gained from each other�s experiences of research, learning, and teaching in different higher education settings and ways in which these intersected with the webinars during the global COVID-19 pandemic. We contend that the generosity of senior academics in leadership positions who embraced global networks of communication, connected students with experts, and learned with and from their students through communal egalitarian spaces has enormous potential to support students as they traverse often demanding and challenging doctoral journeys.
Obstetric violence within students� rite of passage: The reproduction of the obstetric subject and its racialised (m)other
(UNISA Press, 2021) van der Waal, Rodante; Mitchell, Veronica; Bozalek, Vivienne
Building on the work of Mbembe (2019) and Silva (2007), we theorise how the obstetric institution can still be considered fundamentally modern, that is, entangled with colonialism, slavery, bio- and necropolitics and patriarchal subjectivity. We argue that the modern obstetric subject (doctor or midwife) representing the obstetric institution engulfs the (m)other in a typically modern way as othered, racialised, affectable and outerdetermined, in order to constitute itself in terms of self-determination and universal reason. While Davis-Floyd (1987) described obstetric training as a rite of passage into a technocratic model of childbirth, we argue that students� rite of passage is not merely an initiation into a technological model of childbirth. The many instances of obstetric violence and racism in their training make a more fundamental problem visible, namely that students come of age within obstetrics through the violent appropriation of the (m)other. We amplify students� curricular encounters in two colonially related geopolitical spaces, South Africa and the Netherlands, and in two professions, obstetric medicine and midwifery, to highlight global systemic tendencies that push students to cross ethical, social and political boundaries towards the (m)other they are trained to care for. The embedment of obstetric violence in their rite of passage ensures the reproduction of the modern obstetric subject, the racialised (m)other, and institutionalised violence worldwide.
Touching matters: Affective entanglements in Corona time
(SAGE Publications, 2021) Bozalek, Vivienne; Newfield, Denise; Romano, Nike
This article troubles touch as requiring embodied proximity, through an affective account of virtual touch during coronatime. Interested in doing academia differently, we started an online Barad readingwriting group from different locations. The coronatime void was not a vacuum, but a plenitude of possibilities for intimacy, pedagogy, learning, creativity, and adventure. Although physically apart, we met daily through Zoom, and we touched and were touched by each other and the texts we read. A montage of writing fragments and a collective artwork, based on the Massive_Micro project, highlight virtual touching. Undone, redone, and reconfigured, we became a diffractive human/nonhuman multiplicity.
�I could have done everything and why not?�: Young women�s complex constructions of sexual agency in the context of sexualities education in Life Orientation in South African schools
(University of the Free State, 2015) Kruger, Lou-Marie; Shefer, Tamara; Oakes, Antoinette
Progressive policies protecting women�s rights to make reproductive decisions and the recent increase in literature exploring female sexual agency do not appear to have impacted on more equitable sexual relations in all contexts. In South Africa, gender power inequalities, intersecting with other forms of inequality in society, pose a challenge for young women�s control over their sexual and reproductive health. The article focuses on a group of young Coloured South African women�s understandings of their sexual agency, in an attempt to explore how it is explicitly and implicitly shaped by school Life Orientation (LO) sexuality programmes. We found young women constructed their agency as simultaneously enabled and constrained in complex ways: on the one hand, the explicit communication was that they should have agency and take responsibility for themselves sexually, whereas the implicit communication seemed to convey that what they really thought and felt about sex and sexuality was not important.
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.
Men, masculinities, peace, and violence: A multi-level overview on justice and conflict
(Routledge, 2021) Shefer, Tamara; Hearn, J; Ratele, K
The relations between men, masculinities and violence, peace, justice, and conflict are of clear importance, yet often remain unaddressed explicitly in analysis, policy, and practice. This chapter overviews the large body of feminist and critical literature on these multi-level connections. Violence, non-violence, peace, justice, conflict, and post-conflict are approached through the lens of Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities (CSMM), and in terms of theory, politics, policy, and practice. The chapter begins with an overview of CSMM as a body of scholarship informing theory, policy and practice interventions around violence, peace, justice, and conflict at interpersonal, communal, institutional, national, and transnational levels. The authors continue with an analysis of key contributions of CSMM in understanding the challenges and possibilities of peaceful, non-violent masculinities within different levels, while acknowledging intersections and overlaps between levels. It is contended that CSMM provide necessary hope and evidence that positive peace is achievable through the transformation toward more healthy, non-violent masculinities and gender relations.
Students� narratives on gender and sexuality in the project of social justice and belonging in higher education
(South African Journal of Higher Education, 2018) Ngabaza, Sisa; Shefer, Tamara; Clowes, Lindsay
Student protests in South Africa flag the well-documented lack of progress in transforming universities which mirror deeply entrenched inequalities. The imperative to challenge a system of higher education that continues to rationalise and reproduce injustice is even more keenly felt. Efforts to understand the lived experiences of young people within diverse higher educational contexts are arguably especially important in this context. This paper draws on research with students at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) who engaged in a participatory photovoice research project in a feminist research methodology module. Students were asked to take photos on and around campus that represented un/safe spaces for them and to write short narratives on these. The paper unpacks key emerging themes that speak to how gender, intersecting with sexuality, informs experiences of belonging, while arguing the value of student voice in the project of social justice in higher education.
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.
�We don't really see a problem in music because that s**t makes you want to dance�: Reflections on possibilities and challenges of teaching gender through hip-hop
(Taylor and Francis, 2018) Hussen, Tigist Shewarega; Ngabaza, Sisa
Hip-hop culture has been criticised as sexist and misogynist. It is also condemned for being exploitative of black women�s identity and for perpetuating gendered and sexualised assumptions about female musicians. This perspective explores pedagogical possibilities and challenges of using popular culture, such as hip-hop music performances, in a gender studies course. We critically reflect on our experiences of working with second-year students exploring gender performances in music. We encouraged students to analyse music of their own choice within the hip-hop genre, interrogating gender performances beyond simplistic good/bad or right/wrong body and sexual conduct. Data collected in online chat rooms on the teaching and learning platforms show students� enthusiasm in engaging with hip-hop as subject matter. However, in their analysis quite often students struggled to move away from the dominant narrative of hip-hop as sexist and misogynist, their critique focusing on the exaggerated femininity and hypersexuality of female hip-hop artists. Students struggled to critically explore other counter-narratives and counter-representations of the performances. We reflect on the possibilities and challenges of using hip-hop as subject matter in feminist pedagogy.

Browse

Recent Submissions