Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics
Do not hear what others say-/that we are sad creatures/clad in uniforms of loss:/ blue skirts tha... more Do not hear what others say-/that we are sad creatures/clad in uniforms of loss:/ blue skirts that bruise/the heels of those who are living/but are dead. We live, we live 'Spoken, a message home', Yvette Christiansë (2009: 29) Our debt to those who are already dead and those not yet born cannot be disentangled from who we are (Karen Barad, 2010: 266) BEGINNING WITH THE AMPERSAND & alive&kicking, dead&gone, dolce&gabbana, brandy&coke, night&day, down&out. What intrigues is the way in which the sign's loop denies conjuncture; there is no possibility that the ends will meet. A powerful termnonetheless-this and is deployed consciously as yoke or hypothesis, or more usually, unthinkingly as a sloppy compound or conventional assumption: mr&mrs, mother&child. As someone who is sceptical of assumptions, and wary (like a nervous pony edging through acacia trees) of words, I tend to shy away from easy efforts to conjoin concepts with entities, to want examination of the political work done by an 'and', a 'but', an 'or'. As early as 1988, Elizabeth Spelman, a feminist philosopher, writes of 'the ampersand problem in feminist thought' (Spelman, 1988: 1). She explores some contemporary (white) US-based feminist debates' tendency to engage the challenges of 'gender and race' by using the 'and' to slough off the material and socio-cultural influences of racism in the lives of black women. The ampersand, she argues, allows white feminisms to imagine dynamics of exploitative 'gendering' potentially unlinked to 'race' (where there is an ampersand, there sits-semioticallypermission to disconnect), and in the process to disappear the meaning of black women's historical and contemporary lives in feminist work (Spelman, 1988). Spelman is surrounded, in this moment, by many other women of colour theorists in the North, simultaneously critiquing the discourses swiftly becoming known as 'second-wave feminism,' an appellation from its outset
This article draws on qualitative data from observations, interviews, and focus-group discussions... more This article draws on qualitative data from observations, interviews, and focus-group discussions at seven secondary schools in the Wakiso district of the central region of Uganda. It shows that constructions of gender within the school environment include both overt and covert discourses on the interaction of sexual and gendered identities and behaviors that create a climate in which students are constructed simultaneously as "learners free of gendered and sexual identities" and as "girls/boys" deeply embedded within heterosexual trajectories. The study reveals a hierarchically ordered range of masculinities and femininities that constitute the students' informal world (that is, an unregulated space for students' natural, relaxed, casual, and informal gatherings) with activities organized around gendered notions of sexuality. Within this world, sexuality becomes a domain of control causing complex tensions and contradictions that are often reflected in the ubiquitous "sexualization" and "desexualization" of school events. Students interact through gendered sexual expectations and power imbalances, negotiating the lack of female sexual autonomy, compulsory heterosexuality, and the norms that locate girls as objects of male sexual desires. The article concludes that complex gendered sexual experiences position boys and girls differently, often causing gender inequalities reflected in girls' limited participation in schooling.
Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself, to qu... more Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be brainwashed, bringing me to this time when I can set down this story. It was a long and painful process for me, that process of expansion. It was a process whose events stretched over many years and would fill another volume, but the story I have told here, is my own story, the story of four women whom I loved, and our men, this story is how it all began.
The country we want to live in: Hate crimes and homophobia in the lives of black lesbian South Af... more The country we want to live in: Hate crimes and homophobia in the lives of black lesbian South Africans offers a refreshing perspective on violence perpetrated against black lesbians. Based on a Roundtable seminar, held during the 2006 16 Days of Activism for no Violence ...
From mid-2005 to 2006, the African Gender Institute (AGI) carried out a project which allowed res... more From mid-2005 to 2006, the African Gender Institute (AGI) carried out a project which allowed research teams in three Southern African universities to explore the effectiveness of official campus policies on sexual harassment in the complex climates of diversity, discrimination and opportunity that characterise contemporary higher education institutions. The three campuses involved comprised one where the initiation of a sexual harassment policy occurred in the early 1990s (the University of the Western Cape), and two with relatively new policies (the University of Botswana and the University of Stellenbosch).2 This article discusses aspects of the background to the research project, and explores critical findings from the research. We argue that while there is little evidence that policies on sexual harassment in Southern African higher education have been integrated into campus-based discourses on citizenship or democracy, this could be read as complex commentary on the location o...
Researchers such as Hoad (2007), Ndashe (2010), Swarr (2012) and Matebeni (2014) have raised crit... more Researchers such as Hoad (2007), Ndashe (2010), Swarr (2012) and Matebeni (2014) have raised critical questions about the discursive and material positions through which 'South Africa', as a nation, negotiates a continental context of legal, economic, and social violences against diversely identified lesbian, gay, and transgendered people. This article seeks a critical exploration of some of these debates and positionings, in order to deepen conversation on how South African legal and political activism can, or should, engage the realities of blatant efforts to recriminalise l, g, and t knowledges, bodies, lives and relationships. The article includes a brief review of current legal battles in Uganda and Botswana in particular, and engages questions of South Africans' access to information and to political engagement with these battles and their implications. It concludes with an argument for national revisioning of ourselves as simply 'separate' and/or 'privileged', and calls for renewed strategic activism capable of pan-African perspectives.
Between the early and mid-1990s in South Africa, focused attention on the urgent need to transfor... more Between the early and mid-1990s in South Africa, focused attention on the urgent need to transform the institutional cultures of universities and (then) technikons included a strong activist and feminist commitment to addressing gender injustices on campus. Sexual harassment was a target of much research and policy-making, and new networks across SADC were formed to combat the mix of sexism, racism and classism embedded in multiple forms of campus-located sexual violence and sexual harassment. This article argues that the climate of higher institutional commitment to this realm of institutional transformation has become muted. It draws on research and a short case study involving a complaint of rape at the University of Cape Town in 2008 to suggest that feminist activism in South Africa needs once more to theorise and challenge overt and covert forms of sexual violence facing higher education communities.
This paper explores arguments for and against same-sex marriage as 'movement advocacy' in the USA... more This paper explores arguments for and against same-sex marriage as 'movement advocacy' in the USA as a backdrop to the proposition that, despite the influence of US discourses on South African debates about same-sex marriage, US discussions are less important to understanding South African responses than controversies about marriage itself in the country. The paper works in two sections. First it sketches legal and critical tensions within the USA around the implications of same-sex marriage activism, drawing on work from Franke, Brandzel, Grossman, Puar and others. Second, it notes arguments on queer homonationalisms, made most forcefully by Puar, concerning the effects and interests of 'exporting' US legal ideals to countries elsewhere, especially poorer countries. It then moves to offer suggestions for ways of nuancing this argument through stronger critical attention to context concerning radically shifting notions of marriage within those countries themselves, using South Africa as a case study. This section draws on recent work by Judge, van Zyl, Scott, Mkhize and Adebayo and Nyameza, among others.
'My faculty colleagues have urged me not to give the voices of racism '... more 'My faculty colleagues have urged me not to give the voices of racism 'so much power'. Laughter is the way to disempower the forces of evil, I am told. But is it the racism I am disempowering if I laugh?l (Patricia Williams, 1991:167) There can be only one justification for the ...
JANE BENNETT offers her thoughts on the implications of ‘hearing’ the prevalence of gender-based ... more JANE BENNETT offers her thoughts on the implications of ‘hearing’ the prevalence of gender-based violence in African contexts
This essay challenges the (Weberian) thesis that the modern world is a `disenchanted' one. I... more This essay challenges the (Weberian) thesis that the modern world is a `disenchanted' one. I contend that enchantment has outlasted the Enlightenment; that it endures despite the demise of the ontology that allowed it paradigmatic expression in the sixteenth century writings of ...
In May 2008, the Western Cape province of South Africa was shaken by waves of violence specifical... more In May 2008, the Western Cape province of South Africa was shaken by waves of violence specifically targeted at ‘foreigners’. Many were driven from their homes and sought refuge in diverse locations. One small group of women and their young children were housed at the Saartjie Baartman Women's Centre (SBWC), in Manenberg, Cape Town, a ‘onestop’ partnership of NGOs committed
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics
Do not hear what others say-/that we are sad creatures/clad in uniforms of loss:/ blue skirts tha... more Do not hear what others say-/that we are sad creatures/clad in uniforms of loss:/ blue skirts that bruise/the heels of those who are living/but are dead. We live, we live 'Spoken, a message home', Yvette Christiansë (2009: 29) Our debt to those who are already dead and those not yet born cannot be disentangled from who we are (Karen Barad, 2010: 266) BEGINNING WITH THE AMPERSAND & alive&kicking, dead&gone, dolce&gabbana, brandy&coke, night&day, down&out. What intrigues is the way in which the sign's loop denies conjuncture; there is no possibility that the ends will meet. A powerful termnonetheless-this and is deployed consciously as yoke or hypothesis, or more usually, unthinkingly as a sloppy compound or conventional assumption: mr&mrs, mother&child. As someone who is sceptical of assumptions, and wary (like a nervous pony edging through acacia trees) of words, I tend to shy away from easy efforts to conjoin concepts with entities, to want examination of the political work done by an 'and', a 'but', an 'or'. As early as 1988, Elizabeth Spelman, a feminist philosopher, writes of 'the ampersand problem in feminist thought' (Spelman, 1988: 1). She explores some contemporary (white) US-based feminist debates' tendency to engage the challenges of 'gender and race' by using the 'and' to slough off the material and socio-cultural influences of racism in the lives of black women. The ampersand, she argues, allows white feminisms to imagine dynamics of exploitative 'gendering' potentially unlinked to 'race' (where there is an ampersand, there sits-semioticallypermission to disconnect), and in the process to disappear the meaning of black women's historical and contemporary lives in feminist work (Spelman, 1988). Spelman is surrounded, in this moment, by many other women of colour theorists in the North, simultaneously critiquing the discourses swiftly becoming known as 'second-wave feminism,' an appellation from its outset
This article draws on qualitative data from observations, interviews, and focus-group discussions... more This article draws on qualitative data from observations, interviews, and focus-group discussions at seven secondary schools in the Wakiso district of the central region of Uganda. It shows that constructions of gender within the school environment include both overt and covert discourses on the interaction of sexual and gendered identities and behaviors that create a climate in which students are constructed simultaneously as "learners free of gendered and sexual identities" and as "girls/boys" deeply embedded within heterosexual trajectories. The study reveals a hierarchically ordered range of masculinities and femininities that constitute the students' informal world (that is, an unregulated space for students' natural, relaxed, casual, and informal gatherings) with activities organized around gendered notions of sexuality. Within this world, sexuality becomes a domain of control causing complex tensions and contradictions that are often reflected in the ubiquitous "sexualization" and "desexualization" of school events. Students interact through gendered sexual expectations and power imbalances, negotiating the lack of female sexual autonomy, compulsory heterosexuality, and the norms that locate girls as objects of male sexual desires. The article concludes that complex gendered sexual experiences position boys and girls differently, often causing gender inequalities reflected in girls' limited participation in schooling.
Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself, to qu... more Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be brainwashed, bringing me to this time when I can set down this story. It was a long and painful process for me, that process of expansion. It was a process whose events stretched over many years and would fill another volume, but the story I have told here, is my own story, the story of four women whom I loved, and our men, this story is how it all began.
The country we want to live in: Hate crimes and homophobia in the lives of black lesbian South Af... more The country we want to live in: Hate crimes and homophobia in the lives of black lesbian South Africans offers a refreshing perspective on violence perpetrated against black lesbians. Based on a Roundtable seminar, held during the 2006 16 Days of Activism for no Violence ...
From mid-2005 to 2006, the African Gender Institute (AGI) carried out a project which allowed res... more From mid-2005 to 2006, the African Gender Institute (AGI) carried out a project which allowed research teams in three Southern African universities to explore the effectiveness of official campus policies on sexual harassment in the complex climates of diversity, discrimination and opportunity that characterise contemporary higher education institutions. The three campuses involved comprised one where the initiation of a sexual harassment policy occurred in the early 1990s (the University of the Western Cape), and two with relatively new policies (the University of Botswana and the University of Stellenbosch).2 This article discusses aspects of the background to the research project, and explores critical findings from the research. We argue that while there is little evidence that policies on sexual harassment in Southern African higher education have been integrated into campus-based discourses on citizenship or democracy, this could be read as complex commentary on the location o...
Researchers such as Hoad (2007), Ndashe (2010), Swarr (2012) and Matebeni (2014) have raised crit... more Researchers such as Hoad (2007), Ndashe (2010), Swarr (2012) and Matebeni (2014) have raised critical questions about the discursive and material positions through which 'South Africa', as a nation, negotiates a continental context of legal, economic, and social violences against diversely identified lesbian, gay, and transgendered people. This article seeks a critical exploration of some of these debates and positionings, in order to deepen conversation on how South African legal and political activism can, or should, engage the realities of blatant efforts to recriminalise l, g, and t knowledges, bodies, lives and relationships. The article includes a brief review of current legal battles in Uganda and Botswana in particular, and engages questions of South Africans' access to information and to political engagement with these battles and their implications. It concludes with an argument for national revisioning of ourselves as simply 'separate' and/or 'privileged', and calls for renewed strategic activism capable of pan-African perspectives.
Between the early and mid-1990s in South Africa, focused attention on the urgent need to transfor... more Between the early and mid-1990s in South Africa, focused attention on the urgent need to transform the institutional cultures of universities and (then) technikons included a strong activist and feminist commitment to addressing gender injustices on campus. Sexual harassment was a target of much research and policy-making, and new networks across SADC were formed to combat the mix of sexism, racism and classism embedded in multiple forms of campus-located sexual violence and sexual harassment. This article argues that the climate of higher institutional commitment to this realm of institutional transformation has become muted. It draws on research and a short case study involving a complaint of rape at the University of Cape Town in 2008 to suggest that feminist activism in South Africa needs once more to theorise and challenge overt and covert forms of sexual violence facing higher education communities.
This paper explores arguments for and against same-sex marriage as 'movement advocacy' in the USA... more This paper explores arguments for and against same-sex marriage as 'movement advocacy' in the USA as a backdrop to the proposition that, despite the influence of US discourses on South African debates about same-sex marriage, US discussions are less important to understanding South African responses than controversies about marriage itself in the country. The paper works in two sections. First it sketches legal and critical tensions within the USA around the implications of same-sex marriage activism, drawing on work from Franke, Brandzel, Grossman, Puar and others. Second, it notes arguments on queer homonationalisms, made most forcefully by Puar, concerning the effects and interests of 'exporting' US legal ideals to countries elsewhere, especially poorer countries. It then moves to offer suggestions for ways of nuancing this argument through stronger critical attention to context concerning radically shifting notions of marriage within those countries themselves, using South Africa as a case study. This section draws on recent work by Judge, van Zyl, Scott, Mkhize and Adebayo and Nyameza, among others.
'My faculty colleagues have urged me not to give the voices of racism '... more 'My faculty colleagues have urged me not to give the voices of racism 'so much power'. Laughter is the way to disempower the forces of evil, I am told. But is it the racism I am disempowering if I laugh?l (Patricia Williams, 1991:167) There can be only one justification for the ...
JANE BENNETT offers her thoughts on the implications of ‘hearing’ the prevalence of gender-based ... more JANE BENNETT offers her thoughts on the implications of ‘hearing’ the prevalence of gender-based violence in African contexts
This essay challenges the (Weberian) thesis that the modern world is a `disenchanted' one. I... more This essay challenges the (Weberian) thesis that the modern world is a `disenchanted' one. I contend that enchantment has outlasted the Enlightenment; that it endures despite the demise of the ontology that allowed it paradigmatic expression in the sixteenth century writings of ...
In May 2008, the Western Cape province of South Africa was shaken by waves of violence specifical... more In May 2008, the Western Cape province of South Africa was shaken by waves of violence specifically targeted at ‘foreigners’. Many were driven from their homes and sought refuge in diverse locations. One small group of women and their young children were housed at the Saartjie Baartman Women's Centre (SBWC), in Manenberg, Cape Town, a ‘onestop’ partnership of NGOs committed
Uploads
Papers by jane bennett