Feminist Knowledge | Review Essay: GWS in South Africa

Gender Studies and Research from the Mid Nineties

1994, the year of South Africa's first democratic election, and the democratisation that went with it, signalled a watershed moment in the South Africa academy and scholarship. While progressive research, including gender research, continued despite apartheid restrictions at liberal universities such as UCT, Wits and Rhodes as well as black universities like the University of Durban Westville (UDW) and UWC during the eighties, 1994 marked a stage when the state and state-recognised sectors within civil society vindicated and even gave direction to progressive research and teaching trends in universities. This created a new mood around gender research, new patterns of funding and support for it, and also a new public awareness of its relevance to emerging national agendas for democratisation. One effect of this galvanising of governmental support behind and national interest in gender has been a trend towards technocratic and functionalist developmentalism. This has been buttressed by the shift towards market-driven and career-oriented teaching in South African higher educational institutions. But another trend was the ethos of optimism and support it ushered in around gender.

Numerous women's and gender studies units offering postgraduate programmes in gender studies were launched. Among these were:
· the University of Natal's Gender Studies Centre, started in 1995,
· the University of Cape Town's African Gender Institute (established in 1996),
· the University of Pretoria's Centre for Gender Sudies (formed in 1995),
· UNISA's Institute for Gender Studies (established in 1996 as the reconstituted Centre for Women's Studies),
· the University of the Western Cape's Women's and Gender Studies Programme, established in 1995, and
· the University of Venda's Gender Studies Centre, operating as a gender equity unit from 1996 and launching its programme two years later.

The climate of institutionalising gender research encouraged further exploration and variety within gender research. Teachers and researchers grew increasingly less concerned with asserting the importance of feminism in the academy or making women visible in research and writing, and progressively more interested in using feminist analysis or gender theory to equip students with applied or analytical skills.

The mid-nineties therefore ushered in a phase of consolidation and strengthening for women's and gender studies and also led many scholars to connect gender work to other fields. In other words, there was a growing interest in using feminist politics and gender analysis in ways that avoided an atomistic focus on "women's issues".

This development has in some circles led to a growing emphasis on mainstreaming gender and counteracting what many see as the ghettoisation of early feminist paradigms. In history, for example, the work of certain scholars shows that the emphasis on "putting women into history" popular during the seventies is no longer viable, and that feminist interventions need to realign understandings of androcentric history by demonstrating clearly how all social and historical processes are gendered. From this perspective, gender is not one among many approaches to history, but necessary to understanding all historical processes (see essays on South Africa collected in Hunt, 1997).

Again, a conference which marked this shift towards mainstreaming gender was the Gender and Colonialism Conference hosted at the University of the Western Cape in 1997. Many papers dealt with such subjects as gender and nationalism, gender discourses in relation to race, class and region in shaping subjectivity and consciousness; issues of representation and stereotyping shaped by gender discourses in concert with other processes of othering. Overall, the conference highlighted the message that gender research was not mainly about making women visible in male preserves, but about making gender central to a range of political and intellectual debates. In their introduction to the pending publication based on conference papers, Wendy Woodward, Gary Minkley and Patricia Hayes captured this focus on connections and fluid identities: "The conference and this book set a precedent by juxtaposing gender with colonialism, a new conjuncture of categories with which to revisit old questions…The invitation to conference presenters was to scrutinise the ways in which gender was constituted and mediated in relation to other aspects of identity and difference in southern Africa. By 'identity' and 'difference', though, we in this introduction are not suggesting static entities or rigid categorical groupings, but rather processes of identification and differentiation." (1999:2)

There are, as Paul Zeleza (1996) has noted in relation to historiography, problems with approaches that simply urge mainstreaming in opposition to (what is perceived to be) a passé emphasis on the compensatory writing of women into canons. Distinct institutional needs can in certain circumstances make a focus on women's neglected roles and activity important and strategic. Moreover, the danger of mainstreaming is always that the specific political focus on gender politics can be drowned out; mainstreaming can raise the problem of analytical and theoretical dexterity to the detriment of highlighting the oppression, injustices and hierarchies that affect women most. Generally, however, growing attention in South Africa to the ways in which gender is written into various processes has generated an important new mood in gender research. It has, for example, led to a more complex understanding of social identities, with discussion of the various contexts and social circumstances that shape different feminine and masculine identities becoming increasingly detailed and complex.

Currently, the following growth areas in South African gender research warrant special mention:

Women, the Law and Politics
Important work has been done in response to major changes in national representation since 1994. With the South African constitution guarding against discrimination against women in politics, and many political parties instituting affirmative action mechanisms for women, many gender activists and researchers have questioned the deeply entrenched masculine institutional cultures and the ambivalences of women's representation, instead of advocating the straightforward need to incorporate women into government. The visibility of women in the state apparatus has led scholars like Amanda Gouws (1996) to assess the extent to which women as role players in the state can meaningfully advance the agendas of progressive women's movements.

Important work has also been done on local government, with many commentators dealing critically with the under-representation of women in local, as opposed to national government and arguing that it is at the level of local government that the most important gender equity changes are likely to develop (see Agenda, no 26, 1995).

Another important growth area in recent years has been the subject of citizenship, where there has been general and broad discussion about the need to explore women's political participation beyond electoral rights. As has been the case with discussions of women's involvement in politics, emphasis has been placed on the ways in which electoral processes inscribe gender biases, with women rarely having the rights, implied by formal legislation, to vote. In 1999, Agenda's special issue on citizenship (number 40) offered a forum for a range of contributions on the subject of the gap between women's formal and de facto rights. These sobering appraisals of the substantive political gains made by women a few years after the first democratic election have placed in judicious perspective South Africa's much-lauded progress in terms of women's rights.

Gender and Economics
Although earlier work on women and labour tended to focus on microeconomics and women's work, recent years have demonstrated a shift towards macroeconomics. To a large extent, this is a function of the fact that all South African women are now legally full citizens with (nominally) equal rights to key socio-economic institutions and structures. An emphasis on gender in the mainstream economy is signalled in the Women's Budget, which has entailed government's agreement to acknowledge gender inequities through the Finance Ministry. This mainstreaming of gender has meant that each department and ministry needs to address the implications of its budgets and programmes on the quality of life of women. The emphasis on gender analysis at the level of government's macroeconomic frameworks has helped to create a research and policy-making climate in which gender is recognised as a pivotal and integral component of macroeconomics. This is clearly registered in a study like Debbie Budlender's "The Political Economy of Women's Budgets in the South" (2000).

Anthropology, Sociology and History
As disciplines that have had a distinctively colonialist and masculinist legacy in South Africa, anthropology, history, and to a lesser extent, sociology have undergone a number of important shifts - both in terms of theoretical approaches and subject-matter. These disciplines initiated much of the progressive work focusing on black women that mushroomed between the seventies and the eighties. More recently, work on women and gender in these fields has revolved on efforts to make gender analysis integral to understanding a range of past and present social practices. Some subjects covered are the gendering of spaces and roles for women and men from the early 1900s (for example, work by Heike Becker, 2000 and Patricia Hayes, 1998); gendered identities, rituals and roles in rural societies (Ann Mager, 1999); the connections between gender, war and nationalism (Helen Bradford and Jacklyn Cock, 1996) and cultural processes in urban contexts (Elaine Salo).

Gender-based Violence
Writing in 1997, Sheila Meintjes observed that "Perhaps the most hopeful sign for the struggle against women's oppression lies not in pre-exiting women's organisations, but in the emergence of a network of organisations linked together by a shared concern for the prevalence of violence against women" (1997:16). Meintjes' reflections are certainly confirmed when we review the proliferation of organisations in this field. These include the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation Gender Unit, the Gender Advocacy Programme, National Network on Violence Against Women, Nisaa Institute for Women's Development, People Opposing Women Abuse (POWA), Rape Crisis, Unifem Trust Fund in Support of Actions to Eliminate Violence Against Women, Western Cape Network on Violence Against Women and the Gender-Based Violence in Education Programme, which is run by the African Gender Institute at UCT. Most of these have published abundant, accessible resources. Especially, in-depth analytical work has been produced by researchers like Jane Bennett (2000; 2001), Lisa Vetten (1998) and Vogelman (1991).

Education and Information and Communication Techologies (ICTs)
Many African governments focused on both racial and gender imbalances in the educational policy-making that followed decolonisation (see, for example, Aisse-Lumumba's "Educating Africa's Girls and Women: A Conceptual and Historical Analysis of Gender Inequality" (1997). In implementing democratic transformation after 1994, the South African government has also concentrated on redressing gender inequalities in primary and higher education. As has been the case elsewhere in Africa, however, formal recommendations and rhetoric have not always led to meaningful changes, with much recent work on gender in education highlighting gaps between official practice and policy-making and the actual experiences of women and girls in educational institutions and decision-making about education. In "State and Bureaucracy: Symbolic Access?" (1999), for example, Linda Chisholm and Vernet Napo explore the gap between policy and practice by concentrating on especially obvious evidence of enduring gender hierarchies in schools: gender-based violence.

What distinguishes South African findings about the contradictions between policy-making and practice from those made about the rest of Africa is that the South African government has set in place especially numerous and wide-ranging mechanisms for addressing gender inequalities in education. Apart from legislation like the Constitution and an Employment Equity Act, these have included structures like a Gender Management System, the Office of the Status of Women, the Commission on Gender Equality and the Women's Budget Initiative. Recent research has therefore developed especially acute critical analysis of high-profile machinery and initiatives. This ranges from reports like Wolpe, Quinlan and Martinez's report, Gender Equity in South Africa: Report of the Gender Equity Task Team (1997), to incisive articles like Melanie Samson's "Training for Transformation" (1999). These have contested the assumption that women's access to education and training will automatically empower them in the broader society. They have demonstrated that gender hierarchies are cross-cutting, that they cannot be resolved in piecemeal ways, and that changes in education are inextricable linked to broader social transformation.

In addition to gender initiatives in formal education, South Africa exhibits a wealth of gender training ventures at the level of informal education. Systematic research into this area has been relatively rare, however. As Shirley Walters observes, it has tended to take the form of handbooks, manuals, summaries of workshop designs and exercises or reports for funders (1996).

Because of its technological and economic advantages in comparison with other African countries, South Africa also exhibits a rapid growth in the area of ICTs, shaped by gender awareness. The most prominent South African venture in this field to date is Womensnet, formerly a project of Sangonet, but now functioning as an independent network. Womensnet has been key in making public networks, sources, resources and funding opportunities that are broadly related to gender in South Africa. Its main focus is on practical and advocacy-related fields, though it offers invaluable links to many research and academic projects. Publications on recent South African feminist ICT ventures and their political and intellectual implications for South Africa have been undertaken by, amongst others, Anne Tothill and Jennifer Radloff (1995; 1998).

Masculinities
Critics like Vogelman (1990), Campbell (1995, 2001) and Ratele (2001) have undertaken important work on this subject, exploring the "crisis of masculinity" in post-apartheid South Africa. They write about such themes as the long-term effects of apartheid brutality, massive unemployment among black men, high expectations after the first democratic elections, growing state support for gender justice, and the state's increasing encroachment into "private" heterosexual relations previously monitored solely by patriarchal authority within families. This analysis of structural reasons for the mounting brutality directed at, for example, girl children and elderly women, contributes enormously to understanding violence as an instrument for constructing gendered identity and power. As a fairly well-established undercurrent in South African gender research, the subject of masculinity has recently become a central focus of research and writing, as indicated in the publication in 2001 of Changing Men in Southern Africa, edited by Robert Morrell and the inclusion of courses on masculinity in many courses taught in South African gender studies programmes.

Literary and Cultural Studies
Feminist literary criticism played a prominent role in the late eighties in introducing feminist theory into academic journals and taught courses. But the trend amongst teachers and critics was often to focus on women's texts as a way of countering male-centred canons. More recent South African literary studies has shown a growing inclination towards cultural studies, with scholars dealing with gender and other discourses in relation to a range of cultural texts. This has allowed theorists to examine the symbols and codes that reproduce a range of social processes. Ann McClintock's seminal "No Longer in a Future Haven" is a key example of a study that brings poststructuralist textual analysis to bear on understanding nationalism, and has had an important impact of later studies by cultural and literary theorists. Work like Michelle Adler's "'Skirting the Edges of Civilization': Two Victorian Women Travellers and 'Colonial Spaces' in South Africa" illustrates how textual analysis can enhance our understanding of such notions as space, frontiers and civilisation in colonial and neo-colonial contexts, and in many ways reflects the cross-disciplinary orientation of many other studies since the late nineties. Another important growth area within South African literary studies has been popular culture. For example, in her "Drum Magazine and the Spatial Configurations of Gender" (1996), Dorothy Driver shows how deeply gendered meanings are inscribed in black urban popular culture in the fifties. Turning to the late twentieth century, Miki Flockemann considers how television genres produce gendered assumptions, and how pivotally gender shapes viewers' readings of television texts.

While the surveys above are by no means a definitive catalogue of the situation of gender research today, they give some sense of the scope of the field, and of the ways in which current research is charting new directions while also drawing considerably on work undertaken in the past.