A Reflexive Inquiry into Gender Research : Towards a New Paradigm of Knowledge Production & Exploring New Frontiers of Gender Research in Southern Africa [1 ed.] 9781443887571, 9781443885140

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A Reflexive Inquiry into Gender Research

A Reflexive Inquiry into Gender Research: Towards a New Paradigm of Knowledge Production & Exploring New Frontiers of Gender Research in Southern Africa Edited by

Samantha van Schalkwyk and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

A Reflexive Inquiry into Gender Research: Towards a New Paradigm of Knowledge Production & Exploring New Frontiers of Gender Research in Southern Africa Edited by Samantha van Schalkwyk and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Samantha van Schalkwyk, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8514-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8514-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword ................................................................................................... vii Akosua Adomako Ampofo Introduction ................................................................................................ xi Samantha van Schalkwyk and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela Part I: Multiple “Selves” in Context: Disrupting Gendered Categories and Definitions Chapter One ................................................................................................. 3 Rape and the Limits of the Law: Revisiting the Criticism against the South African Sexual Violence Legislation Azille Coetzee Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27 Beyond Heteronormativity: Doing Gender and Sexuality in University Contexts Fay Hodza Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 47 Woman Abuse in South Africa: Reflecting on the Complexity of Women’s Decisions to leave Abusive Men Samantha van Schalkwyk, Floretta Boonzaier, and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela Part II: Feminist Praxis: Collaborations and Bridging ResearchActivist Binaries Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 71 Documenting Trauma, Hope, and Human Security: Scholar Activist Research with Grandmothers against Poverty and AIDS Jennifer Fish and Savannah L. Russo

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Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 103 “Writing My History Is Keeping Me Alive”: Politics and Practices of Collaborative History Writing Koni Benson and Faeza Meyer Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 129 Ought Anti-Racist Males Be (Pro)Feminist Too? Engaging Black Men in Work against Gender and Sexual-Based Violence Mbuyiselo Botha and Kopano Ratele Part III: Feminist Reflexivity: Ethics and Researcher–Researched Power Relations Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 149 Researching the Private Sphere: Methodological and Ethical Problems in the Study of Personal Relationships in Xhosa Families Elena Moore Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 171 Autobiography and the Research Context: A Reflection on Unbecoming the “Native” Anthropologist Elaine Salo Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 189 Interrogating our Research Processes: Reflexive Positioning in an IPA Study of Women Family Cancer Caregivers Jennifer Githaiga List of Contributors ................................................................................. 209

FOREWORD AKOSUA ADOMAKO AMPOFO

The book, "A Reflexive Inquiry into Gender Research: Towards a New Paradigm of Knowledge Production" is born out of research that was first presented at a symposium organised at the University of the Free State in October 2012 through its Trauma, Forgiveness & Reconciliation Studies programme. The symposium was titled, "African Gender Perspectives: Dialogues between Scholars, activists, and community-based workers" and was the first symposium of its kind at the University of the Free State—addressing questions of pain, trouble and trauma; policy and law; family relations; research and activism; as well as new methodologies in gender work. This book project is about a whole lot more than trauma. It is about the lives of ordinary women and men. But is also about the lives of researchers, activists, and policy makers, and their relationships to the stories they encounter in their work, and the people who inhabit those stories. It is about us, me and you, who, like the abusua at the outdooring of a baby, a new member of the lineage, are called upon to ensure that it becomes a person—someone who recognizes that her or his humanity is inextricably linked with others’, who knows she is because others are: Ubuntu! As long as there are humans living on the planet there will be disagreements and conflicts. There will be wars for spoils and enlargement of territories. There will be warriors and heroes, the vanquished and survivors. There will also be mediators and efforts at healing and peace building. The 11 September 2001 terror attacks in the United States, provided new impetus for western powers to construct the “other”—i.e. Muslim societies, African states —through the prism of terrorism. Formal state-building processes and political strategies have been dictated by the imperative of containing, countering and defeating terrorist groups. Sadly, much less attention has been paid to conflict resolution, peace building and healing. Perhaps this should not be too surprising given that war and the trade in arms is a billion-dollar industry. The increasing militarization of our world is not unrelated to the gender troubles, as I refer to them, that we encounter and experience in our

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communities and homes. As violence becomes more and more commonplace, gender-based violence has, more and more, become the arena in which contested power relations are fought. As the power relations that govern the cultural contexts that conflicts and violence inhabit are repositioned, we must ask new questions and devise new methods to enable us to understand and respond to what is happening in our world, our communities and the communities of our neighbours. The Akans say, “When your neighbour’s house is on fire fetch a bucket of water”—this is both good neighbourliness as well as a common-sense survival act. That is what "A Reflexive Inquiry into Gender Research: Towards a New Paradigm of Knowledge Production" does, and does admirably. The text brings together scholars from diverse disciplines; in addition to the editors some are well-known Southern African scholars and scholar-activists, such as Elaine Salo and Kopano Ratele; others are emerging voices that bring fresh perspectives to the table. Having worked in the areas of social justice and transformation for close to 27 years as a “gender person” I believe I can legitimately claim to recognize scholarly expertise and commitment to social justice when I encounter it—and the editors and contributors to this volume fit the bill. It is truly a privilege for me to make a few preliminary remarks about this impressive text. I began my formal career as an Africanist and a “gender person” when I joined the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, as a Junior Research Fellow in 1989. In his famous “African Genius” speech at the formal opening of the Institute on October 5th, 1963, our first president Kwame Nkrumah exhorted us to study Africa and her Diaspora in “African-centred ways” and make specific contributions to the advancement of knowledge about the peoples and cultures of Africa. Over 50 years later knowledge production both within and outside the academy continues to be valorized largely according to where it is produced and by whom—global north authors and publication outlets remain at the top of the rankings as the power nexus is perpetuated, sadly also by scholars from the Global South, for reasons of tenure (institutional) pressure or identity (personal) crisis. This makes the study of the lives, conditions and experiences of peoples of the African world in Africancentred ways as socially, culturally, economically and politically salient today as it ever was. This is a major reason why A Reflexive Inquiry into Gender Research: Towards a New Paradigm of Knowledge Production" connects with my spirit—the book valorizes the knowledge of so-called “ordinary people”. I consider myself a scholar-activist: exploring, explaining and addressing our “gender troubles” continues to engage me inside and

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outside the classroom. Indeed, for me the classroom is itself an activist space where we disrupt and even dismantle the house that patriarchy built. At the heart of these “troubles” are the power dynamics that leave women, as a group, disadvantaged relative to men, and that feminists have described as patriarchy. Nowhere is patriarchy more explicit than in gender-based violence, whether in the home or during conditions of war; whether at the hands of an individual “perpetrator” or via state-constructed systemic violence. Here is why this text is important for scholars of African Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, and also Methodology courses: the book compels us to re-examine our dearly held, but often-times limited understandings of “gender trouble” and other forms of social disadvantage and exclusion. It also compels us to view gender troubles, and especially gender based violence, not as discrete incidents but occurrences that are born out of the intersections of class, race, and the status of the post-colony to name but a few. Further, the book provides ample opportunity for us to confront our own discomforts as we traverse that space where “researcher” and “researched”, where episteme and “lived experiences” meet, or even collide. By so doing we can allow ourselves to recognize, and acknowledge that none too infrequently we, the relatively economically and socially comfortable researchers, could actually be the socially disadvantaged. For a lifetime could not provide some of us so-called middle class researchers with the benefits of the experience of having lived in Khayelitsha. However, this is no simplistic reflexivity journey. It is not enough, as the editors themselves note, to merely recognize difference and provide descriptions of these. That would be narcissism and not activism. Rather, the authors move beyond locating themselves and their identities in the research space, and seek to “focus on the rich dynamics of the context and a reflexive engagement of what went wrong (or right) during their engagements” (this volume page xx, emphasis in original) in ways that seek to be transparent and ethical. Of course, most of the chapters are grounded in the Southern African context, particularly South Africa’s context of extreme violence that continues today. This is where questions of shame, trauma and healing, another important aspect of the book, come in. For healing cannot come unless we open our hearts to see the “oppressor” in his or her context of historical and institutionalized oppression. Hence, the book’s focus on three themes—the deconstruction (and reconstruction) of knowledge, attention to the methodologies of research and the power inherent in the relationships, and “processes that work towards liberation for social change.”

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There will be no spoiler alerts—you must read the book. Indeed as is usual, the Introduction sets the stage quite nicely. Suffice it to say, in conclusion, that the writers come from a feminist framework and so, not surprisingly, the first section of the book contains essays that disrupt gendered categories and definitions in law and also in the academy. In the second part of the book the essays turn to praxis and feminist collaborations across the artificial binaries of academic and civil society spaces, while at the same time politicizing the encounters and possibilities. Part three turns to an extremely important subject that all too frequently receives short shrift—the context of power relations between researchers and “subjects” and the ethics of research encounters, especially in the sensitive areas of intimate relations. This much-needed book seeks to destabilize the taken-for-grantedness of research and knowledge production, and succeeds in doing so. Beware: the willing reader will learn much, but prepare to carry your emotions with you; prepare to be confronted, turned upside down, scared, uncomfortable, but happily, also be prepared to experience numerous “aha!” moments that provide you with considerations on how to find yourself right-side up. This is not a do-research-this-way happily-ever-after story. But it is a hopeful collection of essays of how we can be better feminists, better scholars and activists, better citizens—better human beings.

INTRODUCTION SAMANTHA VAN SCHALKWYK AND PUMLA GOBODO-MADIKIZELA

The mother, wrinkled and meek, shuffled into the other room the first time; the second time, when we tried to interview her, she pulled a blanket to her eyes and disappeared into a corner.

Taken from the paper of Elena Moore (this volume), the research journal entry above speaks powerfully about certain tensions and the messy realities that we as feminist scholars often face during our engagements with participants. Moore is a researcher from Ireland who at the time was doing research in black South African townships. Her research was based on exploring the intergenerational transmission of motherhood among three generations of women. Moore speaks of one of her experiences going into the women’s home to interview them. She describes a poor black woman who lives in a shack in a township on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa. Over 20 years since democracy the legacy of apartheid lives on and the socio-spatial landscape still reflects the ethos of the Group Areas Act. Poor people predominantly reside in ghettos, or townships, to which they were moved as a result of apartheid policies. These areas are beset with a range of social problems, including severe poverty, unemployment, and high levels of violent crime that pose challenges to a life of integrity and self-worth. The excerpt above aptly conveys a sense of the old woman’s experienced vulnerability when researchers from a tertiary institution came into the intimate space of her home and began asking private and sensitive questions about her family life. Moore, the researcher, describes her own emotional memory of the event and the woman’s lack of agency – the mother was “wrinkled” and “meek,” she did not walk but rather “shuffled”. The woman pulls a blanket to her eyes, as if to protect herself from the intensity of the emotional invasion. Moore explains the context of unequal power relations that the old woman lived in and that her presence, as researcher, may have rendered the woman increasingly vulnerable to her abusive husband. This image speaks to the experiences of many researchers who have faced

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participants’ sense of anxiety or unease at being exposed to research processes that are very unfamiliar to them. Sometimes our research topics are considered sensitive issues to the participants (and their family and community) and often we cannot pre-empt these views before we arrive at the location of the research. Indeed, what is considered to be a sensitive topic is dependent on the relational circumstances and the conversational encounter between the researcher and the researched—that is the “cultural and contextual circumstances and the personal views held by the people involved” (Hydén 2008, 22). It is important that we, as researchers and activists, are in tune with our participants’ views, otherwise we miss out on the essence of our interactions with those who take part in our research. Often our very presence as researchers heightens participants’ vulnerabilities, especially when we are working with people who have cultural beliefs that are very different to our own. In some circumstances we may be prying into areas of the participants’ lives that are rendered taboo and “unspeakable” by their culture. We may inadvertently place participants in an uncomfortable or even dangerous position by asking them to respond about certain private aspects of their lives. Such attempts may be met with silence on the part of participants—similar to the blanket in the diary entry above—a symbolic shield with which the old woman tries to protect herself. Often as researchers and activists we do not express the difficult positions that we find ourselves in whilst we are working in the “field”. In this compilation we hope to unearth some of these silences in ways that can be useful for conceptualizing power and “self” in the process of an African-centered knowledge production.

Setting the Context The idea for such a book on a reflexive inquiry into gender research emerged from an international gender symposium held in 2012 at the University of the Free State (UFS) titled, “African gender perspectives: dialogues between scholars, activists, and community-based workers”. The symposium comprised a diverse array of people who work in the field of gender—scholars, activists, and scholar-activists. Present were also community-based workers who live in underprivileged communities in South Africa and who are faced head on with the harsh realities of gender inequality and the economic and social challenges of addressing gender issues in the Southern African context. The community activists included Faeza Meyer, a backyard shack dweller who had been involved in land housing rights and who is the Chairperson of Tafelsig Residents Unite in Cape Town. Faeza was

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working on a research project with feminist historian, Koni Benson, from the University of Cape Town. The researcher and community activist joined forces to document Faeza’s experiences of living in a small informal settlement in Tafelsig, Mitchell’s Plein. Mitchell’s Plein was one of the townships built on the periphery of Cape Town for “colored” people of mixed race ancestry who were forcibly removed from the white areas during the apartheid era. The area is beset with a range of problems, which include high levels of crime, poverty, gangsterism, and other social ills. Due to overcrowding and a severe lack of housing a small community had occupied a piece of land in this area, and had been subjected to a range of violent land invasions as authorities attempted to remove citizens from the land. Other community members included members of a youth group “Nabz Unite” who live in an impoverished township called Namibia Square, which lies in the Free State, South Africa, on the outskirts of Bloemfontein. The rise of democracy in South Africa has not afforded the residents with any improvements in their quality of life and the community is characterized by severe poverty, joblessness, and other social ills such as crime and violence against women. The youths live in a current state of hopelessness with the burdening pressures of adulthood running in stark tension to their sense of hopelessness and the lack of social opportunities. Present at the event were also members from a group for abused women, called Sisters for Sisters, which is based in Cape Town, South Africa. These groups shared their experiences of working with researchers/activists on different occasions. The Sisters for Sisters group focused on their experience of taking part in a doctoral research project (run by Samantha), and the “Nabz Unite” group discussed their experiences of taking part in a series of workshops in their community that were run by colleagues at UFS. These stories added much value to our dialogues as we, the researchers and activists, were able to gain a different perspective about research processes and we could begin to interrogate our “hidden” assumptions about researcher–researched relational dynamics. The conversations contributed to an alternative, often silenced, view about what it means to be an economically and socially disadvantaged social being who participates in social research. For this we are truly grateful to the community members who spoke their minds in a space that was unfamiliar and perhaps a bit daunting to many of them. Most of the chapters in the book are based on research that has been done in the South African context. There is one chapter that explores students’ perceptions of sexuality in a university setting in Zimbabwe and another chapter which is based on research that was done with cancer

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caregivers in Kenya. It is important to note that some of the researchers live, or have lived, abroad and have conducted much of their fieldwork in South Africa. They thus come from contexts that are very different to those of their research participants. Jennifer Fish and Savannah Russo are researchers based in the United States who were studying the experiences of poor black grandmothers in a South African township, Khayelitsha. Elena Moore comes from Ireland and she entered into a very unfamiliar terrain in her work on motherhood in three generations of Xhosa women living in townships on the outskirts of the Western Cape, South Africa. Other authors came from the same context as their participants and shared the same ethnic identity and culture as their participants. However, various other identities that the researchers had access to meant that their worlds were still vastly different from the people who took part in their research. Jennifer Githaiga identified with the participants of her study because she shared the experience of caring for a family member who was dying of cancer and she was from the same country as her Kenyan participants. However, she writes about how her identity as an educated doctoral researcher created a visceral distance from her research participants. Elaine Salo shared the identity of “colored” person who had grown up in the same area as her participants and who spoke the same language, however her status as a middle class women with a motor car meant that the community treated her as significantly different “other”. Fay Hodza, a Zimbabwean heterosexual male, conducted fieldwork with Zimbabwean heterosexual students about homosexuality. Fay does not consider homosexuality as a negative identity (as many of his participants do), and it is from this position of difference that he was able to critically interrogate the students’ narratives. Thus, these positions of difference were of critical significance, shaping the experience of both researcher and participant and influencing the type of data and the analysis that was produced. Following the symposium all of the contributors attended a weekend workshop in the peaceful setting of Monkey Valley in Cape Town. This was a rich space within which we could openly and honestly share the intricacies of our experiences in the field and the complexities of our personal involvements with our topics and our relations with participants. This was a chance for us to regroup and synthesize our thoughts and to provide feedback to each other that fine-tuned the chapters and our imaginings of the book as a whole. It was also a space through which we could provide support to authors who were grappling with ways to translate their practical experience of gender work into a narratable form through the written word. Particular challenges that were voiced were the

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challenges of documenting activist work in the field of sexual violence and the challenges of activists and academics coming together and working in ways that can mutually contribute to the fight against gender-based violence in the South African context. We wanted to use these conversations in ways that will move “African-based” gender work forward. In research on gender and gender-based violence we see the same issues arising again and again—that is, the work is often disconnected from the research participants or it rehashes what has been done before. Research that does not take the micro factors of context into account (context as in participants’ micro context and the geo-social research context) does not have the potential to promote change in the ways in which we theorize gender issues in the African context. We realized that many of the researchers/activists at the gender symposium were doing things differently and that a lot of the work was connecting to real social issues. The stories across our various divides (community-based workers, activists, scholars) were charged as we grappled with issues to do with sexual violence, sexuality, masculinity, activists/scholar/participant experiences and subjectivities, survivor identities, and processes of change. The multiplicity of our voices all contributed rich contextual detail in ways that offer the potential for new theoretic insights in gender work. We addressed core questions of how scholars who work in the African context can do gender research differently and how we can find another language to communicate what goes on when we engage in such work. We also engaged in dialogue about scholarship as it is connected to real community issues in ways that can inspire social change. We wanted to create a book that would document these innovative dialogues and capture a sense of the spirit of “moving beyond” the boundaries of traditional feminist research in Africa. Of course, such a project had to be firmly rooted in our (Southern) African context. The current socio-political landscape of South Africa is one characterized by extreme rates of violence. The history of apartheid has instilled a culture of violence in the country (Goldblatt and Meintjies 1997; Misago, Landau, and Monson 2009), and it is a space where traumatic memories are desperately struggling to be heard, often in horrific ways. Shame is an integral part of people’s social reality within this complex space. Such shame is often not acknowledged or expressed, however, shame is deeply written onto the bodies and psyches of many South African men and women. Very often when shame cannot be acknowledged and expressed by men this shame translates into insatiable

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rage, which is frequently played out onto the bodies of women. South Africa is a place in which some of the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world are documented (Moffett 2006), where women are more likely to be raped than educated (Naidu-Hoffmeester and Kamal 2013), where people are brutally attacked and often killed because their sexuality does not fit the norms of hegemonic heterosexuality, and where any sort of difference is deemed license to dehumanize, oppress, and hurt—as seen by the increasing emotional and physical “xenophobic violence” against black African foreigners who are living in South Africa (Harris 2002; Strauss 2011). As individuals who conduct gender research in this context, we need to be sensitive of these embodied emotions and the very real affects that they have on people in the aftermath of social and political trauma. It is crucial that researchers who work with people of this bruised and torn apart nation are attentive to the power dynamics inherent in research and that they strive to not reproduce patterns of power and oppression through their research work. The questions that we ask throughout this volume are in line with ways of doing exactly this. Our questions are fuelled by the underlying assumptions of the “subjective elasticity” of identities (see Hoel 2013, 33). What this means is that we acknowledge the multiple identity positions of participants and researchers and we focus on the messiness of embodied lived realities that are constantly produced and in progress, shaped by the particular context within which research/activism takes place. The types of questions that we are asking are thus based around our views that the African social-spatial landscape significantly shapes the identities and processes that emerge throughout our research endeavors and, in this way, the context molds the process of knowledge production and the type of knowledge that we produce.

Our Epistemological Positions: Subjective Elasticity, Contextual “Selves,” and Destabilizing Hegemonic Power Relations The word “feminism” has come to represent a vast array of politically conscious ways of thinking that attempt to uncover unequal societal power imbalances and try to change dominant structures of power. In this compilation our understanding of what constitutes the core of feminist work has been enhanced by De Lauretis (1987, 113) who says that feminism is, “A critical reading of culture, a political interpretation of the social text and of the social subject, and a re-writing of our culture’s

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master narratives”. Feminist research in the field of gender is thus centrally concerned with issues of deconstruction, power, and liberation for social change. It is on these three themes—deconstruction, power in research relationships, and processes that work towards liberation for social change—that our book focuses. Our research efforts are broadly based within a qualitative epistemology—all of the contributions adopt a holistic approach to research and the study of people’s subjective realities and experience in context. With the “interpretive turn” in social science came an increased skepticism of the “objectivity” of research and issues of power relations in research came into question (Pillow 2003). In her pioneering paper Oakley (2003) critiqued traditional methods of research as being based on (and as reproducing) hegemonic gender relations. She argued that it is standard practice for interviewers to perform masculine traits of objectivity, authority, and emotional detachment, while participants are to act according to traditional feminine traits such as compliance and submission to authority. However, those who work in the field of gender should know that we, as researchers and activists, are not neutral knowledge seekers and our work cannot be conceptualized through the mere metaphor of “extracting” something (information/ “truth”) from participants. Researchers/activists are subjects, human beings that most often inhabit a more powerful position in relation to the research participants and others that they work with. As Riley, Schouten, and Cahill (2003, 10) state, such an understanding of the power dynamics of research processes is crucial for interrogating the politics and practices of social research as it, “puts relationships, subjectivity and ethics as salient concepts within the research process”. We believe that destabilizing traditional research scripts is an essential component of producing new frontiers of knowledge in the field of gender and to do this we have to be able to acknowledge the different kinds of identities that we “inhabit” when we practice research/activism. Most importantly, we have to make transparent certain identities that make us uncomfortable along the way. In much of this compilation the authors interrogate these “messy” and challenging identities; we do this by situating our work in line with feminist and poststructuralist theories. The work of this contribution falls within a critical feminist approach to research that has been born from postmodern and postcolonial feminist theories. These approaches have in common an acknowledgement that the person is political (thus dissolving the boundaries erected between self and society), a view that patriarchy is an organizing principle in society, and the idea that knowledges (not the singular knowledge) are multiple,

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shifting and situated (Callaghan and Clark 2006). Poststructuralist theories transcend traditional notions of the “self” and focus on the social embeddedness of identities—hence the focus is on a relational notion of personhood as a social construction which can be understood through mutual engagement and dialogue (Fisher 2004 as cited by Etherington 2007). Through our gender work we therefore acknowledge that meanings are multiple and that they are never finished. According to such approaches the immediate social context within which the participants and the researcher are located at the moment of research/data gathering is of critical significance. Research happens within particular spatial-temporal contexts which shape how we conceptualize gender categories as well as the kinds of relationships that we, as researchers, develop with the researched. What we have learnt from these approaches is that power is in flux and we (as researchers and participants) constantly fluctuate between different positions during the process of research/activism. Our work is based on the view that we should not assume that a narrative adequately reveals the meaning of an action beyond the relationship with the researcher through which the narrative is produced. Melucci (1995) says that if attention is not paid to the conditions of production of a text, and to the reception and interpretation of it by the researcher, then one is practicing a new kind of objectivism under the guise of “subjective sources”. The researcher and the participants are reflexively interdependent and interconnected and these connections need to be made explicit during the analysis (Mauthner and Doucet 2003). In our book we use this knowledge to make sense of our challenging and often contradictory experiences as researchers within strange and rather unanticipated landscapes. Such a move encompasses possibilities of moving towards a place of better integrity and also of producing new, exciting kinds of knowledge. A central aspect of this reimaging of fieldwork relationships is the idea of “pushing the boundaries” of reflexive engagement (Bondi 2009), or what we term “complicating reflexivity”.

Complicating Reflexivity Reflexivity has been defined as a research practice through which investigators turn their gaze onto their own subjectivity as it “exists” within the research context and as it impacts on researcher–researched interactions (Parker 2005). The concept has been defined as processes whereby researchers reflect on their research relationships and, in doing so, interrogate unequal social relations that stem from various social

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positions (Bondi 2009). In order to “do” reflexivity, it is important that researchers recognize their differences of gender, class, race (and other positions) that separate them from the people that they study (Kobayashi 2003), and that they interrogate how (and why) these positions matter. Such reflective processes are meant to capture the rich fabric of social life that is overlooked by more traditional methods (Kobayashi 2003). According to Bondi (2009, 328), on a theoretical level reflexivity acknowledges that, “all knowledge bears the impress of the social relations entailed in its production, including the complex power relations between researchers and participants”. However, researchers’ practical engagement with reflexivity often does not match up to the standards/criteria of the theory. Often reflexivity is treated as an afterthought noting points of difference with the participants through brief and uncritical descriptions of certain social categories. As such, critiques of reflexivity have abounded. In particular a reflexive practice whereby the researcher focuses on their own social locations and experience have been accused as being self-absorbed in nature and as being the antithesis of activism (Kobayashi 2003). Some scholars argue that researchers’ focus on their “self” excludes other, more pertinent issues (Bondi 2009) and that such reflections serve to distance them from their subjects, through constructing a sense of a detached other, and by virtue of the researchers’ power to name and situate themselves in relation to the researched (Kobayashi 2003). A central argument is that reflexivity can end up distracting attention from much more important political goals and social change agendas (Bondi 2009). Kobayashi (2003) argues that reflexivity is not the best tool that we have at our disposal for taking us further towards social change. However, what she refers to here is a self-reflexive reflexivity that is researcher centered and a mere reflection of one’s difference in relation to the people of study. Reflexivity can (and as we show, should), however be much more than a mere self-reflexive exercise. When we let go of the assumption that reflexivity should be done by announcing the social categories to which we, the researchers and activists, belong then we can begin to explore more complex and uncomfortable approaches to the process of identity transformation in context (Pillow 2003). It is this territory that our chapters in this volume explore. For example, and a dominant theme throughout the chapters that make up this compilation, as researchers we very often transverse socio-cultural landscapes. That is, we negotiate social (and physical) landscapes that are very different from our own contexts—we are placed both physically and psychologically in unknown territory. It can be very intimidating for us, as

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researchers, to enter into and experience the participants’ topographical texture, however this is crucial information and foregrounding such tensions can help improve our analyses significantly (Pillow 2003). In order to push the boundaries of reflexivity we need to be willing to enunciate this unfamiliar/threatening territory. Some have stated that communicating dilemmas in fieldwork helps us work towards a more ethical research stance (see, for example, Etherington 2007). Once researchers can move away from a self-absorbed focus on their own identities and focus on the rich dynamics of the context and a reflexive engagement of what went wrong (or right) during their engagements with the participants then reflexivity can be a productive tool in the generation of new knowledge. Denzin’s (1997) five different typologies of reflexivity in qualitative research can serve as a useful guide for conceptualizing how we can push the boundaries of reflexivity. He outlines the categories of methodological reflexivity, intertextual reflexivity, standpoint reflexivity, queer reflexivity, and feminist reflexivity. The initial starting point of reflexivity, the base work per se, is to recognize the differences between the researcher and the researched. However, the crucial aspect of this process is then taking up a moral stance in working to eliminate, or reduce, such unequal power dynamics. This is the core of what Denzin (1997) refers to as “feminist reflexivity”. As Kobayashi (2003, 348) argues: reflexivity has no meaning if not connected to a larger agenda—which for most of us is avowedly both political and personal—meant to change the world. How we choose to change the world is a very personal matter; but the results are not.

Reflexivity is thus a varied and multiple concept that encompasses and feeds into both theory and practice (Bondi 2009). Reflexive engagement should entail a practice of on-going conversation about experience that should inform our definitions, concepts of the self, our relational conduct, as well as our political practice. Poststructuralist lines of thinking have politicized the practices of representation; we, as social researchers and activists, now face particularly challenging questions with regards to reflexivity: Can we truly represent another? Whose story is it—the researcher or the researched? How can we engage in ethical (and productive) representation, and then who is the representation serving in terms of ethics and usefulness? (See, for example, Pillow 2003.) Reflexivity in this sense is a process whereby we make visible the ways in which we do the work of representation; it is through such an examination that we can foreground issues about the

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politics of representation (Pillow 2003). However, we would argue that as gender activists and researchers who have a passion for working towards social change, our reflective practices need to be based on something more—a true connection between human beings. Quoting the popular work of John Bradshaw, “Creating love: the next great stage of growth” (1992), hooks (2002) says that global societies’ acceptance of patriarchal domination as a founding narrative has resulted in a preoccupation of narratives of power rather than narratives of love. In this sense we have lost what it means to love in both our personal and professional worldly endeavors. For hooks (2002) this means the absence of care, respect, and responsibility. This is starkly apparent in much qualitative work in which research participants are given token acknowledgements and the research agenda is unequivocally designed to serve only the institution/researcher. So, we ask the question, “How can we re-gain an ‘ethics of responsibility’ and an ‘ethics of care’ in social research?” In this book we offer insights into the processes and practices of novel and exciting forms of reflexivity that can be embraced to move us beyond reflection and moral discussions and further towards a social change agenda. Pillow’s (2003, 188) concept of “interrupting reflexivity” stands as a useful tool to illustrate what we are offering in this book. Pillow (2003) says that this kind of reflexivity renders knowing as uncomfortable and as unattainable. Knowing is unattainable because our ways of knowing the other (and the self) are blurred by the white noise of economic and political institutions. The chapters in this book provide rich context-driven insights that help to counter the privileging of a “reflexivity” that prioritizes the researcher’s identity. We engage in explicit discussion about the economic, political, and institutional contexts within which our research processes are situated, and the ways in which these contexts shape our interactions with others during research/activism. We reflect on the power dynamics inherent in the research process in different but related ways. Broadly, in our book we conceptualize power in research as, firstly, power to define, and secondly, power to practice certain ways of being—both of which can lead to the achievement of certain political goals. Our contributors in this book practice feminist reflexivity in their gender work in the sense that they destabilize power structures according to three different conceptual levels of what power is and what it does (and can do) in research. The first is power as definition. The second is power as social action. The last is power as reflective awareness and communication.

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The section below outlines our (the editors) analyses of the ways in which the contributors of this volume have worked towards “pushing the boundaries” of reflexivity. We analyze these contributions through the lens of “interrupting reflexivity;” drawing on the feminist themes of deconstruction, power in research relationships, and a social change agenda we weave a picture of the ways in which the contributors collectively work towards “ethical reflexivity” in African gender research.

Towards an Ethical based Reflexivity As we work to add to the global body of knowledge, it is important to keep in mind the effects of our contributions, however it is equally important that we keep in mind the effects and repercussions of the processes that we engage in to create this knowledge. In fact exceeding “normal” institutional expectations of research ethics is part of the core work that researcher/activists should be doing in Africa and with certain vulnerable participants (Swartz 2011). As Salo (this volume, 171) states: the questions for African feminists have always required that we interrogated the praxis of knowledge production and of methodology that go beyond the usual normative acknowledgements of ethics, consent and commitment that underwrite standard social science research.

We need to examine our interviews, focus groups and other processes of knowledge production as more than mere data-gathering “tools” and we need to move beyond a “token ethics” which is written up according to prescribed institutional “rules”. All of this entails that we pay closer attention to the relational nature of research encounters (Boonzaier 2014) and the intuitions, motivations, and emotions that emerge within these sites. In this way we will be able to move towards a deeper understanding of our processes of doing research. Such “interruptions” of traditional conceptualizations of reflexivity is, for us, a move closer to “ethical reflexivity”. Qualitative research, and especially work in the field of gender, requires a high level of personal commitment—both in terms of researchers’ taking up personal responsibility to uphold ethical practices during the research process and the emotional dynamics that occur through these human interactions. The latter is a dimension that is not so readily discussed during researchers’ reflections of their work; however this is an ever-present aspect of gender research. It speaks to what we give of ourselves as researchers in these encounters not because of what you might gain in return but because these are ethical human interactions, it

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speaks to the fact that we, as gender researchers, temporarily inhabit unfamiliar and challenging environments that impact our sense of self and emotions as well as others’ emotional and ontological territory (Hoel 2013). The link between reflexivity and ethical research is established by researcher transparency (Etherington 2007). When the reader is given important detail about our choices, interactions, and emotions then they can observe the ways in which these subtle and unpredictable situations arise—what Guillemin and Gillam (2004, 262) call “ethically important moments,” and, importantly, how we negotiate these situations. In such moments the decisions made by the researcher has important ethical consequences (Guillemin and Gillam 2004). We would add that such an agenda can be enhanced by additionally making transparent one’s political and social change agendas and theoretical choices, and the ways in which these choices have shaped our representation of the people who take part in our research. Power relations between the researcher and the researched are never egalitarian but rather are fuelled by imbalances which are shaped by race, class, academic authority, and level of control over the research process and the research output (Hoel 2013). These issues are magnified when working with vulnerable or traumatized communities (Swartz 2011). Researchers are often silent about important issues of power in research relationships. Such silence regularly happens by choice or by the restrictions of institutional norms about doing research and practicing the “researcher” role. Researchers often engage in what Finlay (2002) calls “selective silence”—that is they ignore issues during the research that were difficult for them to manage. This often entails a kind of suppression of verbal or other information that the researcher may find difficult to narrate. When we produce neat final written products in the form of books, academic papers, or theses we do not readily acknowledge that the process of getting to the finished product was not neat or uncomplicated in any way. Researchers need to be explicit about their research processes and about their (political) motivations, choices and experiences that emerged along the way. In this way we can begin working towards a level of accountability with regards to our gender research. The innovative potential of our book lies in the ways in which the contributors grapple head on with such issues. We move beyond the suppression and silence about research experience/method that is so characteristic of contemporary qualitative work in the field of gender. Throughout the book, we keep bringing attention back to the importance of the social context with

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regards to the interpretations and ideas that we have about the people that we study.

Practicing “Ethical Reflexivity” through the Deconstruction of Research Participants’ Social Positions As researchers we often practice a more powerful position in relation to our participants through the kinds of research questions that we ask. Some questions “close off” or inhibit any opportunity for social change in the lives of our participants. Scholars in different fields have criticized certain research questions. For example, the question in the field of violence against women, “Why do abused women stay?” was put under much scrutiny as it placed focus on the psychological deficits of abused women and did not acknowledge the social and economic factors that inform women’s choices to stay with an abusive partner. It was argued that more appropriate questions that acknowledge abused women’s social agency would be, “How do abused women stay?” Such a question moves away from psychologically pathologizing abused women and leaves room for the exploration of some level of agency. This example highlights the power of research questions in terms of their linguistic capacity to situate the researched as certain kinds of subjects. Another potent use (or abuse) of power can be the definitions that we utilize in our research and then reinforce in our written work. In the first section of our book, “Multiple ‘selves’ in context: disrupting gendered categories and definitions,” the authors interrogate certain social categories and binaries of masculinity/femininity, personhood, the body and the sexual self. It is through such investigations that hegemonic definitions and “feminine/masculine” categories can be challenged and destabilized, and that socially constructed, oppressive ways of being can be transcended. The work in this section “speaks” to the first theme of feminism outlined above—that is the deconstruction of language to disrupt hegemonic gendered power. The contributors highlight their important decisions surrounding language and how they represent their research subjects/topic. Such sensitivity to language and representation is an ethical strategy in itself (see Swartz 2011). In the opening chapter, “Rape and the limits of the law: revisiting the criticism against the South African Sexual Violence Legislation,” Azille Coetzee revisits the important question of whether the fight against sexual violence in South Africa should be pursued through avenues of legal reform. She does this through the lens of Carol Smart’s skepticism of the law as an appropriate medium through which to effect transformation.

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Coetzee takes us through a philosophical interrogation of legal definitions that is well situated within the specific South African context. She argues that feminists who pursue change through legal means should look beyond legal definitions and the language of rape and should be ready to delve into transforming the power and logic of the law and challenge the laws power to define. Overall Coetzee concludes that there are significant limits of pursuing change through law reform and feminists should not be looking at the South African criminal law system as a solution to the problem of rape but rather they should pursue the fight through other mediums—such as active pursuits of redefining concepts of masculinity, femininity, personhood, and the body. In chapter 2, “Beyond heteronormativity: doing gender and sexuality in university contexts,” Fay Hodza presents his reflections on gender and sexuality issues among students at a university in Zimbabwe. These are topics that are widely suppressed in a context in which homosexuality is largely rendered pathological, and sometimes even demonic. Hodza outlines his precarious position as a researcher who is studying such taboo, “thorny” topics. He speaks about the stigmatization and incredulity that he received from other scholars who labeled him “insane” and “un-African” because he was doing such gender work in the Zimbabwean context. This was a pertinent issue for him as a Zimbabwean, heterosexual, married male with a political agenda to promote equality. Hodza’s paper speaks to social-political issues of otherness, themes that point to the issues of what is problematic for the democracy of Zimbabwe. Hodza interrogates socially shamed positions to do with homosexuality and also interrogates the positions which his colleagues from Zimbabwe infer of him, as researcher. Here he is doing the work of deconstruction. Hodza’s work is important because it is only through talk about non-normative, “silenced” ways of being that new kinds of discourses and realities can be born. In the third chapter of Part I, “Woman abuse in South Africa: reflecting on the complexity of women’s decisions to leave abusive men,” van Schalkwyk and colleagues explore the experiences of a relatively understudied group of women—abused women who are residing in shelters in South Africa. They coherently weave a picture of these women’s experiences of leaving abusive men and the complex decisionmaking processes that characterize their journeys—shedding insight on what the context of poverty, deprivation, and joblessness means for abused women. Following authors such as Davies and Harré (1990) and Davies et al. (2006), the authors adopt a feminist poststructuralist analytic approach of identities as precarious, contradictory and ever-changing and as constructed through language at certain contextual moments. It is through

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an acknowledgement of their ideological approach to selfhood that the authors open up new kinds of questions about the complexity of abused women’s experience. In this way they explore women’s social agency as it develops within the specific context of the shelter sphere in South Africa. By asking such “identity questions” the authors problematize dominant cultural narratives of abuse, powerlessness, and victimhood. These chapters show that when we begin to acknowledge the multiplicity of identities that are ever in flux, we can begin to deconstruct what it means to be a violated (and) sexual being. Importantly, in these ways we can begin to challenge and (re)construct different meanings about gender and power and what it means to be a victim of sexual assault, an “abused woman,” and a human being who prefers to have sex with others of the same gender. These definitions have significant implications as they provide room to conceptualize space for the recognition of the power of the category of human being that we are researching, and thus provide the mobility to move towards social change. These chapters highlight the importance of researchers’ reflexivity about how they categorize the people that they research. The chapters that follow in Part II of the book deal with reflections of power and the possibilities of social action through research/activism.

Practicing “Ethical Reflexivity” through Bridging Research—Activist Binaries In the second section of our compilation, “Feminist praxis: collaborations and bridging research-activist binaries,” the authors reflect on their own research and activist processes. The stories depict real work in constructing collaborations between the “powerful” and the “powerless,” between the “researcher” and the “researched,” between the scholar and the activist. These chapters are in line with what Finlay (2002) calls “mutual collaboration”—a type of reflexivity through which researchers engage in various strategies to enlist participants as coresearchers and through which they embrace multiple voices, shared realities, and contradictions. However, such collaborative pursuits have often been used as an intellectual means of validating data (Finlay 2002) while less has been focused on mutuality as an intentional ethics of reciprocation in research that can contribute to flatten power gradients between participant/researcher and community worker/activist (Swartz 2011). The chapters in the current compilation bring political motivation into the picture. They illustrate how we can practice mutual collaborative

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reflexivity with a social change agenda, with the aim of changing the lives of our participating “partners”. Most importantly the authors highlight that when one has a social change agenda, one should never truly be able to categorize oneself as either researcher or activist/“teacher” or student”. Such collaborative work should value the combined insights of different persons, places, and contexts (Benson and Meyer, this volume). The work in this section provides insight into how we, as researchers and activists, can work towards liberation and a change in current social conditions— change not as abstract thought or ideas but as something that happens in the “here and now” of research. Through collaboration across divides, the authors co-produce knowledge in diverse formats that are relevant for the lives of activists/community-based workers “on the ground”. They show that through such collaborations both researchers and activists can engage with their co-produced insights and, by doing so, they can push the boundaries of traditional academic knowledge in ways that are productive for all. In chapter 4, “Documenting trauma, hope and human security: scholar activist work with Grandmothers against Poverty and Aids,” Fish and Russo use a human security lens to explore the experiences of black grandmothers living in the Cape Town township of Khayelitsha within the broader context of the HIV/AIDS crisis, poverty, and deprivation. They engage in a reflexive analysis of knowledge production through feministactivist methods. Importantly, Fish and Russo critically engage with their position as privileged, white North American scholars researching the experiences of poor women in a black township in South Africa, and outline a number of components of scholar-activist research that they believe are transferable to scholar-activist work in other sites. In chapter 5, “‘Writing my history is keeping me alive’: politics and practices of collaborative history writing,” Benson and Meyer reflect on the process, the politics, and the practices of collaborative work between a feminist historian and a community activist who formally occupied “illegal” squatter land in a small community on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa. Through their collaborative efforts and a collection of sources they weave together a story of people’s experience of a land occupation in ways that challenge traditional notions of methodology and authorship. Through rich descriptions of what they call a feminist collaborative methodology, they make visible the power positions that emerged throughout this process. Their collaboration makes explicit the intersection between research and political struggle. Importantly, Benson and Meyer say that this process of evolving methodology saw changes in the kinds of questions that they asked—from more theoretical debates such

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as, “who can and should write history?” to more activist questions like, “what can history be used for and how can it produce solidarity?” In their chapter, “Ought antiracists males be (pro)feminist too? Engaging black men in work against gender and sexual-based violence,” Botha and Ratele (chapter 6) describe their collaboration as two African heterosexual men who are passionate about working towards a gender equal society—Ratele as a scholar and Botha as an activist in the field. Botha is an activist who works as a media and government relations person for a non-governmental organization and Ratele is a professor who is engaged in research at a South African university. They have worked together for many years on masculinities and other gender and sexually related topics. They ascribe their sensitivity to the fact that each focuses on different processes and outcomes of activism/research—Botha mostly engages with people in the public eye and Ratele engages in more longterm reflection and research. The contributors say that their collaboration supplements and enriches each other’s work. They use the plural “we” to describe their connected journey towards a manhood that embraces selfdefinitions that are different from those imposed by patriarchal masculinity. Ultimately the chapters in Part II highlight the emergent and transformative nature of collaborations—in providing new kinds of perspectives and knowledge, in eroding dominant narratives of personhood and practice, and in challenging researchers and activists to “push new ground” and to think of themselves and their roles differently. As the authors show, a large part of this work is deconstructing certain assumptions of hierarchy and knowing. In particular these collaborations across divides and across epistemological ways of knowing the world resulted in important shifts in perspectives. The authors moved from engaging in theoretical and language-based questions towards engaging in questions that focused more closely around issues of their connections with each other and the rich potentials of solidarity.

Practicing “Ethical Reflexivity” through Intersubjective Reflection Reflexivity has become an important topic for qualitative researchers in general, and more specifically for those who engage feminist approaches to research. Two foundational influences underpinning reflexivity are intersubjectivity and relational psychoanalysis, concepts that emphasize the interpersonal dimension of the process that unfolds in relational psychoanalytic practice. This perspective suggests that rather

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than a neutral therapist making interpretations of the client’s statements and behaviors, the therapist and client influence one another at both the conscious and unconscious levels. The intersubjective epistemological model has broadened our understanding of the qualitative research process, and intersubjectivity is now seen to be at the core of knowledge production in the relationships between researcher and participants. Thus, making sense of the data is no longer seen as a role exclusively for the researcher, but rather a process of “co-production” of knowledge (Colombo 2003), which unfolds because of the reciprocal mutual influence inherent in these relationships between researcher and participant. Researchers then have to be aware of the interplay between their emotions and those of participants, how their own stories and biographies intersect with those of the participants, and how their positions of power and privilege may have affected the kind of knowledge that is produced. In “Feminist reflexivity: ethics and researcher-researched power relations”—the third and final section in our book, the contributing authors grapple with these issues of power in research relationships, and of the intersection between their personal stories and the stories and circumstances of the participants in their research. Through critical reflection, they use their own fieldwork experiences to examine the deep emotions that they felt when they conducted the research. To demonstrate transparency and accountability, they confront the issues of researchers’ power in relation to the people that they study. A central part of the work in this section is a critical interrogation of our assumptions of shared identities and the ways in which intersectional identities are always linked up with broader inequalities, which are fuelled by social and institutional forces. One cannot unequivocally claim a sense of shared identity with our participants, and to do so would be naive and to ignore the situated “truth” of our research encounters. The authors in this section give transparent accounts of power dynamics that occur throughout their research processes and their chapters constitute a move away from traditional discourses of methodology. A central theme throughout is that we, as researchers and activists, should look deeper than standardized ethical issues of consent, anonymity, and a shallow acknowledgement of our discomfort due to our position of power in relation to research participants. Elena Moore (chapter 7) reflects on the challenges she encountered as a researcher from Ireland applying her research skills within urban townships in the South African context, and the “heart-break” of witnessing the intense male control that dominates the homes of the women who were participants in her study. Moore, from whose diary entry

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the quote at the beginning of this introduction is drawn, also speaks candidly about her own disconnectedness from the woman hiding herself under a blanket: “I did not know how I could communicate with this participant whilst she was hidden under these blankets” (this volume page 158). These are the kinds of experiences that challenged everything she knew about research—ethics, confidentiality, and communication. At the same time, however, Moore argues that through her close engagements with the participants, and by confronting and engaging with the dis-ease in the research process, she gained unique insight into the women’s lived realities and their everyday existence. From engaging in such a way as qualitative researchers we learn more about how different people experience themselves as embodied beings in their social context and throughout the research process, this knowledge obviously enriches our understanding of their lived experiences and enhances our analysis of their stories in invaluable ways. Moore eloquently traces her thoughts and perspective through providing snippets of her field notes and neatly presents us with insight about the origins of her data. As such Moore’s chapter constitutes an outstanding reflexive exercise that is both comprehensive and holistic. In chapter 8, “Autobiography and the research context: reflection on unbecoming the ‘native’ anthropologist,” Elaine Salo makes a call for feminist researchers to pay deeper attention to what “we” consider to be shared feminist epistemologies, dominant feminist perspectives on modernization, and normative discourses of ethics and methodology. She traces her experiences in the lively Rio Street of Manenberg, an impoverished colored community on the outskirts of Cape Town. Through rich descriptions of her interactions with the women of Manenberg, Salo poses critical reflections about shared temporalities and gender and raced identities. Salo uses the term “native anthropologist” because she was studying a familiar place, the colored township of Manenberg, South Africa, and she was looking at the experiences of colored women with whom she shared gendered and racial classification under the old apartheid system. An important issue when considering one’s own power in relation to the people that we study is our own choice as researchers what to disclose to research participants. From a traditional research ethics perspective this translates to informed consent about the research process and other important information about the project (Escobedo et al. 2007). However, issues of disclosure become more complex when we are working with a social agenda in mind, when we connect with participants as human beings and not as the all-powerful researcher. In chapter 9, “Interrogating our

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research processes: reflexive positioning in an IPA study of women family cancer caregivers,” Githaiga examines the experiences of Kenyan women cancer caregivers. Githaiga disclosed to her participants her experience of caring for her father who was diagnosed with incurable cancer, and in this way she negotiated the position of “insider”. She discusses this “insider” position and shows how it often led to a blurring of boundaries: “I felt like they were telling my story”. These moments of connection with the participants are significant as they often entail an “emotional pull” to memories of past trauma and hurt on the part of the researcher—such connection has powerful implications for how the research process unfolds (our narratives connect with and drive the process) and how we interpret the data (we are processing what women say through our own emotional memory mechanism). The chapters in this section highlight a point that Finlay (2002) has made about reflexivity. When it comes to the actual research process, Finlay (2002, 209) argues, engaging in reflexivity is “full of muddy ambiguity and multiple trails”. Indeed, the act of narrating the “unspeakable” aspects of qualitative work means moving into dangerous territory, because by interrogating our actions, and sometimes exposing the inadequacy of our methods, we are, in essence, admitting that these research processes are far from perfect, or even fair. Yet, we believe that it is crucial to be explicit about our choices and to acknowledge that we are more than just researchers, we are human beings who connect to participants on various levels. Reflexive practice in research can help us adapt our research methods in ways that can engage more deeply with nuances of culture and the different positions and realities that we all bring with to the research encounter. It ensures the vitality of research processes (Bondi 2003). Thus, we come to a deeper understanding of our participants’ “truth” (and our “truth” as researchers).

Some Concluding Thoughts Dilemmas of power and ethically acceptable research relationships need to be revisited repeatedly because they cannot ever fully be resolved, asymmetries will always be present, especially when conducting research in the current post-apartheid South Africa of poverty, deprivation, and hopelessness. In this compilation we add to the body of work that has begun to question a mere self-reflexive reflexivity that adheres to the prescriptions of “standard” social science ethics—what Etherington (2007, 601) refers to as “dutiful ethics”. The contributors show that close attention to the

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processes of the production of research creates the possibility of yielding rich new insights within the field of qualitative gender work, and that engaging in deeper levels of reflexive engagement is a means to do just this. The contributors of this compilation offer significant moments of reflection about their research and their research subjects. In this way we highlight ways in which feminist scholars can engage in gender work in important ways that enhance a move towards a more “ethical reflexivity,” which enhances human worth and dignity. These reflections highlight the importance of interrogating the difficulties of research rather than blinkering ourselves to the challenges and dilemmas that often form part of the research process. It is through confronting these difficulties head on that we can gain valuable insight that can evolve the processes and production of future gender work in subSaharan Africa. We ask important questions that may help feminist researchers who are serious about adopting a social change agenda proceed through the “messiness” of social research. Our wish is for this compilation to stand as a resource for young feminist researchers who have not been formally taught ways in which to express their intuitions that they experience as researchers who are studying gender in the African context. We also want this work to stand as a source of inspiration to more experienced scholars in the field who may require some renewed hope and fresh ideas in the field of gender work. We hope that this book fuels courage to make previously silenced processes and relations transparent, to learn from these significant moments, and to move towards a much needed new paradigm of knowledge production that forefronts ethical work and our significant connections as human beings.

References Bondi, Liz. 2003. “Empathy and Identification: Conceptual Resources for Feminist Fieldwork.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2(1): 64–76. —. 2009. “Teaching Reflexivity: Undoing or Reinscribing Habits of Gender?” Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 33(3): 327–37. DOI: 10.1080/03098260902742417 Boonzaier, Floretta. 2014. “Methodological Disruptions: Interviewing Domestically Violent Men across a ‘Gender Divide’.” NORMA International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 9(4): 232–48. DOI:10.1080/18902138.2014.974868

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Callaghan, Jane, and Jude Clark. 2006. “Feminist Theory and Conflict.” In Inter-Group Relations: South African Perspectives, edited by Kopano Ratele, 87–110. Cape Town: Juta & Co. Colombo, Monica (2003). “Reflexivity and Narratives in Action Research: A Discursive Approach.” Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 4(2). Davies, Bronwyn, and Rom Harré. 1990. “Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 20(1): 43–63. Davies, Bronwyn, Brown, Jenny, Gannon, Susanne, Hopkins, Lekkie, and McCann, Helen. 2006. “Constituting the Feminist Subject in Poststructuralist Discourse.” Feminism & Psychology, 16(1): 87–103. DOI: 10.1177/0959-353506060825 De Lauretis, Teresa. 1987. Technologies of Gender: Essays in Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Denzin, Norman K. 1997. Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Escobedo, Crisol, Guerrero, Javier, Lujan, Gilbert, Ramirez, Abril, and Diana Serrano. 2007. “Ethical Issues with Informed Consent.” BioEthics, 1: 1–8. Etherington, Kim. 2007. “Ethical Research in Reflexive Relationships.” Qualitative Inquiry, 13(5): 599–616.DOI: 10.1177/1077800407301175 Finlay, Linda. 2002. “Negotiating the Swamp: The Opportunity and Challenge of Reflexivity in Research Practice.” Qualitative Research, 2(2): 209–30.DOI: 10.1177/146879410200200205 Goldblatt, Beth, and Sheila Meintjes. 1997. “Dealing With the Aftermath: Sexual Violence and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Agenda, 36: 7–18. Guillemin, Marilys, and Lynn Gillam. 2004. “Ethics, Reflexivity, and ‘Ethically Important Moments’ in Research.” Qualitative Inquiry, 10(2): 261–80.DOI: 10.1177/1077800403262360 Harris, Bronwyn. 2002. “Xenophobia: A New Pathology for a New South Africa.” In Psychopathology and Social Prejudice, edited by Derek Hook, and Gillian Eagle, 169–84. Cape Town: Cape Town University Press. Hoel, Nina. 2013. “Embodying the Field: A Researcher’s Reflections on Power Dynamics, Positionality and the Nature of Research Relationships.” Fieldwork in Religion, 8(1): 27–49. hooks, bell. 2002. “Choosing and Learning to Love.” In Communion: The Female Search for Love, edited by Gloria Watkins, 90–104. New York: Harper Collins.

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Hydén, Margareta. 2008. “Narrating Sensitive Topics.” In Doing Narrative Research, edited by Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire, and Maria Tamboukou, 121–36. London: Sage. Kobayashi, Audrey. 2003. “GPC Ten Years On: Is Self-Reflexivity Enough?” Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 10(4): 345–9.DOI 10.1080/0966369032000153313 Mauthner, Natasha S., and Andrea Doucet. 2003. “Reflexive Accounts and Accounts of Reflexivity in Qualitative Data Analysis.” Sociology, 37(3): 413–31. Melucci, Alberto. 1995. “The Process of Collective Identity.” In Social Movements and Culture, edited by Hank Johnston, and Bert Klandermans, 41–63. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Misago, Jean Pierre, Landau, Loren, and Monson, Tamlyn. 2009. Towards Tolerance, Law, and Dignity: Addressing Violence Against Foreign Nationals in South Africa. Arcadia, South Africa: International Organisation for Migration. Moffett, Helen. 2006. “‘These Women, They Force Us to Rape Them’: Rape as Narrative of Social Control in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies, 32(1): 129–44. DOI: 10.1080/03057070500493845 Naidu-Hoffmeester, Rivonia, and Rajiv Kamal. 2013. “South Africa, the World’s Rape Capital.” Accessed June 4. http://www.unisa.ac.za/news/index.php/2013/02/south-africa-theworlds-rape-capital/ Oakley, Ann. 2003. “Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms.” In Turning Points in Qualitative Research: Tying Knots in a Handkerchief, edited by Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Norman K. Denzin, 243–64. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Parker, Ian. 2005. “Reflexivity.” In Qualitative Research, edited by Ian Parker, 25–35. England: Open University Press. Pillow, Wanda. 2003. “Confession, Catharsis, or Cure? Rethinking the Uses of Reflexivity as Methodological Power in Qualitative Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(2): 175–6. DOI: 10.1080/0951839032000060635 Riley, Sarah, Schouten, Wendy, and Sharon, Cahill. 2003. “Exploring the Dynamics of Subjectivity and Power between Researcher and Researched.” FORUM: Qualitative Social Research, 4(2): article 40. Strauss, Helene. 2011. “Cinema of Social Recuperation: Xenophobic Violence and Migrant Subjectivity in Contemporary South Africa.” Subjectivity: International Journal of Critical Psychology, 4(2): 103– 20.DOI:10.1057/sub.2011.7

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Swartz, Sharlene. 2011. “‘Going Deep’ and ‘Giving Back’: Strategies for Exceeding Ethical Expectations When Researching Amongst Vulnerable Youth.” Qualitative Research, 11(1): 47–68.



PART I MULTIPLE “SELVES” IN CONTEXT: DISRUPTING GENDERED CATEGORIES AND DEFINITIONS

CHAPTER ONE RAPE AND THE LIMITS OF THE LAW: REVISITING THE CRITICISM AGAINST THE SOUTH AFRICAN SEXUAL VIOLENCE LEGISLATION AZILLE COETZEE

Introduction A few years after the advent of democracy, South Africa’s Sexual Offences Act 23 of 1957, along with the common law on sexual violence, was subjected to extensive revision by the Law Reform Commission and replaced in 2007 with the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences and Related Matters) Amendment Act 32 of 2007 (the New Sexual Offences Act). The New Sexual Offences Act was aimed at addressing the problems with the previous outdated Act, for example the fact that, in the eyes of the law, only women could be raped and only men could rape, and that many acts of sexual assault that are arguably equally as humiliating and invasive as rape were not included in the definition of rape (for example coerced penetration of the anus).1 However the results of the law reform are widely criticized by feminists and legal scholars. These criticisms are directed at two aspects of the new Act, namely first, the fact that the consent requirement was retained and second, the gender-neutral wording of the Act. In this chapter I will ask what the implication of this is for the fight against sexual violence in South Africa2 and to what extent South African feminists should pursue this fight through legal reform. I will be asking this question in light of Carol Smart’s skepticism of the law as an appropriate medium through which to effect feminist transformation, as argued in her book Feminism and the Power of Law (1989) which, although being twenty years old, still poses a question that feminist legal scholars take seriously today. Smart argues that the power of the law lies in its ability to disqualify certain types of knowledge. Moreover, according to Smart, the

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law functions on an oppositional logic at the heart of which lies a hierarchical understanding of the masculine/feminine3 opposition. I will show how this hierarchical and oppositional logic, as well as the disqualification of women’s experiences, are also at the root of the criticisms that feminists have leveled against the New Sexual Offences Act in so far as most of these criticisms come down to the fact that the definition of rape in the new Act serves to entrench and sustain the sexual hierarchy that underlies the widespread phenomenon of rape. Smart’s analysis thus suggests that the problems of sex/gender hierarchy identified in the New Sexual Offences Act go much deeper than the definition of rape and that addressing these problems thus requires a transformation of the nature and the power of the law itself. On this basis I conclude that South African feminists fighting against sexual violence should be aware of the limits of legal reform and if they choose to pursue change through legal means, they should also direct their efforts at the transformation of the power and the logic of the law and its power to define. I start in the next section by providing an overview of the legal reform process of South Africa’s sexual violence legislation. Thereafter I discuss the prevalent view of the nature of sexual violence as both a result of and cause of sex/gender inequality. In sections four and five I discuss, mostly drawing on the work of South African feminist philosopher, Louise Du Toit, the problems with firstly the consent requirement in the New Sexual Offences Act, and secondly, its gender-neutral wording. Lastly, I explore the question of what feminists can and should expect of the law in addressing the problem of rape in South Africa.

The Reform Process Prior to the reforms, the prevailing definition of rape in the South African criminal law hailed from the common law in terms of which rape was defined as “the intentional unlawful sexual intercourse with a woman without her consent” (Burchell and Milton 2000, 699). Sexual intercourse was defined as the penetration of the vagina by the penis. In the Masiya case (2007)4 the meaning of rape was extended to include acts of nonconsensual penetration of a penis into the anus of a female. The common law definition of rape was severely criticized by South African scholars and courts alike. The most obvious reason is that according to the definition only women could be victims of rape and only men could be rapists. Accordingly, the gender-specific common law definition of rape was not able to account for male victims or female perpetrators of rape (South African Law Reform Commission Discussion Paper 85 1999, 81).

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It was also argued that such a gender-specific definition “sexualizes” the crime of rape and as a result “women are confirmed and entrenched as the eternal passive victims of sexual violence” (Naylor 2008, 25). Accordingly, the argument is that the stereotypes that promote sexual violence are perpetuated and entrenched through a gender-specific approach to rape. On this basis law reform was deemed necessary to provide for a gender-neutral definition of rape in order to include male victims and female perpetrators of rape and to destabilize naturalized sexual hierarchies in accordance with which femininity is automatically associated with victimhood. A further problem that was identified with the common law definition is the fact that many acts that are just as harmful and humiliating as the forced or coerced penetration by a penis of a vagina, like the penetration of the mouth by the penis, or the penetration of an anus by a penis or any other object, did not fall within the category of rape. It was thus argued that the definition of rape should be broadened in order to include such acts under the crime of rape (South African Law Reform Commission Discussion Paper 85 1999, 81). Lastly, consent as the distinguishing factor between sex and rape was identified as a highly problematic concept for various reasons. In this regard Naylor (2008, 42) explains that the South African Law Reform Commission declared in its Discussion Paper 85 (1999, 114), after thorough comparative research regarding rape law reform, that: It is essential to redefine the offence of rape to be reliant on “coercive circumstances” rather than absence of consent in order to establish prima facie unlawfulness. A shift from “absence of consent” to “coercion” represents a shift of focus of the utmost importance from the subjective state of mind of the victim to the imbalance of power between the parties on the occasion in question. This perspective also allows one to understand that coercion constitutes more than physical force or threat thereof, but may also include various other forms of exercise of power over another person: emotional, psychological, economic, social or organizational power.

Discussion Paper 85 (1999, 112) also states that as a result of the difficulty of interpreting the meaning of consent, the courts often rely on stereotypical notions of consenting sexual behavior in order to come to a decision regarding the guilt of the accused. Such stereotyped views then inform the decisions of police and other role players in the prosecution process to screen out cases in which consent seems to be a major issue. There are three main problems with the consent approach as recognized by the Law Reform Commission. Firstly, there is the difficulty of proving rape when its defining characteristic (namely lack of consent) is to be found in the head and possibly in the behavior of the victim, rather than in

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the objective facts of the occurrence. Secondly, the consent approach is insensitive to the hierarchical relations and issues of inequality underlying rape. Thirdly, consent contributes to the construction of harmful stereotypes of women and their behavior, which are then used against them in rape cases. These will be discussed below, along with other problems resulting from the consent approach. The Law Reform Commission thus advocated the replacement of the term “without consent” by the term “under coercive circumstances.” The abovementioned problems, as well as other considerations, resulted in the initiation of the rape law reform process by the Law Reform Commission. In the Law Reform Commission’s Discussion Paper 85 (1999, 115), rape was defined gender neutrally, with reference to “sexual penetration” (which was defined in a much broader way than penetration of a vagina by a penis) and in terms of coercive circumstances: Any person who intentionally and unlawfully commits an act of sexual penetration with another person, or who intentionally and unlawfully causes another person to commit such an act, is guilty of an offence. For the purposes of this Act, an act of sexual penetration is prima facie unlawful if it takes place in any coercive circumstances.

The proposed inclusion of “coercive circumstances” was welcomed by scholars as bringing South African rape legislation in line with international developments and trends (Albertyn et al. 2007, 17). However, the Redrafted Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Amendment Bill B20-2003 that was released in 2006 returned to a consent-based definition of rape. Following on this redrafted Bill, the current definition of rape in section 3 of our New Sexual Offences Act is as follows: Any person (“A”) who unlawfully and intentionally commits an act of sexual penetration with a complainant (“B”), without the consent of B, is guilty of the offence of rape. “Sexual penetration” is defined as including: Any act which causes penetration to any extent whatsoever by (a) the genital organs of one person into or beyond the genital organs, anus, or mouth of another person; (b) any other part of the body of one person or, any object, including any part of the body of an animal, into or beyond the genital organs or anus of another person; or (c) the genital organs of an animal, into or beyond the mouth of another person.

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The New Sexual Offences Act also includes in its definitional section a list of circumstances under which a person (“B”) does not voluntarily or without coercion agree to an act of sexual violation.5 South African legal scholar Nikki Naylor (2008, 48) explains that this definition is the exact definition of rape that is contained in the United Kingdom (UK) Sexual Offences Act of 2003, except that our Act fails to include the detailed evidential and conclusive presumptions regarding consent that accompany the definition of rape in the UK Act. This entails a list of examples where consent is not present in section 74 of the Act. The prosecution only has to prove that sexual activity occurred in one of the circumstances on the list, in which case the evidential burden to prove consent is shifted onto the defendant. Accordingly, although consent is retained in the UK definition of rape, the prosecution is relieved of the notorious difficulty of proving non-consent. This is not the case in the New Sexual Offences Act of South Africa, where the onus remains on the prosecution to prove that consent was not present, even if the alleged rape occurred in the context of one of the listed “coercive circumstances.” Therefore, even though the reform process was largely driven by a critique of the consent-based definition, the element of consent was retained in the reformed New Sexual Offences Act. The biggest change that was effected by the reform process is that the definition of rape is now couched in gender-neutral terms.

Rape and Sex Inequality Before exploring the criticisms against the New Sexual Offences Act I will briefly explain the understanding of rape that underlies most of the criticism. The prevalent argument among feminist scholars is that sexual violence is not simply an instance of private, criminal violence (like physical assault), but that it fulfills a very specific political function which entails the large-scale subordination of women/the feminine and, as a result, the maintenance of patriarchal rule in our society. In this regard Naylor (2008, 23) writes: The intention of gender-based violence is to perpetuate and promote hierarchical gender relations. No matter how the violence is manifested it ultimately serves the same end: the preservation of male control and power. ... Sexual violence is thus seen and contextualized as a form of social control.

This implies that rape is a gendered as well as a gendering phenomenon which cannot be understood independently of its sexual

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meanings: it is an act perpetrated as a masculine form of dominance over the feminine through sexual means. The argument in this regard is that rape is aimed at cruelly displaying and maintaining one type of sexual being’s dominance over another. Cahill (2001, 27), an American feminist scholar, points out that rape is distinct from other forms of political violence in that here group domination is exercised through sexual means, invoking the sexuality of the perpetrator as well as of the victim. Cahill (2001, 27) explains that the crime of rape differs significantly and importantly from other forms of violent attack in so far as it achieves its goal of domination through sexual means. Cahill makes the further point that rape enacts a kind of differentiation that constructs the difference between the sexes in a hierarchical way, where the feminine/woman is deemed inferior. She writes: A significant element of the woman victim’s experience of rape is directly related to the constitutive element of a power discourse that produces her body as violable, weak, and alien to her subjectivity. From the rape victim’s perspective, although not necessarily consciously (in fact, precisely in a bodily way), these meanings too are part of the crime in so far as that particular action is perceived as a threat fulfilled. (Cahill 2001, 162)

Accordingly, the ever-present threat of sexual violence as experienced by women results in the production of a specifically feminine body comportment (Cahill 2001, 159). The pervasive threat of sexual violence produces a vulnerable feminine body resulting therein that women cannot express their sexuality as freely as men, lack the physical mobility and freedom that men experience, and are much more aware of their potential victimhood (Cahill 2001, 159). The phenomenon of rape thus “produces and presents women as pre-victims expecting to be victimized (not because men are rapists, but because women’s bodies are rapeable)” (Cahill 2001, 159). The argument is thus that rape is a means by which patriarchal domination is maintained in society through shaping feminine sexuality in a very specific way and thereby keeping women in their place.6 Sexual violence is therefore a distinctly gendered phenomenon that serves patriarchal social control through the hierarchical construction of sexual relations and the production of a weak feminine body.7 Rape is thus understood as an issue of sex or gender inequality: it serves the system of patriarchal oppression of the female or feminine. Accordingly, the eradication of sexual violence would be central to the achievement of equality between the sexes, and such equality would mean that rape would not be tolerated.

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This view has been acknowledged in South African law. In the case of Masiya (2007), Judge Nkabinde writes that: it is now widely accepted that sexual violence and rape not only offends the privacy and dignity of women but also reflects the unequal power relations between men and women in our society. (para. 28)

In the same case the Constitutional Court shows an even more nuanced understanding of rape as a gendered and gendering phenomenon which is a tool for the oppression of the feminine by the masculine, even in the case of male victims: The groups of men who are most often the survivors of rape, young boys, prisoners and homosexuals, are, like women, also vulnerable groups in our society. Moreover, they, and most other male victims, are raped precisely because of the gendered nature of the crime. They are dominated in the same manner and for the same reason that women are dominated; because of a need for male gender-supremacy. That they lack a vagina does not make the crime of male rape any less gender-based. (para. 86)

In this case the Constitutional Court thus recognizes rape as both an issue of sex/gender and an issue of inequality. This is in step with the views of prominent feminists like Cahill and Du Toit and other feminist legal scholars like MacKinnon, Albertyn and Naylor, to name a few. Furthermore, sexual violence is listed in the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act 4 of 2000 (hereinafter referred to as PEPUDA)8as an instance of unfair discrimination on the ground of gender. This implies further recognition of the fact that sexual violence is an issue relating to sex/gender inequality. The important point here for purposes of the rest of the chapter is that rape is a highly gendered and political crime that is enabled by sex/gender inequality, but also, at the same time, serves to support and sustain gender/sex inequality. Addressing the problem of rape thus requires an awareness of the power imbalances and implicit forms of force that underlie any rape situation.

Consent and Inequality In this section I will, drawing mostly on the arguments of Du Toit, but also on the work of prominent American legal scholar, Catherine MacKinnon, explain how the notion of consent9 at the center of the definition of rape leads to a hierarchized understanding of sexual relations which is at the same time naturalized, so that this hierarchy is not presented as a fundamental inequality.

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The overriding problem with a consent-based approach to rape, which also underlies the practical and evidentiary difficulties outlined by the Law Reform Commission referred to above, is that it roots the definition of rape in sexual hierarchy.10 The presence of consent in the definition of rape as a feature that distinguishes consensual sexual intercourse and rape implies that sexual relations are naturally hierarchized, in so far as it construes “normal” sexual intercourse as something that is actively pursued by one party and passively received by the other. Du Toit points out that even though the sex of A, who initiates the sexual encounter, and B, who must decide whether or not to consent, is not specified in the New Sexual Offences Act, the definition does nothing to counter the established understanding of masculine sexuality as dominant and feminine sexuality as passive. The result of the combination of the gender-neutral language and the concept of consent is thus that A is assumed to be a man, whose role is to initiate sex, and B is assumed to be a woman (or a feminized man), whose role is to submit. Accordingly, the position of the victim remains implicitly feminized, “since ‘consent’ to masculine sexual initiative is seen as the appropriate form of (weak) sexual agency for those designated ‘female’ or ‘feminine’” (Du Toit 2012a, 468). The genderneutrality of the definition therefore does not alter or fight these assumptions, but merely hides it. I will return to this point in the next section. This one-sided understanding of “normal” sexual relations perpetuates an understanding of naturalized sexual domination by men in so far as the feminine is seen as “inherently sexually passive” (Du Toit 2012b, 398) and therefore “passive sexual consent is taken as the default position” (Du Toit 2012b, 398). This allows for a much greater tolerance of rape and limits condemnation thereof: the line between rape and “normal” sexual activity becomes very fine. This makes it difficult for the court to distinguish between genuine and apparent consent in so far as “rape has to forever demarcate itself from naturalized or normalized heterosexual encounters, which views forced sexual penetration as normal” (Du Toit 2012b, 397). Furthermore, any sexual activity by a woman beyond coyness and resistance is easily seen as provocation. A further problematic aspect of the concept of consent in the definition of rape identified by Du Toit, which ties in very closely with the previous one, is that the inequality between the sexes is naturalized as biologicallybased sexual difference and is accordingly not understood as an issue of political inequality. In other words, the concept of consent allows the law to assume equality between the sexes, despite the hierarchical understanding of feminine sexuality as submissive and masculine sexuality as dominant. This hierarchy is seen as natural and thus not an instance of

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inequality, but merely as difference. In this regard Du Toit (2007, 62) explains that the consent doctrine in rape law constitutes a performative contradiction in so far as it assumes a free and autonomous subject with full-blown sexual agency (capable of asserting her or his own sexual agenda), but at the same time it undercuts such freedom and agency by constructing feminine sexuality as inherently passive and submissive. Du Toit argues that, on the one hand, the law does not allow women any sexual agency (by regarding sex as an act in which the feminine plays no active role): the woman merely submits to the sexual agency which men exercise on her. On the other hand, by making non-consent the defining factor of rape, the law assumes that it is working with a fully autonomous and free person who has full-blown sexual agency and the final say over her own body. Du Toit (2007, 62) articulates the dilemma powerfully: The law thus frames and constructs “normal heterosexual” intercourse as a male-driven, forceful and one-sided event involving woman’s essentially passive sexualized body, but then in its tail, right at the end, it turns the woman’s consent, her response, into a crucial axis for determining the very nature of the event.

Defining rape in terms of consent only makes sense if, firstly, the woman is in a position where she has the freedom and power to refuse consent to unwanted sex; secondly, if her non-consent will be interpreted as such by her assailant as well as by the legal system; and thirdly, if her non-consent will have the authority to ward off any unwanted sexual acts. MacKinnon (2005, 245) explains that “within its legal ambit, consent can include sex that is wanted, but it can also include sex that is not at all wanted and is forced by inequality.” South African feminist legal philosopher Karin Van Marle (2007, 75) notes in this regard that “consent can only have meaning within a context where dissent and refusal are real possibilities,” and thus where forms of force and inequality that eliminate the possibility of dissent are uncovered. In this vein, and similar to Du Toit’s argument, MacKinnon (2006, 955) holds that the reason for the general failure of rape legislation to result in successful convictions is that it incorrectly assumes equality of power between the parties involved through invoking the element of consent. MacKinnon argues that because rape, in terms of the consent approach, hinges on what transpired in the psychic space of the victim, and necessitates no exploration of the forms of force and inequality that might underlie the rape, “consent” is a highly inappropriate way of conceptualizing the boundary between sex and rape, in so far as it isolates the event from

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the structures of inequality that surround it (MacKinnon 2006, 955). MacKinnon (2005, 243) explains that: when the law of rape finds consent to sex, it does not look to see if the parties were social equals in any sense, nor does it require mutuality or positive choice in sex, far less simultaneity of desire.

Furthermore, MacKinnon (2005) argues that even the criminal law’s treatment of force in the context of rape does not display an awareness of the hierarchy between the sexes, in so far as the dominant positions that men occupy in the power structures of society are not acknowledged as forms of force at all. MacKinnon (2005, 244) lists the following as instances of such forms of force: the economic superiority and domination of men as employers, dominance in the patriarchal family, the power and authority of teachers and religious leaders, the dominance of men in state offices (such as policemen and prison guards), and: the credibility any man has (some have much more than others based on race and class and age), not to mention the clout of male approval and the masculine ability to affirm and confirm feminine identity.

The insensitivity of South African courts to these forms of power is strikingly exhibited in the Zuma case (2006)11 where the then vice president, Jacob Zuma, was accused of raping a young woman. In this case the effects of Zuma’s powerful political position, his positioning as patriarch in a big family, as well as the complainant’s financial dependence on him, were not considered by the court at all. Related to these issues, Du Toit (2012b, 390) argues that the consent requirement in the definition of rape makes of rape a sexual rather than a violent offence (in so far as it is not about what was done to the rape victim and under what circumstances, but to what extent she participated in the sexual act), thereby privatizing it and stripping it of its political meanings. Moreover, Du Toit (2012b, 393) argues that the consent requirement objectifies women’s bodies in so far as it sustains the Cartesian split between “self” and “body” by viewing the woman as “the rightful owner of the sexual property in her body,” thereby enabling her to consent to have this sexual property used by another. The implication of these points of criticism is that a consent-based definition of rape remains unable to recognize and deal with the systemic structures of inequality that at once justify and are perpetuated by sexual violence. Through naturalizing masculine dominance and feminine submission, the inequality underlying the problem of rape is supported and

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perpetuated, as sexual hierarchy is not acknowledged as inequality. In this regard our definition of rape thus reflects the same assumption that underlies the problem of sexual violence in our society, namely that the sexual domination of women is not unacceptable or wrong, but merely the result of natural interaction between masculine and feminine sexualities. On this basis feminist scholars argue in favor of rather defining rape in terms of coercive circumstances. If rape is defined in terms of coercion, proof of physical acts and the surrounding context become decisive (MacKinnon 2006, 942). The questions that are then asked concern the material plane of concrete events: “who did what to whom and sometimes why” (MacKinnon 2006, 942). Force and inequality are thus factors that can more readily be taken into account if rape is defined in terms of coercive circumstances. Similarly Du Toit (2012b, 399) argues that a focus on coercive circumstances does not allow the law to presume at the same time both the capacity for meaningful consent and the likelihood of actual consent, but rather contextualizes rape within the actually existing power inequalities.

Gender-Neutral Language and Male Bias In her article From Consent to Coercive Circumstances: Rape Law Reform on Trial (2012b) Du Toit explains the problems with consent specifically in the context of the gender-neutral provision in the New Sexual Offences Act. She argues that through the presence of the concept of consent, the definition of rape in the New Sexual Offences Act retains a highly gendered understanding of the dynamics of rape and the relation between perpetrator and victim even though the rape definition is worded in gender-neutral terms (Du Toit 2012b, 382). She explains this as follows: Even though the law opens up the possibility to acknowledge female perpetrators and male victims of rape, it re-inscribes its 1957 logic of viewing the rape accused along masculine lines as representing active sexuality and the complainant in the rape case along feminine lines as representing passive sexuality. The reformed law does not challenge but rather reinforces the pervasive view of human sexuality as an intrinsic (naturally given) power inequality existing along an axis of normative masculine, active sexuality versus devalued or deviant feminine, passive sexuality. (Du Toit 2012b, 382)

Although couched in gender neutral terms, the crime is thus still genderized, gender being encoded hierarchically. Du Toit (2012b, 385) argues that the apparent gender-neutral language merely serves to hide the

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masculine bias, making it all the more pernicious and obscuring the way in which “rape functions to enforce violently a gendered hierarchy between masculine and feminine, while sometimes including under the feminine boys and other men.” The gender neutrality of the language thus works to depoliticize the crime further. In her article Sexual Specificity, Rape Law Reform and the Feminist Quest for Justice (2012a) Du Toit outlines the problems inherent to the gender-neutral language of the New Sexual Offences Act and this issue of depoliticization is central in her criticisms. She writes: If rape is viewed as a gender neutral crime it may be wrongly assumed that one’s actual sex and gender are purely incidental to raping others or to being raped by another. This is simply not the case, and rape remains a deeply gendered crime. (Du Toit 2012a, 470)

She explains that the gender-neutral language in combination with the consent requirement dismisses rape’s political dimension and results in the feminization and privatization of the issue (Du Toit 2012a, 470). Du Toit (2012a, 472) further argued that the naming of body parts such as “mouth,” “anus,” and “genital organ” in ungendered terms and as if they are mutually interchangeable and gender neutral obscures the fact that “women do not ‘have’ a penetrating sexual organ and men do, and that women have much greater difficulty accessing rape as a tool of sexual power and domination than men.” She writes: The law can thus not acknowledge the phenomenon of rape as one of the most important ways in which possession of a penis is violently and materially endowed with (sexual) power, and lacking a penis is symbolized and materialized as powerlessness in terms of being (sexually) subjugated on the grounds that females are fundamentally and preeminently rapeable and thus sexually accessible for use by a masculine other. (Du Toit 2012a, 472)

Another central issue regarding gender-neutral language that Du Toit points out is that in our symbolic order, what seems to be gender neutral is centered on a masculine standard or model of being human. Feminist philosophers and theorists have shown in a myriad of contexts and ways that sexual difference is constructed hierarchically, so that deviance from this masculine norm is construed as inferiority. Du Toit argues that this masculine norm that underlies gender-neutral language could operate in the New Sexual Offences Act in at least two different ways. Firstly, the Cartesian unsexed and disembodied conception of the subject presumed in the definition of rape results in certain qualities being implicitly ascribed to the victim and perpetrator, and certain assumptions are made about their

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actions and experiences. Du Toit argues that this either has the effect that women are judged in accordance with a masculine norm, or alternatively, that their femininity is constructed as a deviant position (Du Toit 2012a, 469). Accordingly, when evaluating, for example, whether the victim has consented to intercourse or not, the courts implicitly measure the woman victim’s behavior against the “reasonable man” standard. Furthermore, she is assumed to be a disembodied rational being who can direct her actions in accordance with rationality, detached from a body and its experiences. In addition, she is regarded as fully autonomous and not influenced by or constituted through her relations to other people and their actions. This standard is very far removed from the reality of the flesh-and-blood woman who appears before the court. However, Du Toit (2012a, 496) explains that judging women according to an idealized masculine norm is only one side of the problem: the other possible outcome of the masculine norm implied in the gender-neutral language of the definition of rape is that femininity is constructed as a deviant position. This is done through ascribing qualities such as “fickleness, untrustworthiness, excessive emotion, and an affinity with corporeality and sex” (Du Toit 2012a, 469) to women, thereby also making it extremely difficult for them to prove rape in a court of law. Du Toit (2012a, 469) notes that a woman victim is sometimes judged in accordance with both of these standards at the same time which leads to contradictory expectations of her. The denial of sexual difference in the formulation of rape in the Western symbolic and legal order thus precludes an acknowledgment of the feminine as a category of being in its own right: femininity is either denied altogether, or is regarded as inferior and lacking in comparison to the masculine norm. The idea that femininity is compatible with the acknowledgement of a full humanity is thus absent. A second way in which the hidden masculine bias operates in a gender-neutral definition of rape which is centered on the disembodied Cartesian subject is that women’s sex-specific injuries resulting from rape can be obscured or understood as exceptional or as special pleading (Du Toit 2012a, 473–4). Women’s sex-specific embodiment means that they can sustain injuries through rape that male rape victims commonly do not, for example falling pregnant and experiencing damage to their reproductive capacity (Du Toit 2012a, 473). Because the neutral legal subject is modeled on idealized masculine subjectivity and characteristics, such injuries fall outside the scope of the “normal” or “standard” results of rape, which again leads to a limited and male-biased conceptualization of the issue of rape. Although these issues were all present in the previous sexual offences legislation too, they could be argued to be more dangerous in the new Act because they are obscured by the gender-neutral language.

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Accordingly, the use of gender-neutral language not only depoliticizes the definition of rape, and in that way hinders an understanding in courts of rape as a crime-perpetuating sex inequality; such inequality is also actively, albeit covertly, supported by the definition in so far as, in our patriarchal symbolic order, gender-neutral language carries with it an inherent masculine bias which encodes in the definition a denial of the full and equal subject position of the feminine alongside the masculine.

The Role of the Law in the Fight against Sexual Violence: What can we expect of the South African Criminal Law? In light of these arguments it seems that the only positive outcomes of the legal reform of the South African sexual offences legislation (a process that took longer than a decade) is that it also now allows for male victims and female perpetrators of rape and that it includes in the definition other harmful sexual acts that were previously excluded. Otherwise it retains all the consent-related problems of the previous Act (which are now merely concealed by the gender-neutral language, making them harder to identify and resist) and is further problematized by the gender-neutral language. This constitutes a significant setback for the feminist activists and scholars who pushed for legislative reform. What does this mean for the fight against sexual violence in South Africa? In her 1989 book, Feminism and the Power of Law, Carol Smart argues that feminists should decenter the law in their pursuit of societal transformation, because when challenging the law, feminism concedes too much by accepting the terms on which law operates. As a result she urges feminists to use non-legal strategies and to “discourage a resort to law as if it holds the key to unlock women’s oppression” (Smart 1989, 5). Van Marle (2012, 158) confirms the relevance of Smart’s ideas today: At the heart of Smart’s project was to show the problematic relationship between feminism and law, how feminism and feminists always stand back, allowing the law to take over. Unfortunately, with some exceptions, my sense is that this claim should be taken as seriously today as then. Feminism and law might appear to be on equal footing particularly because many feminists willingly embraced law, legal reform and (women’s) rights as a valid methodology. However my concern is whether feminism again is conceding too much.

Smart argues that the law exercises its power by disqualifying other knowledges and experiences in so far as non-legal knowledge is suspect and everyday experiences must be translated into another form to become

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legal issues (Smart 1989, 11). The power of the law to disqualify alternative accounts is demonstrated through the law’s practice of determining the way in which parties are allowed to speak and how it turns their experiences into something that it can “digest and process” (Smart 1989, 11). Specifically with regard to rape law Smart argues that the law presents “an impervious obstacle to a more complex understanding of rape” by combining with a binary system of logic (Smart 1989, 33). She explains that the legal method is imbued with oppositional thinking, which she explains as follows: For example active/passive, truth/lie, culture/nature, rationality/emotionality, man/woman. These binary opposites are not of equal value however. Basically one is subordinate to the other, and the subordinate one is associated with the female. Hence the concept of masculinity or maleness can only be understood by reference to femininity and femaleness, and basic to this understanding is the knowledge (meaning) that the latter is inferior to the former. (Smart 1989, 33)

And then, importantly: “I hope to show that this binary logic, which insists on binary opposites like truth/untruth, guilty/innocence, consent/non-consent, is completely inappropriate to the ‘ambiguity’ of rape” (Smart 1989, 33). In order to illustrate the way in which rape law disqualifies women’s experience she shows how the consent/non-consent dichotomy which is central to the outcome of a rape case is completely irrelevant to the woman’s experience and cannot encompass and capture the complexity of things like submission. She writes powerfully: This legal process of narrowing down the possible interpretations of behavior is linked to law’s “claim to truth.” This is because law is a powerful voice or signifier which has the authority to assert that the version of events it allows to prevail is the only truth of the event. The outcome of every rape trial which finds the accused innocent is also a finding of sexual complicity on the part of the victim. The woman must have lied. In this way the phallocentric view of women’s capricious sexuality is confirmed. In the symbolic sense, every rape case that fails is a victory for phallocentric values. (Smart 1989, 34)

The problem underlying most of the criticisms outlined in the previous sections against the New Sexual Offences Act is exactly the problem that Smart argues to be inherent to the entire legal system, namely the hierarchical understanding of sexuality where femininity and masculinity are understood as two sides of a hierarchical binary which is encoded along a set of other hierarchical oppositions, including passive/active,

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weak/strong, emotional/rational, and body/mind, thus producing and naturalizing a “rapeable” female body. Closely tied to this is the issue that the New Sexual Offences Act cannot do justice to and is not interested in the woman’s experience which is central to understanding whether rape occurred and what harm it caused, which Smart argues to be inherent to the way in which the law as a system exerts its power, namely disqualifying certain knowledges. According to Smart’s argument then, these problems lie far deeper than the wording of the New Sexual Offences Act because the oppositional and hierarchical encoding of masculine and feminine is integral to the logic in terms of which the whole system of law operates. Furthermore, the inability to understand and respect a woman as an integrated whole and sexual subject and to take into account her experiences is then a direct result of the legal method which is unable to deal with ambiguity and can only digest information that fits into the legal framework of oppositions. Du Toit provides five requirements which rape legislation should meet if it is to acknowledge the fluidity of gender hierarchy and at the same time its pervasiveness in rape law which makes it complicit in sustaining it. The first requirement is that consent should be erased from the definition (Du Toit 2012a, 481). The second requirement is that the violent and injurious nature of rape should be acknowledged and that the language of rape should allow for the articulation of sex-specific and spirit injury, without “making the reality of the claim dependent on the complainant’s ability to prove such injury” (Du Toit 2012a, 481). The third requirement is that rape law should acknowledge the gender hierarchy (which is fluid to an extent) that facilitates and re-inscribes rape (Du Toit 2012a, 481). Fourthly, Du Toit (2012a, 481) notes that rape law should be able to interrogate and problematize the sexuality and agency of the accused, thereby resisting the tendency to naturalize masculine sexuality as violent and rather emphasize the responsibility that all persons carry towards the conditions of personhood of all others. Lastly, it should draw attention to the way in which rape destroys the subjectivity of another through sexual subjugation: As such, rape law should acknowledge the way in which all embodied persons are vulnerable to intersubjective violation, an acknowledgement which would counter the tendency to trivialize rape on the basis of a putative Cartesianism (which views the body and “self” as essentially separate or dual) or on the basis of a misogynist framing of women’s sexuality as naturally passive and thus “available,” appropriable and violable. (Du Toit 2012a, 481)

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These requirements give one an idea of how nuanced and comfortable with ambiguity a good legal definition of rape should be and to what extent it should include and take seriously the experience of the rape victim in the judicial decision making process. Du Toit’s outline shows how in order to do justice to the complexities of rape, rape legislation should be reflexive and should be able to interrogate its own logic and workings and understand its own place in a network of power relations. It also should allow and make use of information without trying to fit it into the binary scheme of truth/untruth or proven/unproven and should be able to deal with a great deal of ambiguity and what is currently understood as “non-legal” issues and knowledge. According to Smart’s (1989) understanding, these things run counter to the very nature of the law. The fact that the criticisms against rape law transcend the ambit of the mere wording of rape legislation is to a certain extent reflected in Du Toit’s criticism of the gender neutrality of the Act. Her criticisms of the gender-neutral rape definition are based on the same problem for which the gender-specific definition was criticized, namely that it sexualizes rape and entrenches feminine sexuality as weak and inferior. Accordingly, the problem remained inherent to the definition even though the problematic sex-specific wording was removed in the reform process. This is partly because the concept of consent still genders the definition. However, many of Du Toit’s criticisms against the gender-neutral wording do not flow from the presence of the consent requirement, but are based on arguments about how in our symbolic order gender-neutral language is loaded with implicit male bias. In order to overcome this problem, the Act must be worded in a way that actively resists this male bias. Smart helps us to understand that the law is not a neutral instrument that can easily be harnessed in the fight against such male bias in the social and symbolic order, because the law is also founded in and operates according to a logic that takes the masculine as standard for humanity and construes sexual difference hierarchically. Expecting rape law to resist assumptions about passive feminine sexuality thus means that we expect the law to turn on itself, which requires a deeper and more radical transformation than changing the wording of legislation. The same kind of point can be made with regard to the issue of consent. Naylor (2008, 27) argues that even if consent is written out of the definition of rape the problem of consent is likely to remain an issue in most rape cases. This is because the accused will still be able to use consent as a defense and Naylor explains that this appears to be the case in jurisdictions where the consent approach has been replaced with a coercive circumstances approach (Naylor 2008, 27). Consequently, even though the binary of consent/non-consent is removed

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from the definition of rape and replaced with coercive circumstances, the trial very easily slides back into the binary because the system operates on such oppositional logic. It can thus be argued that the ambiguity of rape and the complexity of the experiences surrounding it keep escaping the law’s reach in so far as the law can only deal with it and is only interested therein to the extent that it is translated into terms that fit the binary logic of law. Thus, in merely insisting on legal reform, feminists are confirming and accepting a system that by its very nature disqualifies their experiences and operates through a harmful oppositional logic which is rooted in masculine bias. According to Smart the more productive feminist exercise would be to challenge the power of the law and its ability to define. She argues that it is the law’s power to define and disqualify which should become the focus of feminist strategy, rather than legal reform as such, in that feminism offers political gains in its ability to redefine truth of events (Smart 1989, 165). According to Smart the legal forum provides a space to engage in a process of redefinition and that feminists have so far managed to redefine harmless flirtation into sexual harassment, misplaced paternal affection into child sexual abuse, etc. (Smart 1989, 165). She writes: It is important to resists the temptation that law offers, namely the promise of a solution. It is equally important to challenge the power of law and to insist on the legitimacy of feminist knowledge and feminism’s ability to redefine the wrongs of women which law too often confines to insignificance. (Smart 1989, 165)

The point is not that we should abandon the law completely. Smart (1989) does concede to the importance of challenging the law. She notes that the law constitutes an important way of giving meaning to the world and of organizing social institutions and processes (Smart 1989, 49). As a result it can define women’s sexuality in an oppressive way and accordingly it cannot be ignored (Smart 1989, 49). Accordingly she argues that the law should be challenged, but “we should not make the mistake that law can provide the solution to the oppression that it celebrates and sustains” (Smart 1989, 49). Drucilla Cornell (1995) justifies her feminist work in law by arguing that law is a powerful part of culture and it should be challenged. However, she also warns that it is important to recognize the law as a “field of coercion” and that any attempt to further the cause of feminism through legal projects is thus inherently limited (Cornell 1995, 26). Accordingly:

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feminism must not entrench itself in the realm of legal struggle as the primary arena of its political and personal aspirations to change the social world and our form of life. (Cornell 1995, 26)

There is thus a strong argument to be made that feminists should not be looking to the South African criminal law system as a solution to the problem of rape in South Africa and that we should pursue the fight through other channels and mediums. Even though the law should not be abandoned entirely, the limits of pursuing change through law reform should be acknowledged. Moreover, we should set our sights higher than only changing rape legislation, we should engage in a project of redefinition, in legal forums and elsewhere, of concepts like masculinity, femininity, personhood, the body and sex, all of which are loaded with problematic meanings that support and sustain the widespread practice of rape in South Africa as well as the legal system’s tolerance of it.

Notes  1 In the previous Act rape was defined as follows: “a man commits rape when he engages in intercourse with a woman (not his wife); by force or threat of force, against her will and without her consent.” 2 South African rape statistics are of the worst in the world. The South African Police Service (SAPS) crime statistics of 2010/2011 report that 56,272 cases of rape were reported during that year. Furthermore, this figure is estimated to reflect merely a fraction of the rapes that actually occurred, in so far as studies have found that only one in nine rapes are reported (Jewkes and Abrahams 2002, 1233). Less than half of reported rape cases result in the initial arrest of the alleged perpetrator in order to start the prosecution process, and a trial commences in only 14.7 percent of cases (Vetten et al.2008, 7). A 2012 study by Interpol estimates that a woman is raped every 17 seconds, and that one in four women in South Africa suffers domestic violence (Odhiambo 2011). The SAPS rape statistics of 2007– 2011 report that 26 percent of reported rape cases in South Africa are retracted before they get to court, 53 percent of reported cases are thrown out of court, and in only 11 percent of reported cases are there successful convictions (Gouws 2012, 8). In addition, statistics reveal that the incidence of rape in South Africa is not decreasing but increasing (SAPS Crime Report 2011, 10). 3 I want to draw a distinction between my use of the words “masculine” and “feminine” on the one hand, and “male” and “female” on the other. With “masculine” and “feminine” I refer to the symbolic categories of being that are associated with different sets of sexed values and characteristics. Where “femininity” is associated with values like vulnerability, motherhood, dependence, plurality, and is regarded as corresponding to an ethics of care, “masculinity” is constructed as invulnerable, independent, singular and corresponding to an ethics



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 of justice. Feminist scholars have shown in a variety of disciplines and contexts that, in a patriarchal symbolic order, masculinity and femininity are set up in a hierarchical dichotomy, where masculinity is the dominant position and its characteristics and corresponding values are deemed to be more important than those of the feminine. Even though femininity is seen as the appropriate category of being for women and masculinity as the appropriate category of being for men, masculinity and femininity are positions that can be taken up by either male or female persons. Women often need to become masculine and embrace masculine values in order to be recognized by society on political or professional levels. On the other hand, men who are more feminine are seen as having taken up an inferior position and are often marginalized. It will be argued in this chapter that rape serves the domination of the masculine over the feminine. Even though this results in the oppression of both women and feminized men, my focus will be on the oppression and harm that women suffer through it and as a result of it. 4 Masiya v Director of Public Prosecutions (Pretoria) and Others 2007 (8) BCLR 827 (CC). 5 These include, but are not limited to: (a) Where B (the complainant) submits or is subjected to such a sexual act as a result of the use of force or intimidation by A (the accused person) against B, C (a third person) or D (another person) or against the property of B, C or D; or a threat of harm by A against B, C or D or against the property of B, C or D; (b) where there is an abuse of power or authority by A to the extent that B is inhibited from indicating his or her unwillingness or resistance to the sexual act, or unwillingness to participate in such a sexual act; (c) where the sexual act is committed under false pretences or by fraudulent means, including where B is led to believe by A that B is committing such a sexual act with a particular person who is in fact a different person; or such a sexual act is something other than that act; or (d) where B is incapable in law of appreciating the nature of the sexual act, including where B is, at the time of the commission of such sexual act- asleep; unconscious; in an altered state of consciousness, including under the influence of any medicine, drug, alcohol or other substance, to the extent that B’s consciousness or judgment is adversely affected; a child below the age of 12 years; or a person who is mentally disabled. 6 Although men and boys also get raped, they make up world-wide, at most, about seven percent of all rape victims, and less than one percent of perpetrators are women (Stemple 2009, 606–7). Arguing that men also get raped is thus not a counter argument to the idea that rape serves as a tool in the patriarchal domination of women. By this I do not mean that male rape (where a man is a victim of rape) is less problematic, important or harmful than female rape, I merely mean that it is a separate issue (which I do not focus on in this chapter) that does not detract from the arguments made above. 7 Du Toit argues that insights regarding instances of rape where the victims are male indicate certain trends that show that arguments about the gendered nature of rape are also applicable to male rape. Men who become the victims of rape are



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 often perceived to be more “feminine” by the rapist and in the process of the rape are also actively “feminized” by the rapist; homosexual men have a higher chance of being raped and men who rape men mostly identify as heterosexual (Du Toit 2012a, 470). In addition, male rape occurs mainly within “strongly hierarchised, institutionalised all-male settings such as prisons or prisoner-of-war camps” (Du Toit 2012a, 470). In this sense Du Toit holds that male rape (the rape of men) is “parasitical” on female rape for its meaning in so far as the male victim is feminized and humiliated for his perceived or imposed femininity (Du Toit 2012a, 475). She argues that women and girls mostly constitute the target of rape because they are female/feminine (Du Toit 2012a, 470). 8 PEPUDA was promulgated to support the equality clause of the Constitution by developing section 9 in such a way as to promote equality and eliminate unfair discrimination. 9 For a brief history of consent in rape law, see Du Toit (2012b, 387–9). 10 This problem persists even though consent is defined in the New Sexual Offences Act in terms of coercive circumstances (which constitutes an improvement on the previous definition, which referred only to consent). The retention of the concept of consent at the center of the definition pushes the crime back into the “psychic space” of the victim, even though an interpretation of what happened in that psychic space is now enhanced by taking note of coercive circumstances. 11 S v Zuma 2006 (3) All SA 8 (W).

References Albertyn, Catherine, Artz, Lillian, Combrinck, Helࣉne, Mills, Shereen, and Wolhuter, Lorraine. 2007. “Women’s Freedom and Security of the Person.” In Gender, Law and Justice, edited by Elsje Bonthuys and Catherine Albertyn, 295 – 380. Cape Town: Juta. Burchell, Jonathan, and John Milton. 2000. Principles of Criminal Law. Cape Town: Juta. Cahill, Ann J. 2001. Rethinking Rape. New York: Cornell University Press. Cornell, Drucilla. 1995. The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography and Sexual Harassment. New York: Routledge. Du Toit, Louise. 2007. “The Conditions of Consent.” In Choice and Consent: Feminist Engagements with Law and Subjectivity, edited by R Hunter, and S Cowan, 58 – 73.Oxford: Routledge. —. 2012a. “Sexual Specificity, Rape Law Reform and the Feminist Quest for Justice.” South African Journal of Philosophy, 31(3): 465–83. —. 2012b. “From Consent to Coercive Circumstances: Rape Law Reform on Trial.” South African Journal on Human Rights, 28: 308–404.

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Gouws, Amanda. 2012.“Slegte Nuus vir Vroue se Posisie.”[Bad news for women’s position].Die Burger, May 9. Jewkes, Rachel, and Naeema Abrahams. 2002. “The Epidemiology of Rape and Sexual Coercion in South Africa: An Overview.” Social Science & Medicine, 55(7): 1231–44. MacKinnon, Catherine A. 2005. Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University. —. 2006. “Defining Rape Internationally: A Comment on Akayesu.” Columbian Journal of Transnational Law,44: 940–58. Naylor, Nikki. 2008. “The Politics of a Definition.” In Should We Consent? Rape Law Reform in South Africa, edited by Lillian Artz, and Dee Smythe, 22 – 51.Cape Town: Juta. Odhiambo, Agnes. 2011. “Healthcare is Failing Women.” Mail & Guardian, December 20. http://www.mg.co.za South African Law Reform Commission. 1999. Project 107 Discussion paper 85.http://www.justice.gov.za/salrc/dpapers/dp85.pdf South African Police Service. 2011. Crime Statistics Report. http://www.saps.gov.za/statistics/reports/crimestats/2011/crime_situati on_sa.pdf Smart, Carol. 1989. Feminism and the Power of Law: Sociology of Law and Crime. London: Routledge. Stemple, Lara. 2009. “Male Rape and Human Rights.” Hastings Law Journal, 60: 605–47. Van Marle, Karin. 2007. “The Politics of Consent, Friendship and Sovereignty.” In Choice and Consent: Feminist Engagements with Law and Subjectivity, edited by R Hunter, and S Cowan, 74 - 90. Oxford: Routledge Cavendish. —. 2012. “‘We Exist, but Who Are We?’ Feminism and the Power of Sociological Law.” Feminist Legal Studies, 20: 149–59.DOI: 10.1007/s10691-012-9205-x. Vetten, Lisa, Jewkes, Rachel, Sigsworth, Romi, Christofides, Nicola, Loots, Lizle, and Olivia Dunseith. 2008. “Tracking Justice: The Attrition of Rape Cases through the Criminal Justice System in Gauteng, Johannesburg.” Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre, the South African Medical Research Council and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, 1-60.

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Cases Cited Masiya v Director of Public Prosecutions (Pretoria) and Others 2007 (8) BCLR 827 (CC) S v Zuma 2006 (3) All SA 8 (W)

Legislation Cited Criminal Law (Sexual Offences and Related Matters) Amendment Act 32 of 2007 Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act 4 of 2000 Sexual Offences Act 23 of 1957 United Kingdom Sexual Offences Act of 2003

CHAPTER TWO BEYOND HETERONORMATIVITY: DOING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN UNIVERSITY CONTEXTS FAY HODZA

Introduction Many existing studies depict university and student life as gendered and sexualized (Gaidzanwa 1993; Mama 2011; Masvawure 2010). In most cases, student interactions and identities are interpreted and experienced in ways that reinforce hegemonic masculinity, that is, the tendency of male students to seek to dominate other males on one hand, and subordinate female students on the other. These studies reinforce a binary conceptualization of gender and sexuality, a practice that Butler (1990) rejects. A binary view of human sexuality and gender assumes that there are only two possibilities, that is, one is either female or male (Jackson 2006). Nothing is in between or outside that set of normative beliefs. However, new realities on university campuses and everyday life experiences indicate that gender and sexuality can take multiple forms (Jackson 2006; Lorber 2003). Using evidence from observations of and conversations with university students at a university in Zimbabwe, I interrogate the existing notions of gender and sexuality in African universities. Drawing from Butler’s (1990) notion of heteronormativity, I argue that the traditional definition of gender and sexuality is not only conceptually inadequate but it is also socially and politically indefensible. I propose a new conceptualization of gender and sexuality that encompasses both conventional and non-conventional gender and sexual practices. My arguments and conclusions in this chapter are based on a qualitative exploratory study that I conducted at a university in Zimbabwe from 15 June 2012 to 31 January 2013. At the time of writing this article, the university had a total enrolment of 3,000 students, 40 percent of whom were female-bodied. Given the sensitivity of the area under study –

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heteronormativity, gender and homosexuality at a Zimbabwean university – I will not disclose the full details of the institution where this study was conducted. Disclosing the full details of the institution may disadvantage the university when it comes to student enrolment and international standing, particularly with regard to funders and prospective students who may find what I report to be repulsive or unacceptable (Kaiser 2009). Therefore, for professional and ethical reasons I have decided not to name the university. My description of the institution is deliberately incomplete to protect the university’s name and integrity. The study was exploratory in the sense that very little is known about the nature and extent of non-heteronormativity in Zimbabwean institutions and communities. I used unstructured observations, interviews, and analysis of reports of gender and sexuality workshops that were carried out at the university once a year from 2005 to 2007 and in 2012, as part of new student leadership orientation training. In my observations and interviews, I was particularly interested in pursuing the theme of conventional and non-conventional gender and sexuality practices and identities in order to examine how some practices and identities were suppressed, while others were celebrated and promoted. The workshops, interviews, and direct observations all showed that while universities were diverse in terms of gender and sexual practices, identities, and relationships, heteronormativity was often assumed. In other words, heteronormativity and gender conformity were often demanded and socially enforced. The workshop offered a relaxed environment that allowed participants to openly express their opinions about sexuality and gender practices on campus. While all workshop participants knew each other because they were all members of the student leadership on campus, their views differed, depending on their fields of study. For example, while students from humanities and social sciences were quick to engage with each other, students from the Faculty of Management and Administration did not see the value of discussing gender and sexuality, because to them these concepts were alien and, as one student put it, “useless imported constructs.” What made these workshops interesting was the heated debate that arose between student leaders who believed that gender and sexuality rights were human rights and those who dismissed these concepts as foreign, demonic and irrelevant to Africa’s development. It was during these debates that I recorded the major ideas that were coming out of the discussions. Research on alternative genders and sexual orientation is sensitive (Oswald, Blume, and Marks 2005). Non-heterosexuality is widely stigmatized and suppressed (Herek et al. 1991). Homosexual people are

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often described as deranged in most developing countries and are sometimes sexually violated, as evidenced by corrective rape and public ridicule (Martin et al. 2009; Mieses 2009). The sensitivity associated with unconventional sexual orientations requires that researchers do their work in an ethically sound way (Cochran and Mays 1994). In line with the basic ethical procedures in social science research, I sought approval for this study. The study was approved by the university’s Research Committee. At the time of the research, this committee operated as the university’s Ethics Institutional Review Board. Apart from obtaining official approval from the institution all people who participated in the study were fully informed and data was de-identified in order to maintain the privacy of the research participants.

Concerning Gender and Sexuality The question of gender and sexuality is a thorny one. While both terms refer to social phenomena, there are differences in the ways these phenomena are socially constituted (Jackson 2006). Gender, as I am using it, encompasses all aspects of the distinction and division between male and female as well as departures from the normative binary (Jackson 2006). Thus, gender is historically and culturally produced, reproduced, and transformed. Gender is very dynamic and is grounded in what people do to authenticate who they are in terms of their maleness, femaleness, or something different (West and Zimmerman 1987). I also use the term “sexuality” to refer to the “erotically significant aspects of social life and social being, such as desires, practices, relationships, and identities” (Jackson 2006, 106). I choose this definition because it assumes fluidity. Generally, what is erotic is not fixed but varies as a result of what is socially defined as erotic in different historical and social contexts. Hence, sexuality has no fixed boundaries because what is sexual to one person in one situation may not be so to someone else in another situation or context. The definitions of gender and sexuality provided above push one to think beyond normative ideas regarding gender and sexuality. It is pertinent to note that thinking about gender and sexuality outside the normatively prescribed boundaries is a risky endeavor in conservative countries in Africa, but it is an intellectual activity that must be carried out anyway. As a heterosexual man, questions will be asked about why I am critical of heteronormativity. However, like Wilchins (2004, 123), I strongly believe that “you don’t have to be a whale to join Greenpeace, and you don’t have to be locked up in a foreign cell to support Amnesty International.” Neither does one need to be a woman to see that the

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subjugation and oppression of the “second sex” is unacceptable. In the same vein, one does not need to be a homosexual to see that any form of heterosexual determinism, marginalization and erasure of the homosexual or any other form of human identity is retrogressive. I also believe that progressive scholarly endeavors can best succeed when alliances are built and strengthened around issues, individuals and groups that are not necessarily homogenous but share the same values of human liberty, freedom and self-determination. As Butler (1990) has shown, basing our political and intellectual involvement on who belongs to which identity almost always leads to the weakening of the liberal discourse. My well-considered view is that examining multiple conventional and non-conventional constructions of gender and sexuality enables us to capture the totality and diversity of expressions and practices of gendered and sexual identities on university campuses. The idea of multiple gender and sexuality practices, relationships, and identities is also supported by Lorber (2003). She argued that sexuality and gender have many possible categories embedded in social experiences and practices. For Lorber (2003, 148): there are certainly more than two gendered sexual statuses. If one uses the criterion of linguistic markers alone, it suggests that people in most English-speaking countries recognize four genders: woman, lesbian (gay female), man and gay male.

While acknowledging these four genders, she however rejects the notion that each person has one sex, one sexuality, and one gender that are congruent with each other and fixed for life. She contends that people move in and out of socially prescribed boundaries of sexuality and gender depending on personal, historical, political, social, and economic circumstances. However, in many social and academic contexts this diversity is often not recognized. This was evident in this study as gendervariant and non-heterosexual students were not seen as deserving recognition and/or a dignified existence. This insensitivity or unresponsiveness to unfamiliar gender and sexuality practices is also evident in social, political and cultural discourse in Zimbabwe.

Heteronormativity, Homosexuality and Their Implications in Zimbabwe The history of homosexuality can be traced back to the pre-colonial era (Epprecht 2004). Stone Age rock paintings, oral evidence and police records have all been used to indicate that homosexuality predates

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colonialism, as some authors suggest (Gunda 2010). While many academics have avoided discussing homosexuality in public discourse even after independence, the practice has been acknowledged and supported by a national non-governmental organization called Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ) which was established in 1990. GALZ offers legal services, counseling, and educational programs to those experiencing challenges related to their unconventional sexuality. Culturally and socially, homosexuality is unacceptable in Zimbabwe. The President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe once said: It [homosexuality] degrades human dignity. It’s unnatural, and there is no question ever of allowing these people to behave worse than dogs and pigs. If dogs and pigs do not do it, why must human beings?1 (See also Shoko 2010.)

Mugabe’s views permeate many institutions and communities in Zimbabwe, including universities. For Mugabe and other conservatives, there are only two possibilities for gender and sexuality and these two should remain as such. While the sentimental voices against alternative ways of doing gender and sexuality are strong, there is also a liberal position that contends that as researchers, as theorists, and as activists, sociologists must go beyond paying lip service to the diversity of bodies, sexualities, and genders. As a sociologist, I question the binary division of gender and sexuality because not doing so renders invisible the complexities of human sexual and gendered experiences and also has disastrous health outcomes, as has been seen with the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections. A transgressive activity of intellectual labor such as the current chapter will create possibilities for the development of gender and sexuality policies that are inclusive and sensitive to non-normative gender and sexuality practices. Lorber (2003) supports this position. She contends that there are revolutionary possibilities inherent in rethinking the categories of gender and sexuality. Dominant ideas about sexuality and gender have the problem of regulating those kept within socially approved boundaries of doing sexuality and gender and marginalizing and sanctioning those outside them. For example, institutions and communities that hold on to traditional ideas of gender and sexuality around the world tend to attack homosexual people in ways that dehumanize and in some instances punish them. In many cultures homosexuality is viewed as not only wrong, but as a terrible and abominable sin. Such practices and ways of thinking represent and reproduce norms of heteronormativity. I will now examine this concept in detail.

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The Notion of Heteronormativity The term “heteronormativity” refers to an ideology based on definitions of what it means to be a woman/girl or a man/boy that exclude and discriminate against a significant minority population, particularly those who do not conform to traditionally recognized cultural norms (Butler 1990; Oswald, Blume, and Marks, 2005). In other words, heteronormativity describes the processes through which social structures and social policies reinforce the belief that human beings fall into two distinct sex/gender categories, male and female, and that anything outside these two main categories (such as being lesbian, gay or bisexual) is both abnormal and unacceptable. Thus, the concept of heteronormativity reveals institutional, cultural, and legal norms that reify and entrench the normativity of heterosexuality (Chambers 2007). Put differently, heteronormativity brings to light the fact that: heterosexual desire and identity are not merely assumed, they are expected. They are demanded. And they are rewarded and privileged. Heteronormativity is written into law, encoded in the very edifices of institutions, built into an enormous variety of common practices. (Chambers 2007, 665)

To describe a social practice or sexual orientation as heteronormative means that it has evident or concealed norms, some of which are viewed as acceptable only for males and others as normal only for females. Heteronormative practices, then, can block access to full legal, political, economic, educational, and social participation for many individuals. As a concept, heteronormativity is used to help identify the processes through which individuals who do not appear to fit or individuals who refuse to fit these norms are made invisible and silenced (Butler 1990). Butler’s theory of gender (1990) is very useful in providing a lens for examining how the heteronormative constructions of sexuality influence young people’s lives in universities. Although Butler’s theory of gender has not been used in behavioral sciences, her ideas are useful for this analysis. She initiated a unique way of understanding gender and sexuality as complex issues, which other researchers have called complex gendering and complex sexuality (Oswald, Blume, and Marks 2005). A conceptualization of gender and sexuality as complex phenomena recognizes practices that defy normative ways of asserting identity–such as lesbian, gay and other nonheterosexual behaviors–as legitimate ways of “doing gender” (West and Zimmerman 1987) or “doing sexuality” (Oswald, Blume, and Marks, 2005). Many other gender theorists now believe that gender encompasses more than just the socially constructed differences between heterosexual

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males and heterosexual females. It also includes the non-traditional identities, behaviors and practices of non-heterosexual individuals (Boswell 2003; Connell 1987; Fausto-Sterling 2003; Lorber 2003; Oswald, Blume, and Marks 2005; Thorne and Luria 1993). Butler (1990) interrogates the traditional binary conceptualization of gender which tends to reduce gender to only two possibilities, namely, male or female. She views the binary approach as the “heterosexual model of thinking about gender” (Butler 1990, xii) and argues that this approach promotes the naturalized knowledge of gender. This in turn makes any form of gender outside the naturalized forms irregular and unthinkable. Butler (1990) rejects the heterosexual definition of gender because it represents a hegemonic politics of social exclusion that serves to produce and reinforce a masculine reality that relegates other forms of gender expression to the periphery of social existence. Thus, Butler (1990) suggests that a gendered analysis must consider those identities and practices that defy normative gender creations, such as lesbian, gay and other non-heterosexual behaviors. For Butler (1999), forcing people into fixed binary modes of gender behavior constitutes serious gender-based harassment. For her, it makes more sense to talk about several “genders” rather than just two genders. This means that people, including university students, express their gender in many different ways; this would include women, men, females, males, lesbians, gays, people who are bisexual, transgendered, and more. All these possible forms of gender expression must be factored into the analysis of the gender and sexual experiences of university students. In other words, my analysis does not stop with males and females only, but also examines other forms of “doing” gender and sexuality in university contexts. This approach helps to reveal how stakeholders in the university system immobilize non-heterosexual identities, practices, and behaviors. I use the concept of heteronormativity because it is theoretically rich and politically salient; it makes it possible to analyze the practices that structure beliefs around presumed heterosexual desire and force people to conform to hegemonic heterosexual standards and expectations. Chambers (2007) observes that heteronormativity carries regulatory practices within it which privilege behaviors, relationships, and practices that more closely approximate the norm, while stigmatizing, marginalizing or rendering invisible those behaviors, relationships, and practices that deviate from it. Most of the students and staff at the university under study expressed a strong belief in the “sex-gender-sexuality system.” The phrase “sexgender-sexuality system” was coined by Rubin (1975) to describe the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into

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products of human activity. For example, gender becomes a social product of the cultural elaboration of biological sex. In most African cultures, everyone is understood to be heterosexual (attracted to men if they are females; attracted to women if they are men) until proven otherwise. Thus, African cultures assume compulsory heterosexuality (Rich 1980). Someone born with a female body is expected to identify as a woman and all women are female bodied. On the other hand, someone born with a male body is expected to identify as a man and perform male roles. While this is true in many cases, this may not be the case for some people born as males who identify with or perform female gender roles. Conversely, some people born as females may identify with or perform male gender roles. The fluidity of gender and sexuality among university students was reflected in the responses that I got from students and staff concerning their views on gender and sexuality on campus. While heteronormativity was evident in the ways in which presumed non-heterosexual students were described and conceptualized by other students, the presence of nonconforming students was also reported. I discovered that people holding traditional views about sexuality and gender looked down upon those who engaged in non-traditional gender and sexuality practices. Non-normative sexual and gender practices, relationships, and identities were viewed in negative ways. The following section reports on and examines the different ways in which non-heteronormativity was conceptualized at the university under study. Broadly, non-heterosexuality and gender nonconformity were described as nauseating, disgusting, and impure.

Non-heterosexuality as Disgusting and Nauseating In many cases, non-heterosexual people were attacked because they were seen as dirty. One student, in a very condescending way, said that talking about homosexuality “zvinoita kuti ndide kurutsa (it is nauseating), it’s disgusting.” The description of non-heterosexuality as “disgusting and nauseating” reveals something deeper discursively. It reveals the depth of homophobic sentiments against doing gender and sexuality in socially unapproved ways. When someone vomits, it is generally interpreted that the person is sick. Thus, by saying that talking about, let alone, practicing homosexuality makes someone want to vomit means that the practice is seen as sickening. In fact, some students and staff in the workshops argued that the presence of homosexuals and those who support them on campus was an indication of the pathological decay in our society. While these sentiments represented the majority view on campus, there was also a minority group of students who publicly and privately indicated

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to me that it was intrinsically indefensible to discriminate against students on the basis of the sexuality and gender. While discussing the controversial nature of my research, one colleague told me that while she could not express her views publicly, she believed that “it was high time that universities should openly challenge belief systems that discriminates sexual minority youth.” She went further to argue that “universities should be zones where students and academics are free to do and to be anything they want.” For her, this is how new frontiers are created and current ones extended in the development of knowledge and new social orders. I found this intervention important because it takes the argument further than gender and sexuality. In other words, challenging homophobic gender and sexuality practices and beliefs in universities and society in general has the potential of liberating individual students who want to be or who are actually different: it will help them to be who they are or who they want to be. Furthermore, and more importantly, such a process can create a new social order based on equality, openness, and respect for difference. Recent scholarship in cultural studies indicates that difference is something that should be celebrated rather than thwarted (Boswell 2003; Caneles 2000; Fausto-Sterling 2003; Lorber 2003; Young 1991).

Impure Students: Violating Religious and Other Cultural Norms While homosexuality was defined as nauseating and disgusting, most students highlighted that it was impossible to accept homosexual practices because they violated religious and cultural norms in Zimbabwe and most parts of Africa. Homosexuality was seen as representing the highest order of impurity. One student stated that “even though I don’t agree with Robert [Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe] on many things, I fully support him on his stance against chingochani (homosexuality).” Another student further indicated that he would vote for ZANU PF in any election because the party represents purity. Thus, homosexuality or any other nonheterosexual practice or identity can be seen as not only personal but also as deeply political. Perceptions of homosexuality have the capacity to change the shape and content of national politics. In fact, the politics of purity has suddenly become very important in Zimbabwe as a result of the desire to resist the perceived expansion of Western values in the body politic in the country. Another group of students that was detested on campus was a group that cross-dressed. Cross-dressers were defined as those students who chose to dress in ways that were not in line with traditional conceptions of

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what it means to be a man or a woman. They dress in socially unapproved ways. For example, at the university that I studied I learned that young men who wore rings on their left ears were regarded as homosexuals. This endangered their lives as they were stigmatized and avoided by their student peers. The university did not have any policies that could directly protect these students on campus. I also found out that another group called the “tom-boys” existed on campus. This group was made up of female students who dressed and carried themselves in a “non-ladylike style.” They had short hair, never used hair extensions and walked in a non-female way. When I asked the participants in the workshops to describe what constituted a “non-ladylike style,” they all pointed to the fact that “tom-boys” never wear skirts, even though they are biologically female. They don’t wear any make-up and “they are able to stand up for themselves even in the presence of men.” In other words, even though “tom-boys” are biologically female, they reject living a life that reflects their femaleness. They basically transgress the socially defined ways of acting like a woman. Tomboys were seen as rejecting feminine weaknesses in favor of masculine strength. Tomboys fit within the category of women who espouse female masculinity (Halberstam 1998; Walsh and Scully 2006). Halberstam used the term “female masculinity” to describe the ways female-bodied people may perform masculinity. She posited that the connection between maleness and power is that female-bodied people are able to access power by acting in male-like ways. Thus, while tomboyism, lesbianism and female heterosexuality are three different identities, they are often conflated into one in everyday interactions. A tomboy is not necessarily a lesbian or heterosexual. However, as shown above, tomboys are often seen as not only unconventional but also unacceptable.

Imported Constructs: Rejecting the Unfamiliar Gender and Sexuality Identities and Practices While homosexuality and non-heteronormativity constituted the real lived experiences of some young people at the university under study, these experiences were trivialized, ignored and sometimes even demonized. One Student Affairs staff member argued that discussions of the rights of gays and lesbians were not welcome in African institutions. She said that “our discussions should focus on proper gender and sexuality we should look at what is acceptable in our context.” She went further to accuse this researcher of having been brainwashed by an American education. She said, “Our systems are now being polluted by foreign-

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educated people like you. Look, you got your Ph.D. from an American university. Those things are OK in America, not here.” For her, talking about the fluidity of gender and sexuality is irrelevant in the African context because it is an imported discourse and does not represent the values and aspirations of local people. My research experience here is similar to Molara Ogundipe’s experiences in the Nigerian academy. She noted: When I began talking and writing about feminism in the sixties and seventies, I was seen as a good and admirable girl who had gone astray, a woman whose head [had] been spoilt by too much learning. (Lewis 2002)

Coincidentally, a colleague whom I requested to proofread this article before publication told me in my vernacular that “kudzidza kwakukupenza” (education is making you insane). For him, writing and talking about gender and sexuality in non-normative terms was a sign of madness because no sane person would accommodate such thoughts. Thoughts about the salience of gender and sexuality, particularly how other genders and sexualities are erased and suppressed in the public domain, are seen as foreign and unnecessary. The view that non-heterosexuality is foreign, unnatural, and uncultural has been used in many other African contexts to censure homosexuality. For example, Kapasula (2006, 68) observed that in many parts of Africa, homosexuality is treated as a new menace, an alien sin that needs to be swiftly uprooted before it spreads: “It is not African, but a vile foreign import.” Wendy Isaack (2006), in her conversation with Pumla Dineo Gqola for the Feminist Africa journal, reiterates the same view. She observes that “homophobia, like patriarchy and many other evils and exclusions, is supported and justified in the name of religion, culture, and tradition” (Isaack 2006, 93). She goes further to state that in many black communities in Africa, homosexuality is still seen as a white phenomenon, as unAfrican, an aberration, as contrary to the dominant religious beliefs and cultural systems. Other writers have also observed that normative heterosexuality is sustained on the basis that homosexuality is “unbiblical, unnatural, and definitely unAfrican” (Salo and Gqola 2006, 7). There is a great deal of evidence that challenges the notion that homosexuality is an unAfrican practice. According to Epprecht (2004), homosexual behavior and relations can be traced back to the pre-colonial era in Zimbabwe. Evidence ranging from Stone Age rock paintings to oral and police records shows that African people engaged in homosexual behavior before the coming of European settlers (Murray and Roscoe 2001). In fact, the first case of the crime of homosexuality in Zimbabwe

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was recorded in 1892, only two years after the arrival of white people in the country. Surely, the foreigners could not have influenced the sexual practices of local people in only two years (Dzvarai 2012). Alleging that the local people had been forced to change their traditional practices within this short period of time is akin to undermining the strength of African cultures. Therefore, to argue that homosexuality is a foreign practice is questionable given the existing evidence we have on the ground. In the same vein, Salo (Salo and Gqola 2006, 1) contends that: when you hear about attacks on minorities, whether sexual or whatever, it is not a good sign, because who is to define who is African? Such behavior usually leads to the closing down of the cosmopolitan nature of what is African.

In other words, rejecting homosexuality as a lived experience erases the realities of some people in Africa. It suppresses “difference” as a defining aspect of being African. Africanness does not always entail sameness. Pursuing the same argument, Salo and Gqola (2006, 1) observed that “anyone who is passionate about women, gender, and development in African contexts needs to interrogate discourses about African sexuality.” Thus, talking about non-normative sexualities and gender is part and parcel of the development and empowerment of alternative discourses on the continent. Horn (2006, 8) adopts a human rights perspective in discussing this concept. She contends that “the use of a discourse of ‘culture’ to defend and legislate homophobia constitutes a form of cultural violence.” Furthermore, the use of the discourse of culture assumes that culture itself is fair and just. Writing about gender in Zimbabwe’s high schools, Gudhlanga, Chirimuuta, and Bhukuvhani (2012) suggest that unquestioningly accepting culture leads to the glorification of oppression. They observed that: the three prominent languages [in Zimbabwe] Shona, Ndebele and English support oppression of women and glorify male promiscuity on the grounds that “This is our culture” and it is not supposed to be questioned. (Gudhlanga, Chirimuuta, and Bhukuvhani 2012, 4540)

Therefore, attacking homosexuality in the name of culture is very questionable because it is based on beliefs and values that are inherently oppressive. In this instance, the culture discourse holds far-reaching implications for human rights claims.

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Refusing or blocking university students or denying any other person the right to freely and responsibly decide on matters related to their sexuality, including their right to choose their sexual partners without fear of discrimination, constitutes cultural violence. Therefore, the rejection of non-normative gender and sexuality practices as unAfrican, alien, and uncultural are not grounded in reality. This reflects hegemonic discourses about sexuality that compel everyone to fit within the parameters of prescribed heterosexual gender and sexual roles. Realizing sexual and gender rights, including one’s right to a choice of partner, presents one of the most complicated, yet exciting, challenges for the fulfillment of social justice. Therefore, the views expressed by students and staff make visible the underlying discourses of cultural hegemony. If taken at face value, universities and society at large will remain homophobic and intolerant of cultural difference and diversity. I agree with Mama and Barnes’s (2007, 2) observation that “higher education [like many other social institutions] has always had a gendered element ... modern universities are exhibitions of patriarchy, albeit of the most professedly liberal kind.”I also agree with Mama (2003) where she argues that institutions of higher learning tend to embrace a reform agenda but completely reject a transformative agenda. .

Betraying Patriarchy and Manhood Sentiments expressed against non-heteronormativity were also rooted in patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity. Young men who were involved in this study believed that men who engaged in homosexual practices were doing a disservice to the male species. One young man asked “Unoita chingochani kuti hakuna vakadzi here?” (Why would a man engage in homosexuality? Are there no women?). In his study of the views of high school children in South Africa, Ratele (2006) came up with similar findings. He showed that for young boys homosexuality was “unmanly.” One participant in the study said that you know that someone is a homosexual because “you can’t tell if they are boys or girls . . . they change all the time, they have sex with people of the same sex.” Most young men expressed the view that homosexuality was an inhuman practice. They believed that men should defend their manhood by marrying or sleeping with women. Sleeping with another man was perceived as not only inhuman but also as demeaning. However, a close examination of all these positions shows a deepseated belief in patriarchy and male masculinity. What is at stake here has to do with the deeply embedded belief in male supremacy. The malebodied students’ passionate homophobic responses were influenced by the

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desire to maintain the status quo, where maleness is associated with privilege and honor. Hungwe’s (2006) argument that women’s experiences are couched in discourses of respectability can similarly be applied to antihomosexual discourses. These discourses show that men who sleep with men are dishonorable and not respectable. Thus, practicing homosexuality is not only seen as a betrayal of the social structures of patriarchy, but also as leading to the depreciation of a male-bodied person’s manhood. The use of the discourse of respectability and honor is also evident in recent banishment of homosexuality in Malawi and Uganda. Homosexual men and women are often described as bringing dishonor to their communities and families (Jonas 2012; Shoko 2010).

Concluding Thoughts and Recommendations In this article, I have examined various ways in which gender and sexuality are understood and practiced by students at a relatively small university in Zimbabwe. I have demonstrated that university students understand and practice gender and sexuality in both traditional and nontraditional ways. In other words, while the general assumption in universities is that gender and sexuality are fixed binaries, in reality, some students understand gender and sexuality in more complex ways. For example, while male-bodied students were expected to show aggression, competitiveness, ruthlessness and dominance, the study showed that some male-bodied students behaved and carried themselves in ways that led others to see them as females. Some wore clothing that was normatively associated with women. For example, some boys wore ear rings. Such males were ridiculed and stigmatized. Unfortunately, university policies were silent on this issue. There is a need for policy reviews to ensure that non-normative students are protected. Although the university had gender and anti-sexual harassment policies, these policies assumed a heteronormative world. Sex was defined as an activity between males and females. The policies did not recognize that sexual harassment and abuse could take place between people of the same sex. The silence and erasure of non-heteronormative subjects can also be understood in the context of the broader national culture. Like many African countries, Zimbabwe is a very conservative nation. Homosexuality is broadly rejected by many people. As shown in this article, homosexuality was generally seen as evil and inhuman. The challenge that the university will face, even if it decides to change, is posed by the homophobic nature of the society in which it finds itself. It will be extremely difficult to convince local people and the nation at large that

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non-heterosexual people have rights that must be protected at community, national and international levels. I end on this rather sad note not because I am pessimistic but because I understand the deep negative feelings and perceptions that many people at the university and indeed in the whole country have regarding sexual and gender freedom. Far from being pessimistic, my point is that to achieve both gender and sexual freedom many challenges will have to be overcome. These challenges are social, cultural, political, and psychological. Social activists interested in addressing gender and sexual inequalities at universities must understand the complex or multifaceted nature of the field. Thus, while the global tide is moving in the direction of change, the process in Zimbabwe will be slow due to these strong fixed beliefs that have been built over centuries. While it is understood that advocating for change in the way gender and sexuality are understood will be a high and huge mountain to climb, it is also encouraging to note that there are students and staff at universities who see the need for change. The way forward is to build a critical mass of people, especially in key leadership positions, who earnestly believe in diversity. In addition, further research will be needed to find ways in which the deep-seated homophobic sentiments can be dismantled. Many people are afraid to discuss their views about gender and sexuality openly, let alone “come out” as homosexuals. Such studies should shed light on ways in which universities can be more receptive to new ways of understanding gender and sexuality, and subsequently develop policies that are diversity friendly. The situation on the ground at the university under study calls for a more radical transformative paradigm if gender and sexuality issues are to be addressed holistically. Clearly, homosexuality is not intrinsically wrong, but is socially constructed as such. What needs to be challenged are the social processes that construct non-heteronormative sexual and gender practices, relationships and identities as inhuman and uncalled for. A radical transformative agenda would entail disentangling the present binary conceptualization of gender and sexuality and replacing it with a more realistic and open one. Binaries are “social constructs composed of two parts that are framed as absolute and unchanging opposites” (Kang 2012, 22). Binary systems mask the complicated realities and varieties in the realm of social life. Thus, rather than seeing gender and sexuality as either/or binaries, it is perhaps more productive to look at these identities as occurring on a continuum where there are points in between the two poles and where poles (men, women, gay, lesbian, etc.) may not be so completely different after all (Kang 2012).

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Notes  1

http://www.shout-africa.com/opinion/opinion-in-zimbabwe-gays-are-worse-thandogs-and-pigs/

References Boswell, Holly. 2003. “The Transgender Paradigm Shift towards Free Expression.” In The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality. Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality, edited by Tracy E. Ore, 114–8. New York: McGraw-Hill. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Caneles, Mary K. 2000. “Othering: Towards an Understanding of Difference.” Advances in Nursing, 22(4): 16–31. Chambers, Samuel A. 2007. “An Incalculable Effect: Subversions of Heteronormativity.” Political Studies, 55(3): 656–79. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00654.x. Cochran, Susan D., and Vickie M. Mays. 1994. “Depressive Distress among Homosexually Active African American Men and Women.” American Journal of Psychiatry, 151: 524–29. Connell, Raewyn W. 1987. Gender and Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dzvarai, Tatenda J. 2012. “Homosexuality, International Human Rights, and Politics in Post-Independence Zimbabwe.” Honors Thesis, Monash South Africa. Epprecht, Marc. 2004. Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa. Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2003. “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female are not Enough.” In The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality. Race, Class, Gender, and sexuality, edited by Tracy E. Ore, 107–13. New York: McGraw-Hill. Gaidzanwa, Rudo B. 1993. “The Politics of the Body and the Politics of Control. An Analysis of Class, Gender, and Cultural Issues in Student Politics at the University of Zimbabwe.” Zambezia, xx(ii): 15–33. Gudhlanga, Enna, Chirimuuta, Chipo, and Crispen Bhukuvhani. 2012. “Towards a Gender-Inclusive Curriculum in Zimbabwe’s Education System: Opportunities and Challenges.” Gender and Behavior, 10(1): 4533– 45. Gunda, Masiiwa R. 2010. The Bible and Homosexuality in Zimbabwe. A Socio-Historical Analysis of the Political, Cultural and Christian

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Arguments in the Homosexual Public Debate with Special Reference to the Use of the Bible. Bamberg: Germany University Bamberg Press. Halberstam, Judith. 1998. Female Masculinity. Raleigh: Duke University Press. Herek, Gregory M., Kimmel, Douglas C., Amaro, Hortensia, and Gary B. Melton. 1991.“Avoiding Heterosexist Bias in Psychological Research.” American Psychologist, 46: 957–63. Horn, Jessica. 2006. “Re-Righting the Sexual Body.” Feminist Africa, 6: 7–19. Hungwe, Chipo B. 2006. “Putting Them in Their Place: ‘Respectable’ and ‘Unrespectable’Women in Zimbabwean Gender Struggles.” Feminist Africa, 6: 7–19. Isaack, Wendy. 2006. “Pumla Dineo Gqola speaks with Wendy Isaack.” Feminist Africa, 6: 91–100. Jackson, Stevi. 2006. “Gender, Sexuality, and Heterosexuality. The Complexity (and Limits) of Heteronormativity.” Feminist Theory, 7(1): 105–21. DOI: 10.1177/1464700106061462. Jonas, Obonye. 2012. “The Quest for Homosexual Freedom in Africa: A Survey of Selected Continental Practices and Experiences.” International Journal of Discrimination and the Law, 12(4): 221–42. DOI: 10.1177/1358229112471477. Kaiser, Karen. 2009. “Protecting Respondent Confidentiality in Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Health Research, 19(11): 1632–41. DOI:10.1177/1049732309350879. Kang, Miliann. 2012.“Introduction to Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies.” Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Educational Material. Accessed March 29, 2013 http://scholarworks.umass.edu/wost_ed_materials/1 Kapasula, Jessie K. 2006. “Challenging Sexual Stereotypes: Is CrossDressing ‘unAfrican’?” Feminist Africa, 6: 69–72. Lewis, Desire. 2002. “In Conversation with Molara Ogundipe.”Feminist Africa, 1.http://agi.ac.za/sites/agi.ac.za/files/fa_1_conversation_2.pdf Lorber, Judith. 2003. “The Social Construction of Gender.” In The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality. Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality, edited by Tracy E. Ore, 99–106. New York: McGraw-Hill. Mama, Amina. 2003. “Restore, Reform but Do Not Transform. The Gender Politics of Higher Education in Africa.” Journal of Higher Education in Africa, 1(1): 101–25. —. 2011. “The Challenges of Feminism. Gender, Ethics, and Responsible Academic Freedom in African Universities.” Journal of Higher Education in Africa, 9(2): 1–23.

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Mama, Amina, and Teresa Barnes. 2007. “Editorial: Rethinking Universities.” Feminist Africa, 8: 1–7. Martin, Andrew, Kelly, Annie, Turquet, Laura, and Stephanie Ross. 2009. Hate Crimes: The Rise of Corrective Rape in South Africa. London: Action Aid. Masvawure, Tsitsi. 2010. “‘I Just Need to be Flashy on Campus’: Female Students and Transactional Sex at a University in Zimbabwe.” Culture, Health & Sexuality: An International Journal for Research, Intervention and Care, 12(8): 857–70. DOI:10.1080/13691050903471441. Mieses, Alexa. 2009. “Gender Inequality and Corrective Rape of Women who have Sex with Women.” GMHC Treatment Issues. http://www.gmhc.org/research/treatment-issues. Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe. 2001. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Sexualities. New York: St Martin’s Press. Oswald, Ramona F., Blume, Libby B., and Stephen R. Marks. 2005. “Decentering Heteronormativity: A Model for Family Studies.” In Sourcebook of Family Theory and Research, edited by Vern L. Bengtson, Alan C. Acock, Katherine R. Allen, Peggye DilworthAnderson, and David M. Klein, 143–65. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ratele, Kopano. 2006. “Ruling Masculinity and Sexuality.” Feminist Africa, 6: 48–64. Rich, Adrienne. 1980. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs, 5(4): 631–60. Rubin, Gayle. 1975. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter, 157–210, New York: Routledge. Salo, Elaine, and Pumla D. Gqola. 2006. “Subaltern Sexualities.” Feminist Africa, 6: 1–6. Shoko, Tabona. 2010. “‘Worse Than Dogs and Pigs?’ Attitudes Toward Homosexual Practice in Zimbabwe.” Journal of Homosexuality, 57(5): 634–49.DOI: 10.1080/00918361003712087. Thorne, Barry, and Zella Luria. 1993. “Sexuality and Gender.” In Worlds of Childhood, edited Robert H. Wozniak, 430–48. New York: Harper Collins. Walsh, Denise, and Pamela Scully. 2006. “Altering Politics, Contesting Gender.” Journal of Southern African Studies, 32(1): 1–12.DOI: 10.1080/03057070500493712. West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. “Doing Gender.” Gender and Society, 1(2): 125–51.

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Wilchins, Riki. 2004. Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer. Los Angeles: Alyson Publishers. Young, Iris M. 1991. Social Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER THREE WOMAN ABUSE IN SOUTH AFRICA: REFLECTING ON THE COMPLEXITY OF WOMEN’S DECISIONS TO LEAVE ABUSIVE MEN SAMANTHA VAN SCHALKWYK, FLORETTA BOONZAIER AND PUMLA GOBODO-MADIKIZELA

Introduction South Africa has one of the highest rates of woman abuse in the world. In 1999 the country had the highest rate of intimate femicide reported anywhere in the world (8.8 per 100,000 women over the age of 14 years old) (Matthews et al. 2008), and, according to Fuller (2010), a rate of rape of women that is more than twice that of the United States, with black and colored (or “mixed-race”) women 4.7 times more likely to be raped than white women (Anderson 2000). With few exceptions (such as Boonzaier 2008; Shefer 2004), much of the focus on this problem in South Africa has been on women’s victimhood and powerlessness at the hands of men, a perspective that draws largely on theories such as Walker’s (1979a; 1979b) “battered woman syndrome,” Dutton and Painter’s (1993) “traumatic bonding,” and Herman’s (1992) notion of “captivity.” While acknowledging the traumatic effects of woman abuse and the problem of patriarchy, particularly in marginalized townships1 where women are most vulnerable, this victim perspective often glosses over women’s capacity to enact resistance and agency in their lives even within the context of imbalanced social relations of power (Profitt 1994; 2000). Thus, there is a need for research that addresses women’s resistance as it exists in dialogue with the material and social realities of women’s oppression.

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This paper addresses the issue of women’s resistance by examining women shelter residents’ narratives of their desire to leave abusive heterosexual relationships. We utilize Scott’s (1990) concept of power and resistance to shed light on the complexities of meaning that women give to their own sense of power and powerlessness and the fluctuations of identity that occur throughout their tellings. By looking at how women retrospectively construct their desire to leave these relationships, we gain insight into the different subjectivities that women adopt during this telling and what these subjectivities mean in terms of the women’s sense of agency in the world.

Agency and the Stages of Disengaging from Abusive Relationships Much feminist literature in the field of intimate partner violence has attempted to move away from static notions of women’s powerlessness and victimhood. Studies that have focused on women’s agency while leaving the abuser have described the process of leaving as consisting of many stages that begin before physical exit of the relationship (Anderson and Saunders 2003). Burke et al. (2001), for example, outlined a process of leaving that consists of certain behavioral changes seen through the stages of pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance. Studies that have addressed the earlier stages of leaving have highlighted certain turning points (see Khaw and Hardesty 2007) and defining moments (for example, Taylor 2002) that motivated a woman’s decision to leave. Other studies have foregrounded women’s positive selfreconstructions that emerged throughout the phases of disengaging from an abusive partner, particularly women’s active “reclaiming of the self” during which they moved from a “victim” to a “survivor” identity (see Enander and Holmberg 2008; Landenburger 1998; Patzel 2001; Wuest and Meritt-Gray 1999; 2001). Moving away from static notions of women’s victimhood has led to more attention being focused on women’s power within abusive intimate relationships. Inversely then, this feminist work has often highlighted aspects of women’s agency and resistance while downplaying the challenges and structural constraints of women’s lives (Boonzaier and de la Rey 2003). Ignoring such challenges and extracting the abusive relationship from the broader socio-cultural and material environment within which it occurs may result in studies losing a certain richness of understanding of women’s lived realities and their complex responses to abuse (Yoshioka 2008).

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“Victim” and “Survivor”: A Critical Perspective As noted above, many authors have conceptualized abused women’s agency as processes by which women move from the position of victim to the position of survivor who negotiates separation from an abuser. This idea of the transition from “victim” to “survivor” is problematic, however, given that this trajectory may not be a smooth one. The situation for economically disadvantaged women is complex as they may be controlled by their intimate partners, but also lack access to material resources, and therefore be economically dependent upon the men who abuse them. These women are unlikely to call the police and attempt to have an abusive partner jailed. Often women do not manage to leave the abusive situation and, if they do, many return to their abusers at the end of a shelter stay as they have nowhere else to go. The act of leaving, while often saving a woman from the current abuser, may drive her into poverty, homelessness, or further abuse at the hands of other men. Thus, the distinction between the notion of “survivor” and “victim” is not as clear cut as some (for example, Baker 1997; Lempert 1996; Wuest and MerittGray 2001) have suggested. Moreover, the process of moving from a “victim” to a “survivor” identity is unlikely to be a simple linear progression. Women who manage to leave abusive relationships do not necessarily assume and then maintain a survivor identity. Rather, women may constantly fluctuate between positioning themselves as either “victim” or “survivor” at different points: positionings that emerge out of the complex material and contextual realities of their lives (Boonzaier and de la Rey 2003). The process of leaving an abusive partner has also been recognized as a complex, non-linear journey that consists of many contradictions. Anderson and Saunders (2003), for example, have shown that women continue to grapple with meaning about the abuse long after the physical point of leaving the relationship. The act of leaving in itself does not constitute a final move to the identity of survivor (see Enander 2011). Evident in the literature are multiple and nuanced understandings of women’s resistance as well as an outline of certain shifts in cognition that occur during the process of disengaging from abuse. Such studies are particularly relevant to our current inquiry that explores women’s retrospective accounts of their motivations to leave their abuser. Researchers such as Enander (2010) have conceptualized cognition as determined by discourses that shape emotion and action and, as such, have a significant impact on the leaving process. Enander (2010) argued that women oscillate between constructions of their abuser as “good” (Jekyll) and “bad” (Hyde) and that these multifaceted descriptions shape women’s

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positioning of agency in relation to the abuser. In a more recent article, Enander (2011) showed that greater amounts of physical violence result in greater cognitive-emotional dissonance for abused women. She suggested that after repeated acts of violence, a woman who thought of her partner as good may begin to experience conflict between the perception of her partner as “good” and her actual experience of abuse. This cognitive dissonance, or cognitive emotional dissonance as Enander termed it, leads to a gradual shift from positive emotions for the partner to “cold” emotions – a shift that results in women maintaining separation from abusers. Margerita Hydén (2005) also highlighted the complexity of women’s resistance through her examination of women’s agency “post abuse.” She found that, over time, women spoke from different subject positions that varied from “the wounded” to “active agent.” Significantly, Hydén’s focus on multiple positions in women’s talk has allowed her to problematize mainstream meanings of fear as a signifier of women’s powerlessness (see Hydén 1999). Complementing the literature on the complexity of leaving, Towns and Adams (2009) argued that women experience certain dilemmas between intellectual ideologies and the ideologies of their lived experiences. These tensions stimulate “internal debates” (Towns and Adams 2009, 750) that are particularly prominent when a woman leaves an abusive relationship and may eventually lead to active resistance on the woman’s part.

Conceptual Framework: Self, Identity and Transcripts of Power In his book Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Scott (1990) explores the secret transcripts of power that slaves, laborers, and prisoners display behind the scenes–discourses that are largely hidden from their oppressors. His work on public and hidden transcripts of power provides a valuable added dimension for understanding women’s narratives. The concept of “transcripts” refers to repertoires that shape an individual’s self-construction. The public transcript is the script by which subordinate groups conform to social expectations of how they should behave towards their “superiors.” Scott argued that underlying these public transcripts are hidden transcripts through which the oppressed can harbor a sense of themselves that is generated in response to their oppression and that could be understood as a form of resistance against oppression. Scott’s (1990) conceptualization is based on the notion that power is both performative and relational. In this sense, people draw on the public and private transcripts in particular ways that are descriptive of their sense

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of power in certain interactional settings. This approach concurs with a Foucauldian notion of power as multidimensional and relational. According to this view there is some form of resistance at every point of power (Foucault 1982). Scott’s notion of power serves as a useful analytic frame to explore the way in which individuals fluctuated between resisting and subjection. This approach supplements Foucault’s concept of power by providing a means to explore the nuanced interplay between accounts of self as powerful and powerless and how these constructions co-manifest at various moments. In this analysis we adopt an understanding of subjectivity as the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of a person, their sense of self and their ways of relating to others in the world (see Weedon 1987).This poststructuralist approach moves us beyond a rational, unitary self as it recognizes a precarious, contradictory, and ever-changing self that is constructed through language and in different interactional contexts (Davies and Harré 1990; Davies et al. 2006). In this sense, an individual constructs and reconstructs a self at different socio-historical moments according to the discourses and the audiences that are present. Various storylines offer different, often contradictory, subject positions from which an individual draws at different moments to position themselves and others in certain ways (and to negotiate new positions) (Davies and Harré 1990). In this paper we draw on Scott’s framework to further the insights in the field of women’s agency and research into the process of leaving abusive relationships. More specifically, we look at how women retrospectively narrated the process that leads to their desire to leave the abusive relationship and the nuances of power that manifested in these accounts. Our analysis addresses the intersection of the public transcript (the “battered woman” script) with the hidden transcript of women’s power, a transcript which, according to Scott (1990, 190), represents a kind of “ideological dissent.” In this paper we conceptualize resistance as an active self-construction strategy. We focus on the ways that women draw on some scripts and resist others through their retrospective accounts of their motivations to leave an abusive partner. As we will show, the comanifestation of transcripts of power and powerlessness in women’s accounts of leaving have implications for thinking about the complex psychological processes involved in leaving and women’s agency and subjectivities “post abuse.” Feminist poststructuralist work in the field of intimate partner violence (such as Hydén 1999; 2005) and the work of Enander (2010; 2011) has contributed significantly to the field by providing insight into the manifestations of both the agentic/powerless transcripts that may co-exist

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in a single woman’s account as she continually fluctuates between positioning herself as powerful and powerless in relation to her abuser. This paper adds to this work by exploring the intersection of the transcript of power and the transcript of powerlessness. Ultimately, we unpack the meaning that is made through these particular moments of intersection in terms of our research question: How do the women construct their desire to leave abusive relationships?

Methodology Research Context The research project on which this paper is based was a critical feminist inquiry into understanding women’s experiences of disengaging from an abusive partner. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with sixteen women shelter residents who had experienced physical and psychological abuse at the hands of an intimate partner. The first author initiated contact with the shelters and conducted the interviews. The interviews took place in private rooms on the premises of the shelters. The interview questions covered challenges that women experienced while disengaging from an abusive relationship, personal changes/growth that they experienced at this stage of their life, and the role that the shelter has played in facilitating this process of disengaging. These interviews were audio taped, with the consent of the participants, and they were transcribed verbatim. Women were recruited from two shelters located in townships near the greater Cape Town area. These townships are characterized by high levels of crime, substance abuse, unemployment and general economic deprivation. All of the women were living in circumstances of severe economic deprivation, threads of which were woven into the stories about themselves and their worlds. Racially, fifteen of the participants could be identified as “colored”2 and one as “white.” All were of South African nationality. The age range of the participants was 24 to 57 years old, with a mean age of 35.4 years. The average education level was Grade 10, and only five of these women completed their high school education. All of the women had at least one child staying with them at the shelter. At the time of the interviews, the average length of shelter stay of the participants was 4.6 months, with a maximum stay of 36 months and a minimum stay of three weeks. It must be acknowledged that these women’s narratives of violence are constructed from the vantage point of the shelters after they had already

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left the abusive relationship. They construct their decision to leave in retrospect, narrating their past from their present lives at the shelter.3 The shelter may facilitate the process of naming abuse and shifting away from minimizing abuse, and it may facilitate particular interpretations of abusive experiences that draw on the broader societal context of power imbalances. It may also make available certain discourses of empowerment by which the women can articulate and negotiate their sense of power in the world. Here the women are connected with others who have experienced similar abuses, and this may inform their consciousness surrounding the issue. From a feminist poststructuralist view, the women are not looking back and relaying an absolute “truth,” but rather they are constructing a narrative truth that is informed by discourses that are available to them at a specific moment.

Data Analysis The data analysis involved drawing on themes that provided insight into the main thematic focus, namely women’s constructions of their desire to leave abusive relationships. We identified themes that spoke to the public transcript of abused women: pathology and powerlessness in relation to men. We also identified themes that represented the hidden transcript: women’s scripts of their sense of power (and ideological dissent) in relation to male abusers. Extracts of the women’s narratives were chosen according to those that most aptly conveyed a sense of the interplay between the public and the hidden transcript, as we have interpreted these concepts. Themes were extracted from brief segments of the women’s narratives rather than extended biographical accounts. Themes were then explicated across cases, providing a holistic view of the women’s voices. These methods of analysis are consistent with thematic narrative analysis as outlined by Riessman (2008). Attention was also paid to the language that the women used in the telling of their stories. Dominant scripts were identified in women’s narratives, particularly with regard to discourses of “abused women” and “active agents.” This involved an examination of the women’s use of language and the ways in which their articulations of self were structured by the surrounding social system (Collins 2003).

Ethical Considerations A number of ethical concerns were kept at the forefront of the study, namely, voluntary and informed consent, confidentiality, anonymity and

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non-maleficence. Informed consent was obtained and women’s rights to refuse to disclose certain information, as well as their rights to withdraw from the study were respected, along with the provision that no negative consequences would arise from non-participation or from withdrawal. The interviews were conducted in an ethically sensitive manner and women were informed about the availability of counselors at the respective shelters, should the interviews have raised any areas of concern. In this publication, women are identified through pseudonyms, with no further identifying details being provided, including the names and locations of the shelters.

Analysis: Constructing the Desire to Leave In what follows we analyze the women’s narratives of their desire to leave abusive heterosexual relationships. The analysis revealed that the women drew on the cultural “battered woman” transcript and at times in their narratives they also resisted this transcript and invested in more powerful “alternate selves.” These oscillations of self were signified by narrations that adhered to hegemonic constructions of femininity and the “abused woman” on the one hand and to alternate constructions of self as “powerful moral agent” on the other. The former hegemonic discourses stand as Scott’s (1990) public transcript that provided a cultural script of abused women as powerless (and pathological), while the latter refers to women’s hidden transcript of power in relation to men.

The “Battered Woman” Script The women in this study worked with the “battered woman” script in complex and varied ways. This cultural script depicts abused women as being weak, pathological and passive. They drew on this script by identifying the unequal power dynamics of their relationship and, in doing so, constructed themselves as “powerless” and “fearful” victims who held little power in relation to their abuser. The narratives of self as “powerless victim” encompassed constructions of self as “abused woman” that were juxtaposed with constructions of self outside, or beyond, the abuse. Because a man the way they abuse you it makes you feel scared, you get weak, you turn up to do everything they want you to do. You get to be also everything they want you to be. It’s like a role you playing now. It’s like a game you playing for them now and the only way to end is you, you make it stop. (Jolynn)

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Above, Jolynn highlights her sense of a loss of identity in relation to her controlling abuser (“you get to be also everything they want you to be”). She uses the pronoun “you” to construct women in general as being “weak” and “fearful” in relation to men; thus she draws on dominant discourses of masculinity and femininity that appear to shape her account of her lived experience. She, however, articulates submissiveness as a role that women adopt and not an inherent part of women’s nature. She contrasts the submissive “game” that women play with women’s “true” self that may be strong and capable. It is this self that she refers to when she says, “you make it stop.” Jolynn is highlighting her own sense of women’s capacity for action. The positioning of self as agent blurs the boundary of the powerful/powerless duality and suggests the complexity of women’s experiences of self in relation to their male abusers. In this excerpt Jolynn highlights the contradiction between a “capable self” and a “submissive self” and makes a call to the potential agency of abused women—seen by her description of women’s capacity to make the abuse stop. Here she invests in an agentic self that has the responsibility and the capacity to end the “game” with the abuser (“the only way to end it is you”). We interpret the contradiction between the agentic self and the passive abused self as representing a juncture for Jolynn: a point at which leaving became a possibility. It is this juncture that she retrospectively narrates as her motivation to take action by leaving. The women also positioned themselves as “fearful victims” in relation to the abusers. They did this by narrating certain insights of “realizing the danger” during which they constructed an increased awareness of the danger that the abuser posed to their lives. This was illustrated most notably via women’s descriptions of particularly violent incidents of physical abuse. Altoise painted a picture of her “fearful self” by constructing her lack of physical power in relation to her abuser. He take me one night here by the arms. He’s a big man. He take me there was a blue mark and things like that and he throw me against the wall there. There was a knock here, my eye was blue, he slapped me, you know. Then I thought to myself, “Oh well, this is the last straw. I have to run for my life. This guy is gonna kill me.” (Altoise)

Altoise positions herself as helpless victim who is vulnerable to intense physical domination at her partner’s hands. By focusing on his strength and capacity to exert power over her, she constructs herself as having limited power in relation to the abuser. She articulates a retrospective account of the seriousness of the abuse and displays the source of her “fear.” This narrated moment may be seen as representing what various

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scholars have defined as a turning point in the relationship, a moment at which a woman’s cognition shifts to become oriented towards leaving (see Khaw and Hardesty 2007; Patzel 2001). Here Altoise highlights the point at which she realized that she had to leave the abuser. Within the context of socio-cultural pressures that blame women for leaving and breaking up the family unit (see Towns and Adams 2009), Altoise may draw on this incident to construct a plausible “explanation” for why she left her abuser. Her account could be read as conveying her need to respond to this brutality in a way that will save her life (“I have to run for my life”). She constructs herself as “victim,” thus connoting fleeing, helplessness and lack of choice. Of course, “run for my life” could also be interpreted in terms of Altoise narrating her active choice to engage in activity to preserve her life (and thus articulating a capable, powerful self). Her representation of her sense of responsibility to herself that is signified by the need to protect her life is, however, situated against the backdrop of her account of self as vulnerable in relation to the abuser. The construction of a “fearful self” that co-exists with her sense of increased power in relation to the abuser may create a kind of dissonance of self (a “vulnerable” woman versus “capable” woman who can change this vulnerability). This dissonance, as we interpret it, is manifest via Altoise’s retrospective account of her “realization” that she had to act to save her life by leaving. Below, Rochelle constructed her “fear of death” as being the impetus for her to leave, regardless of the hardships that being a single mother may bring. I just had to draw the line. It was like a wake up call for me with the last assault that um just because I was close to death I had to draw the line somewhere. September last year was just my line and that is how I ended up here (at the shelter), I had nowhere else to go. (Rochelle)

Rochelle depicts her victimhood in terms of the severe assaults that she had limited physical power to shield. She speaks of “drawing the line” indicating her action of setting boundaries that delineated when the abuse was becoming too severe to bear (when she was almost killed). Here she draws on her moral power in outlining the level at which the abuse was unacceptable. Rochelle also articulates her sense of responsibility to set these boundaries as she says, “I had to draw the line somewhere.” The decision to leave can accord Rochelle more power as she is removed from the immediate danger of the abuse. This is, however, situated against the backdrop of her lack of socio-economic opportunities. The situation of women like Rochelle who are dependent on their abusers for finances and

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shelter is consistent with Scott’s (1990) account of the benefits that subordinate groups often receive if they maintain the silence of the hidden transcript. In this case Rochelle invests in her responsibility to protect herself over and above her identity of married/cohabiting woman. Staying with the abuser can be beneficial when it offers Rochelle more safety than going out into the world by herself. When staying in the relationship accords her more danger, she is then justified in choosing to leave. She constructs the danger as being severe enough to leave even though she had “nowhere to go.”4 This articulation of the danger serves to “explain” how Rochelle’s investment in her identity of “wife” was decreased. Rochelle instead invests in a more positive identity of “strong woman” and “moral agent” who must protect herself by leaving the abusive situation. Lillian draws on the “battered woman” script in her description of an abused, depressed self that lacks self-esteem. She suggests, however, that this self may be only part of the picture. I didn’t realize that I was being abused by him until I started to have effects of depression and you know getting at that point where my selfesteem was so low it looked even to everybody that I looked stupid. I looked like I had no confidence. It’s like my brains were closed up in a box. (Lillian)

Lillian highlights the effects that the abuse had on her self-confidence that led to her “looking stupid” in front of others. Here she positions herself in relation to discourses of abused women as “pathological,” representing a social self that is less powerful in relation to her abuser. Negative positions such as these are reflective of discourses of women in general as “mad”/“bad” or as “good virgin”/“bad whore” (Macdonald 1995) that offer women limited (often polarized) subject positions. Lillian stresses that “it looked” as if she was stupid and “it looked” as if she had no confidence. Thus, she sets up a disparity between how others position her due to the effects of the abuse and the fact that she does not position herself in this way. Lillian presents herself as clever (articulation of her sense of power) but the influence that the abuse had on her sense of self had an impact on her behavior and interactions with others. This is signified by her statement that her brains were “closed up in a box.” Thus, she sets up a contradiction between her sense of self and her sense of how others position her as “abused woman.” Our findings concur with Enander’s (2011) in the sense that dissonance is a crucial aspect of the women’s accounts of their desire to leave the abuser. The availability of discourses of women’s power (that contradict the “battered woman” script) may facilitate such dissonance of self that

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may in turn result in changes in the way that women narrate a sense of their power in relation to others. The intersections of the public and hidden transcript created inconsistencies in the women’s narratives of self in abusive relationships. These inconsistencies are heightened as they invested in identities that accord them a greater sense of power in the world. The analysis showed that women complexly managed “moral selves” as they explored and worked through certain contradictions of self that emerged along the way. Many women drew on these contradictions as a basis to “explain” why they left their relationships and such “explanations” seemed to be an important element for the women in their accounts of leaving. Overall, the women drew on the “battered woman” transcript in their constructions of themselves as “powerless” and “fearful” victims in relation to their abusive partners. This “abused self” was contrasted alongside alternate, more powerful subjectivities that the women drew upon at specific moments. The interaction between these particular scripts generated certain contradictions of self that seemed to play an important role in women’s constructions of their desire to leave.

Managing a Moral Self Studies have shown that an increased awareness of the dynamics of the abusive situation leads to a surge of emotions that stand as a resource to leaving (Hydén 1994; Kirkwood 1993). In the current study the women narrated self as “good person” and “moral agent.” They also highlighted contradictions between a more socially valued “good self”/mother and the “bad self”—a pathological subjectivity that occurred as a result of the abuse and who intends to harm the abuser because of feelings of desperation and anger. In what follows we explore the ways in which the women narrated their desire to leave as being the result of a complex “identity decision” through which they invested in identities that accorded them more power at certain moments.

Self as a “Good Person” and “Moral Agent” Some women in the study spoke about managing a moral self. These narratives centered on the contradictions of self that their intent to harm the abuser generated. The women examined these contradictions, drawing on their moral power and responsibility. They invested in more socially valued subjectivities—such as non-violent identities—that may be less threatening to their sense of themselves as good woman and mother.

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Mia spoke of the contradictions that her thoughts of killing the abuser generated in terms of her sense of herself as a moral agent in the world. I’m not that type of person and that’s how I feel sometimes when he was drunk and beating me up. And then he sleep and then I feel maybe I must kill you now but my heart was never strong enough to do it. It was just not me. So I said to myself, “before I become a person that do it (murder), I must get out.” (Mia)

In the extract above Mia narrates her thoughts of killing the abuser as being the result of violent episodes of drunken battering on the abuser’s part. Here she constructs an “abused self” whose thoughts of murder are a consequence of her partner’s abusive behavior, a response that she is powerless to control. She contrasts this with her sense of her “true” nature (“my heart was never strong enough to do it”). On one hand Mia’s narrative can be interpreted as being in line with the public transcript as she represents herself as being both negatively affected by the abuse and passive in the sense that she is not able to take this kind of action against the abuser. We interpret her account, however, in the context of the extreme nature of murder and the negative identity that is associated with a person who commits such an act. Mia draws on a “positive self” that makes an active choice to not enact harm on her abuser. This is consistent with the hidden transcript through which she articulates an agentic self. Here she strengthens her identity and sense of herself as someone who is capable of evaluating a point of action and as capable of taking action by leaving. She invests in a self that is compatible with her own values and that may accord her more social power than the negative identity of murderer. She attempts to show that if she committed violence against her abuser her sense of self as moral agent would have been threatened. Interestingly, her narrative suggests that it is the prioritizing of moral concerns that enabled her to leave the abuser. Leaving occurs in the face of multiple social expectations, including the value of a father figure (see Peled and Gil 2011; Shefer et al. 2008) and idealized notions of romantic heterosexual love (Jackson 2001; Towns and Adams 2000). Towns and Adams (2009) have highlighted certain ideological dilemmas that women face at the point of separation, such as the tension between collectivism and individualism. Relatedly, the women in the current study engaged in dialogue about the abuser’s dangerousness in order to justify their decision of aligning to the individualistic ideologies of leaving. In the example above, Mia explicitly mentions the physical threat that her partner posed towards her. She aligns with individualistic ideologies firstly by wishing her abuser dead and thus

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positioning herself in an imaginary way as separate from him. Secondly, in her final statement that she “must get out” she positions herself as a possible survivor who is capable of leaving the abuse. Both of these examples strongly contradict collectivist ideologies of romantic love (see Jackson 2001). At the beginning of the excerpt Mia outlines the specific context (“drunk and beating me up”) within which her thoughts of killing the abuser and then the thoughts of leaving him emerged. This description serves as a backdrop setting (an exceptional context of brutal force against her), offering Mia a means to justify the positioning of self in line with individualistic ideologies of separation.

Contradictions of Self as Mother A concern for the effects that the abuse has on children has been found to be a significant turning point that motivates many women to leave the relationship (for example, Khaw and Hardesty 2007; Taylor 2002). In the current investigation women’s identities of mother seemed to play a pivotal role in their “managing a moral self” by leaving. I was having so much anger against him. I was starting to have these thoughts I must do something to this man when he’s sleeping. I can throw him with boiling water or something and when I’m alone (I) used to think, “hey this is wrong. I am going to end up in jail if I’m going to do something to him and my children will suffer. Let me rather leave him. (Maleka) I tell for myself today is the day I’m going to do something to this man. And I take the tablets and the Ratex [rat poison] in my hand. That’s the day I decided I want to kill him…but you know, when I was standing there and I see my daughter’s face and I think who’s going to look after her if I (am) going to do something like that. (Beryl)

In the extracts above Maleka and Beryl highlight the contradiction between their intention of harming the abuser (their abused, angry and, perhaps, desperate self) and their responsibility as mothers. Maleka constructs her intention for violence as being a disempowering effect that is caused by the abuse. Beryl narrates her intention to harm the abuser as being an active decision (“that’s the day that I decided I want to kill him”) that is not merely a passive response to abuse. Beryl highlights her capacity to exert a negative change on her abuser’s life. This is signified through her intention to poison him. This construction of her own capacity to enact harm on the abuser suggests her increased sense of power in relation to him. Beryl chooses not to enact agency in this way because the end result may mean that she would not be able to take up the position of

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“good mother.” If, as in Beryl’s account, the construction of “angry abused wife” gives her a sense of power, then investment in a particular identity becomes complex as the identity of mother also accords her power. Here Beryl works with the two different powerful storylines and invests in an identity that is more morally acceptable and, as such, may accord Beryl an increased sense of self-worth. Both Maleka and Beryl construct their desire to leave as being the result of a rational choice in which they engaged in the strategy of “managing moral selves” and not acting in a violent manner. Their moral stance is closely tied to what the consequences of harming the abuser will mean in terms of the impact this will have on their children’s lives, and the possible threat to their subjectivities as mothers. If they end up in jail, their identities of mother would be shattered as they would then be unable to care for their children. They construct their desire to leave as being fuelled by their identities as mothers, identities that are imbued with cultural meanings that relate to their moral responsibilities in the world (Davies and Harré 1990). Their accounts show that women do not only draw on discourses of “emphasized femininity” to “explain” why they stay in abusive situations (Boonzaier and de la Rey 2003) but that they also position themselves within these discourses to “explain” why they leave. Ultimately, the women highlight contradictions between their bad “abused self” who intends to commit violence and the “good self”/mother. They draw on identities of responsible, moral person whose active choices may lead to a more favorable outcome in terms of facilitating their capacity to continue looking after their children. Such subjectivities may accord them more social value than the negative identity of “angry abused wife” who commits harm.

Conclusion The women in this study articulated the hidden transcript through “realizing the danger,” “managing a moral self” and drawing on “alternate selves”—all of which constitute agentic storylines by which the women narrated a sense of their power in relation to the abuser. In this paper we show that women shelter residents construct their desire to leave their abusive relationship as involving a complex engagement between their powerless/pathological “abused woman” self and their powerful “moral agent” self. Their accounts show a fluctuating sense of their power in relation to the abuser. The women present themselves in agentic ways that contradict meanings around the pathological and powerless victim prescribed by the “battered women” script. The women work through the

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contradictions between these two scripts and take on identities that accord them more power at specific moments as well as identities that are consistent with their sense of self at these moments. Ultimately, they invest in positive forms of subjectivity-selves that are capable of evaluating their situation and that have the control to choose to act in ways that will have positive consequences for their sense of self as culturally appropriate moral subject. These positionings may result in positive changes for their sense of self-worth and the ways in which they experience the world. In addition to the representation of self through language, this paper provides insight into the women’s lived experience as “abused women.”5 Constructions of self manifest via the women’s use of language but this also provides insight into the experience of “being subjected” that occurs as a result of the ways in which the women are positioned as “abused women,” as well as the different ways in which they position themselves (Davies and Harré 1990). The analysis shows that constructing a self as vulnerable, “powerless victim” in relation to the abuser is a crucial element in the women’s accounts of their desire to leave. Our findings are consistent with past research that has shown that different subject positions are taken up at various moments to achieve varied purposes (see Boonzaier and de la Rey 2003). The women in the current study position themselves as “fearful” and “powerless.” These constructions are narrated within the context of descriptions of the serious danger that the abuse posed to themselves as well as their children. A common theme is the women’s identities of mother and their concern for their children. What we hope this analysis has shown is not that women are trapped by one gendered subject position replacing another, but rather they draw on subject positions that have more social value and that may accord them an increased sense of self-worth. By depicting staying in the relationship as more dangerous than leaving, the women could justify their decisions to leave and maintain positive social identities, even in the face of the imperative of femininity that positions women as being responsible for maintaining the family system. The women’s investment in “powerful selves” occurs at a specific moment in South Africa in which women are gaining increasing power in the public sphere. The broader context of poverty does, however, also color their narrations of self (Brock 1993 as cited in Profitt 2000). The women’s situations of poverty mean that when they leave they are making a choice that could result in negative material consequences. Many describe having nowhere to go when they leave the abuser and do not have the finances to support their children alone. In this study, the women look back on their situations of abuse and, in doing so, narratively structure

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certain dissonances of self in relationship. This discord, or contradiction, between these two “selves” seems to form the basis by which the women “explained” why they left their relationships. The women paint a picture of the severe danger of the abusive environment and pair this with their sense of moral power and responsibility. This narration of the threat that the abuse poses to their sense of self and, in some cases, their physical selves, or lives, serves to equate the partners’ abuse as being as serious as the violation that they could experience outside the home (at the hands of other men or the violence of poverty). Here the women articulate that their investment in their identity of “wife” decreased as this position no longer holds a sense of power and safety. Our work contributes to the research that shows leaving as a process. It offers a unique angle for exploring the psychological aspects of abused women’s agency, one that interprets resistance as an active process of selfconstruction that is beyond mere visible action. We shed some light on Scott’s notion of power and resistance when applied to the issue of woman abuse. The women’s working through of contradictions of self stands as Scott’s (1990) “rupture” of the “normal world” public transcript of battered woman as powerless victims. It is at the site of contradiction that the public and the hidden transcript intersect. This contradiction of selves, according to our interpretation, constitutes a significant part of the women’s retrospective accounts of their desire to leave their abusive partners. Women do not draw on discourses of power and resistance in any simple way that replaces dominant discourses; rather a complex negotiation exists between the two. Our utilization of Scott’s concept of power relations provides us with a framework to analyze the ways in which constructions of self as powerful and powerless co-manifest at particular moments in the women’s retrospective accounts of leaving. In this way we offer a novel perspective on the complex psychological process of leaving an abusive heterosexual relationship and we offer new knowledge about women’s subjectivities “post abuse.” We also contribute fresh insights into the multifaceted issue of women’s agency in light of their narratives of their desire to leave these relationships within the broader South African context of poverty, deprivation and limited opportunities for marginalized women who may want to leave an abusive partner.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank the women shelter residents who took part in the larger study on which this paper is based. These women gave up their time and spoke openly about their experiences.

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Notes  1

Even though South Africa has experienced over 20 years of democracy, the spatial landscape to a very large degree still reflects the ethos of the Group Areas Act. This encompasses poor non-white people predominantly residing in townships or “ghettos” to which they were moved as a result of apartheid policies. These townships are often beset with a range of problems, which include high levels of violent crime, poverty, gangsterism, and a range of other social ills. 2 The term “colored” is one of the many racial categories constructed by the former apartheid government of South Africa. The term is still used in the country today to refer to a group of people who constituted one of the oppressed groups and who are of “mixed” ancestry. 3 The position of “having left” an abusive relationship is not definite or always permanent. Studies show that many women return to their abusive partners for various reasons; including societal pressures or a lack of financial resources (Abraham 2000; Ludsin and Vetten 2005). 4 Rochelle and the other women had in essence found somewhere to go in terms of their current residence in the shelters. Evident in the women’s narratives, however, was an implicit concern regarding the appropriateness of the shelter as a housing solution. A prominent concern was the limited length of time that the shelter could house them and having “nowhere to go” when they left the shelter. 5 We thank an anonymous reviewer for noting this point.

References Abraham, Margaret. 2000. “Isolation as a Form of Marital Violence: The South Asian Immigrant Experience.” Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, 9(3): 221–36.DOI:10.1023/A:1009460002177. Anderson, Michelle A. 2000. “Rape in South Africa.” Georgetown Journal of Gender & Law, 1: 789–821. Anderson, Debora K., and Daniel G. Saunders. 2003. “Leaving an Abusive Partner: An Empirical View of Predictors, the Process of Leaving, and Psychological Well-Being.” Trauma, Violence, and Abuse, 4:163–91. DOI: 10.1177/1524838002250769. Baker, Phyllis L. 1997. “‘And I Went Back’: Battered Women’s Negotiation of Choice.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 26(1):55–75. Boonzaier, Floretta. 2008. “‘If the Man says you Must Sit, Then you Must Sit’: The Relational Construction of Woman Abuse: Gender, Subjectivity and Violence.” Feminism & Psychology, 18(2): 183– 202.DOI: 10.1177/0959353507088266. Boonzaier, F., and Cheryl de la Rey. 2003. “‘He’s a Man and I’m a Woman’: Cultural Constructions of Masculinity and Femininity in

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South African Women’s Narratives of Violence.” Violence Against Women, 9(8): 1003–29.DOI:10.1177/1077801203255133. Burke, Jessica G., Gielen, Andrea C., McDonnell, Karen A., O’Campo, Patricia, and Suzanne Maman. 2001. “The Process of Ending Abuse in Intimate Relationships: A Qualitative Exploration of the Transtheoretical Model.” Violence Against Women, 7(10): 1144– 63.DOI:10.1177/10778010122183784. Collins, Anthony. 2003.“Social Psychology and Research Methods.” In Social Psychology: Identities and Relationships, edited by Kopano Ratele, and Norman Duncan, 23–41. Lansdowne: University of Cape Town Press. Davies, Bronwyn, and Rom Harré. 1990. “Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 20(1): 43–63. Davies, Bronwyn, Browne, Jenny, Gannon, Susanne, Hopkins, Lekkie, McCann, Helen, and Monne Wihlborg. 2006. “Constituting the Feminist Subject in Poststructuralist Discourse.” Feminism & Psychology, 16(1):87–103.DOI: 10.1177/0959-353506060825. Dutton, Donald G., and Susan L. Painter. 1993. “Emotional Attachments in Abusive Relationships: A Test of Traumatic Bonding Theory.” Violence and Victims, 8(2): 105–20. Enander, Viveka. 2010. “Jekyll and Hyde or ‘Who is this Guy?’–Battered Women’s Interpretations of their Abusive Partners as a Mirror of Opposite Discourses.” Women’s Studies International Forum, 33:81–90. —. 2011. “Leaving Jekyll and Hyde: Emotion Work in the Context of Intimate Partner Violence.” Feminism & Psychology, 21(1): 29– 48.DOI:10.1177/0959353510384831. Enander, Viveka, and Carin Holmberg. 2008. “Why Does She Leave? The Leaving Process(es) of Battered Women.” Health Care for Women International, 29: 200–26.DOI: 10.1080/07399330801913802. Foucault, Michel. 1982. “Afterword: The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus, and Paul Rabinow, 208–26. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fuller, Alexandra. 2010. “Mandela’s Children.” National Geographic, 217: 80–108. Herman, Judith. 1992. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. USA: Basic Books. Hydén, Margareta. 1994. Woman Battering as Marital Act: The Construction of a Violent Marriage. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.

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—. 1999. “The World of the Fearful: Battered Women’s Narratives of Leaving Abusive Husbands.” Feminism & Psychology, 9(4):449– 69.DOI:10.1177/0959353599009004012. —. 2005. “‘I Must Have Been an Idiot to Let it Go On’: Agency and Positioning in Battered Women’s Narratives of Leaving.” Feminism & Psychology, 15(2): 169–88.DOI:10.1177/0959353505051725. Jackson, Sue. 2001. “Happily Never After: Young Women’s Stories of Abuse in Heterosexual Love Relationships.” Feminism & Psychology, 11: 305–21.DOI:10.1177/0959353501011003004. Khaw, Lyndal, and Jennifer L. Hardesty. 2007. “Theorizing the Process of Leaving: Turning Points and Trajectories in the Stages of Change.” Family Relations, 56: 413–25. Kirkwood, Catherine. 1993. Leaving Abusive Partners: From the Scars of Survival to the Wisdom for Change. Newbury Park: Sage. Landenburger, Karen M. 1998. “The Dynamics of Leaving and Recovering from an Abusive Relationship.” Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, and Neonatal Nursing, 27(6): 700–06. DOI: 10.1111/j.1552-6909.1998.tb02641.x. Lempert, Lora B. 1996. “Women’s Strategies for Survival: Developing Agency in Abusive Relationships.” Journal of Family Violence, 11(3):269–89. Ludsin, Hallie, and Lisa Vetten. 2005. Spiral of Entrapment: Abused Women in Conflict with the Law. Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Macdonald, Myra. 1995. Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in the Popular Media. London: Edward Arnold. Matthews, Shanaaz, Abrahams, Naeemah, Jewkes, Rachel, Martin, Lorna J., Lombard, Carl, and Lisa Vetten. 2008. “Intimate Femicide-Suicide in South Africa: A Cross Sectional Study.” Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 86(7):552–58. Patzel, Brenda. 2001. “Women’s Use of Resources in Leaving Abusive Relationships: A Naturalistic Inquiry.” Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 22(8):729–47. Peled, Einat, and Inbal B. Gil. 2011. “The Mothering Perceptions of Women Abused by Their Partner.” Violence against Women, 17(4):457–79.DOI:10.1177/1077801211404676. Profitt, Norma J. 1994. “‘Battered Women’ as ‘Victims’ and ‘Survivors’: Creating Space for Resistance.” Canadian Social Work Review, 13(1):23–38. —. 2000. Women Survivors, Psychological Trauma, and the Politics of Resistance. New York: Haworth.

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Riessman, Catherine K. 2008. Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shefer, Tamara. 2004. Psychology and the Regulation of Gender. In Critical Psychology, edited by Derek Hook, 187–209. Landsdowne: University of Cape Town Press. Shefer, Tamara, Crawford, Mary, Strebel, Anna, Simbayi, Leickness C., Dwadwa-Henda, Nomvo, Kaufman, Michelle R., and Seth C. Kalichman. 2008. “Gender, Power and Resistance to Change Among Two Communities in the Western Cape, South Africa.” Feminism & Psychology, 18:157–81.DOI:10.1177/0959353507088265. Taylor, Janette Y. 2002. “‘The Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back’: African American Women’s Strategies for Disengaging from Abusive Relationships.” Women & Therapy, 25(3/4):79–94. DOI:10.1300/J015v25n03_06. Towns, Alison J., and Peter J. Adams. 2000. “‘If I Really Loved Him Enough, He Would Be Okay’: Women’s Accounts of Male Partner Violence.” Violence Against Women, 6: 558–85. DOI:10.1177/10778010022182038. —. (2009). “Staying Quiet or Getting Out: Some Ideological Dilemmas Faced by Women who Experience Violence from Male Partners.” British Journal of Social Psychology,48(4):735–54. DOI: 10.1348/014466608X398762. Walker, Lenore E. 1979a. “How Battering Happens and How to Stop it.” In Battered Women, edited by Donna Moore, 59–78. California: Sage. —. 1979b. The Battered Woman. New York: Harper & Row. Weedon, Chris. 1987. Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. New York: Basil Blackwell. Wuest, Judith, and Marilyn Merritt-Gray. 1999. “Not Going Back: Sustaining the Separation in the Process of Leaving Abusive Relationships.” Violence against Women, 5(2): 110–33. DOI:10.1177/1077801299005002002. —. 2001. “Beyond Survival: Reclaiming Self After Leaving an Abusive Partner.” Canadian Journal of Nursing, 32(4): 79–94. Yoshioka, Marianne R. 2008. “The Impact of the Cultural Context on the Experience of Domestic Violence.” In Domestic Violence: A MultiProfessional Approach for Healthcare Practitioners, edited by June Keeling, and Tom Mason, 81–90. Berkshire, UK: Open University Press.

PART II: FEMINIST PRAXIS: COLLABORATIONS AND BRIDGING RESEARCH-ACTIVIST BINARIES

CHAPTER FOUR DOCUMENTING TRAUMA, HOPE, AND HUMAN SECURITY: SCHOLAR ACTIVIST RESEARCH WITH GRANDMOTHERS AGAINST POVERTY AND AIDS JENNIFER N. FISH AND SAVANNAH L. RUSSO

Introduction This chapter draws upon narrative accounts of South African grandmothers and participatory organizational observations to bring into focus the intersecting complexities and complementarities of scholaractivist research. We discuss our shared process of acquiring, analyzing and expanding applied research with a community-based organization of 300 grandmothers, which provides support for women on the front lines of the HIV/AIDS crisis in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. By connecting the micro level of grandmothers’ day-to-day experiences with a larger context of post-conflict trauma, reconciliation and national development, this scholar-activist research illuminates the distinct experiences of elder women, who struggle to realize the promises of the post-94 democratic South Africa in the face of the escalating AIDS pandemic. As we explore how grandmothers act as agents of human security, experience continued trauma, provide multigenerational caretaking labor, and act as community leaders, we simultaneously interrogate the underpinnings of feminist scholar-activist research. This chapter centers analyses of human security, gender and postconflict reconstruction on Grandmothers against Poverty and AIDS (GAPA), a community-based organization of elder women, all of whom experienced suffering and severe marginalization under the apartheid regime and now face the current wave of the HIV/AIDS crisis’ caretaking and economic demands. The foundation of this scholar-activist research

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with GAPA began ten years ago.1 The bulk of the material for this chapter, however, emerged over the course of a focused research project in Cape Town in 2011, when we interviewed 22 members of the GAPA organization and engaged in a month of extensive ethnographic observational research in Khayelitsha.2 Throughout this period, we focused on grandmothers’ experiences of the impact of HIV/AIDS, particularly in relation to the high levels of crime and poverty that pose serious threats to personal, community, health and political security for elder women in this community. Our collection of data required that we build individual and organizational trust with GAPA, ask sensitive questions about intimate topics to individual participants, engage in intensive observations of daily life and family structures, and sit alongside grandmothers who recounted severe life challenges, loss and persistent grieving. In this chapter, we integrate our academic topic of inquiry—the relationship among grandmothers, HIV/AIDS and human security in South Africa—with a reflexive analysis of the process of acquiring knowledge through feminist-activist forms.

Framing Human Security through a Feminist Lens Our research shows how elder women provide not only core foundational support systems and community social cohesion within Khayelitsha, but also central human security functions within the larger socio-economic context of South Africa’s post-conflict transition. As an outgrowth of the traditional nation-state focus of security studies, human security frameworks ask, “What can we do to ensure that people around the world are able to secure themselves, their families, and their communities, from the various threats they face every day?” (Hubbard, Suzuki, and Koryu 2008, 15). This perspective places individuals and civil society at the center of analysis to examine the particularities of the local in the context of larger global dynamics. While exploring the transnational, human paradigms simultaneously incorporate personal, community, national and international scales (Lammers 1999, 62). The 1994 launch of the new security framework in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) shifted human security emphasis to include socio-economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, and personal wellbeing (Ray and Basu 2006, 5). The HIV/AIDS crisis provides an exemplar of this perspective because it impacts health, economic livelihood, food supply and community cohesion, while illuminating the daily human impact of insecurity.

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When we look at human security as an ideological framework, the burden of political, social and economic instability is assumed more heavily by women throughout the world. Here, the burgeoning field of feminist security studies synthesizes the human security analysis of a wider measure of peace and stability with a gender lens that focuses on the disproportionate impact of socio-economic, health, and environmental insecurity on women. This shift in orientation and applied practice complements the trends toward a human security framework, while widening the scale of empirical studies to include individuals, organizations and civil society more broadly. According to feminist security studies scholars, gender is central to both development and security studies because of the asymmetric power relations between men and women across societies, which reinforce conflict, violence and unequal access to resources. Feminist security studies scholars focus on how such imbalances in access to resources are central to world politics and contribute to the insecurity of individuals, particularly, marginalized and disempowered populations (Tickner 2001). As Annick Wibben (2011, 5) argues: Feminists have played an important role in proposing alternative conceptions of power and violence that go beyond the traditional military configurations of the discipline of IR, including ideas of common and cooperative security arrangements, and non-state-centric perspectives on security.

For these reasons, feminist security studies scholars have consistently argued that human security and post-conflict peace transitions cannot be achieved without the vital integration of attention to women and a wider gender perspective. We draw from feminist and human security studies to situate the experiences and contributions of Khayelitsha grandmothers, who are on the front lines of the HIV/AIDS crisis in South Africa. At this particular moment in South Africa’s ongoing post-apartheid transition, when the promise of social justice in the building of democracy confronts the pervasive HIV/AIDS pandemic, elder women encapsulate a critical juncture where human security, development and reconciliation intersect. Through the case study of GAPA, we explore both the individual narratives of grandmothers as well as the role of civil society organizations in securing communities, confronting the AIDS pandemic and addressing the particular needs of elder women who live within the socio-economic structural residue of apartheid’s harshest inequalities. From this research, and our analysis of the scholar-activist methods undertaken to gather these data, we intend to deepen and expand theoretical and applied

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considerations of the meaning of peace and security, as it is lived on a daily basis among this particular and symbolic population.

Women and HIV/AIDS in South Africa In South Africa’s post-94 political, economic and social context, accompanied by the unparalleled AIDS crisis, women continually bear disproportionate burdens of the aftermath of apartheid and the costs of rebuilding a new democratic nation. In the communities most heavily impacted by HIV/AIDS, they support orphaned children, care for the sick and dying, work more hours in paid and unpaid labor, coordinate funerals and serve as heads of households. Within the prevailing socio-economic circumstances, these gender disparities become even more pronounced (Ferreira and Kalula 2009). Furthermore, the overarching geographic location dynamics of urban townships in Cape Town shape the genderspecific nature of AIDS and its caretaking dimensions. A closer examination of this disproportionate burden suggests grandmothers are “picking up the pieces” of the AIDS pandemic (Smetherham, Miller, and Fish 2013). In doing so, their networks and community support organizations become that much more vital to survival, as well as a collective response to the crisis. Our study took place in Khayelitsha—South Africa’s fastest-growing township. Khayelitsha captures the existing race, class and gender divides that reflect South Africa’s highly stratified history and foundation (Uthando 2011). Since its establishment in the mid-1980s, Khayelitsha has seen a steady population increase, paralleled by increases in HIV/AIDS rates at nearly 13 percent nationally and extremely high unemployment rates at 41 percent nationally and over 70 percent in township locations (South Africa HIV and AIDS Statistics 2010). A substantial portion of the homes in Khayelitsha are informal squatter camps, which lack proper sanitation and security. Rates of violence and crime have escalated, coupled with substantive increases in gang violence and drug use. In particular, violence against women has escalated, as South Africa often claims to have one of the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world, with extremely high incidents of intimate partner violence (Abrahams et al. 2012). The relational links between unemployment, housing, crime, and violence against women are poignant factors that shape the growing numbers of HIV infections and its disproportionate impact on women. Elder women in Khayelitsha face a particular dual experience because they hold the history of living through suffering within the apartheid era

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and are now taking on central roles as the caretakers, as their own children are dying of HIV/AIDS at escalating rates. These grandmothers—who lived through South Africa’s end of apartheid and the ushering in of a new democratic nation under Nelson Mandela—thought they would be taken care of in their elder years, yet now face the realities of their need to perform care labor as the HIV/AIDS pandemic’s demands place an enormous toll on elder women in the most affected communities (Miller, Smetherham, and Fish 2012). Yet, even as their lives are reshaped by the needs of this pandemic, women continue to organize collectively to confront the HIV/AIDS crisis and its central links to poverty and development within South Africa. With these two overarching trends—an increase in HIV/AIDS and the reliance on elder women to provide caretaking—non-governmental and civil society organizations play a central role in responding to grandmothers’ needs and confronting the pandemic through collective mobilization. Let us turn to an analysis of the organization at the heart of this study.

Feminist Research with Grandmothers against Poverty and AIDS Our feminist scholar-activist research orientation emphasizes the importance of building relationships with the participants in this study, as well as the organization as a whole. The narrative data collected for this study emerged from a ten-year working relationship established through continual contact and a series of academic exchanges for US students and faculty at Grandmothers against Poverty and AIDS (GAPA). In this section, we overview key components of our findings while within GAPA’s main programs and outreach services. Let us begin with a short overview of the organization, followed by a more detailed account of our findings surrounding women and human security. Next, we move to a reflective analysis of our research process, paying particular attention to the ways in which our role as researchers shaped the research design, process and findings. Formed as a pilot project by University of Cape Town occupational therapists, Kathleen Broderick and Monica Ferreira, GAPA initially set out to empower grandmothers from townships in the Western Cape of South Africa through social and small-scale bereavement support groups that also promoted HIV/AIDS education. With acquired government support, small- and large-scale donations from organizations like the Stephen Lewis Foundation (a program of the United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa), and individual donors, GAPA became an

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official non-governmental organization (NGO) in 2001. The formalization of this organization stemmed from grandmother members’ clear indication of the pressing need for a larger-scale ongoing community-based project to fight the interlocking problems of security, development and HIV/AIDS (GAPA 2011). Today, GAPA reaches over 300 grandmothers through a total of nearly 30 support groups, including income-generation training, grief support groups, health and wellness programming, and an afterschool education and nutrition program for over 200 children. These focus projects, as well as the larger organizational philosophies, are guided by a perspective that draws upon the social capital and status of elder women as central figures in the fight against AIDS, violence and poverty. Our research suggests that in addition to supporting individual women and smaller groups, GAPA has become a central community base that holds a symbolic presence about the collective force and contributions of grandmothers on the front lines of the AIDS pandemic. The philosophy of the organization requires that each member be affected by HIV/AIDS in her immediate family or household. GAPA supports a decentralized leadership philosophy where grandmother members are an active part of the organizational structure. Kathleen Broderick (pers. comm.), founder of GAPA, stated that GAPA was “building the capacity of older women to cope with their life circumstances, achieving this through building self-esteem.” She went on to identify the following central ways in which GAPA serves as a community-based, grandmother-run support system where the flow of knowledge is expansive and inclusive: 1) making educational enrichment opportunities available in various language formats; 2) contributing to household income through the skills development that builds upon the agency of grandmothers’ hands; and 3) providing opportunities for community leadership roles and the spread of knowledge, while advocating on behalf of older persons. Within this advocacy role, GAPA plays a vital role by supporting the daily needs of grandmothers and maximizing their potential to gain state-sponsored child support and foster care grants for the added economic costs they assume in stepping into intergenerational parenting roles.3 Grandmother members, Olivia and Gladys, characterized GAPA as an organization that seeks to help the elder generation in the wake of AIDS: “GAPA is trying to help the grannies and the grandchildren of the grannies who have lost their parents.” Gladys’ definition of GAPA reaches deep into the core foundational aspects of the organization to address the innumerable costs of the grip of AIDS on parent-aged populations. With an overarching goal to support,

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educate and empower grandmothers, GAPA works to provide security and stability for elder women and their grandchildren. Along with Olivia and Gladys, Florence, a staff member at GAPA, described the organization’s role in decreasing the burdens of death, AIDS and poverty for many grandmothers: GAPA is telling people each and everything that is heavy and a bad thing, that is not the end of the world you can keep on going. Life is going and that problem will be solved. It will pass and you can keep on going with your life.

Doris gave her own definition of what GAPA does in her life and community, underscoring the role the organization plays for elder women: GAPA first thing, likes us to be happy and not to sit in the house thinking about everything. GAPA is here to give you a new life and a new thinking and you have something to do as old people.

The belief that elder women can overcome obstacles and serve as valuable assets to community development became a key piece in the organizational model, after small-scale support groups had initially been created to ease grandmothers’ suffering and increase their coping skills. In these ways, rather than reifying common associations about elder women as passive and likely unaware of the HIV/AIDS context, GAPA positions itself as an organization comprising grandmother social change agents who actively confront the multiple dimensions of poverty and the AIDS pandemic as a collective force. The community formed through GAPA’s model serves to make women like Tenjiwe stronger in her capacity to cope with the daily experiences of AIDS-affected community life: I get rest [here] and the stresses went off. It made [me into] something. I just talk to the other one [and get support]. Every day I am longing to come here, it is happy every day. I realized I am not the only one. AIDS is in all our houses. I am becoming stronger.

Because AIDS plays such an impactful role in all of the grandmother members’ lives, GAPA seeks to build upon this shared experience to foster collective strength, coping skills and resilience. The GAPA model includes both a community outreach program component and substantive organizational efforts devoted to empowering the capacities of individual grandmothers to act as community leaders and change agents, in the face of severe poverty, unemployment, security instability and HIV/AIDS.

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Grandmothers reap benefits in their GAPA membership through a series of education and self-improvement programs. Workshops are continually conducted by trained grandmother members three days of every month, covering a wide variety of topics, including HIV/AIDS, parenting, business and gardening skills, human rights, sexual violence and bereavement. These sessions are open to the public in efforts to expand the impact of GAPA’s educational component. To promote wellness for its members, GAPA grandmothers launched a weekly health club with over 45 participants (GAPA 2011). Various elements of security, economic support and education play vital roles in the mission of GAPA and all of these related programs. Within a larger national context of high unemployment, escalating violence, AIDS and a systemic educational inequality, GAPA strives to address the severe levels of community insecurity rendered from the persistent fissures between South Africa’s apartheid history and its long walk to the realization of the 1994 vision of a human rights and social equality-based democracy.

HIV/AIDS, Caretaking and Shifting Grandmother Roles The reality of caretaking in the midst of security issues, such as unemployment, a lack of education and HIV/AIDS, leads to many subsequent effects for elder women. The AIDS pandemic has altered the structure of motherhood because so many mothers are dying during the time that they would be investing in child rearing. This demographic reality has reshaped the role of GAPA grandmothers, who are often forced to assume extensive caretaking responsibilities at the time in their lives when they have expected to be cared for (Smetherham 2011, 33). While associations about African women’s roles as “other mothers” in wider communities and families reflect the core strengths and capabilities of elder women, they also reinforce a misperception about elder women’s seemingly natural capacity to remain caretakers for the duration of the lifespan—without consideration for the larger structural burdens they experience as a result of the dual impact of the AIDS pandemic and massive security concerns in South Africa. May Chazan (2008) conducted research on grandmothers’ caretaking in the Warwick Junction of Durban. One participant in this study linked traditional caretaking to the increased demands of the AIDS crisis by stating: Many children have been left behind. It’s us grandmothers who are taking care of them. This is nothing new, we have always done this. It is our duty. But the cause of death now is HIV/AIDS. (Chazan 2008, 945).

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Monica Ferreira and Sebastiana Kalula (2009, 3) address this issue by stating: The HIV/AIDS epidemics are thrusting many older women back into the role of primary child care provider to sick adult kin and vulnerable and orphaned grandchildren. Up to two-thirds of people living with AIDS are cared for by a parent in their sixties and seventies.

The burden of these caretaking roles is even heavier when we consider the efforts grandmothers make to serve as agents of security within the post-apartheid context. Many of the GAPA grandmothers in this study echoed similar experiences about the increased caretaking demands they faced with the AIDS pandemic. When asked about the reason for the changing role of grandmothers, the majority of participants connected the high rate of HIV/AIDS with increased parenting role expectations placed on elder women, which destabilizes the traditional family structure. Thelma4 attributed this increased burden to the economic situation and the history of wide patterns of rural to urban migration in South Africa: No, before when there was no HIV our grannies raised us. My mother was always working and my grannie raised me. I grew up in the Eastern Cape there were cows for children, milk, fields to grow but not everything has to be bought in the shop. So the grandmothers now have to have money.

As this reflection suggests, while grandmothers have always taken on central caretaking roles in the history of South Africa, the demands of maintaining family livelihoods in urban spaces, with the increased costs of HIV/AIDS place expansive economic demands that substantially increase the expectations placed on grandmothers. All grandmother participants in our interviews agreed that HIV/AIDS, while posing increased demands to support and provide for their children and grandchildren, has not changed the social perception of grandmother caregivers that has long been part of communal and family living. Georgina shared her perceptions of how the devastating effects of HIV/AIDS have changed the historical reliance on women for childcare and family maintenance: It’s different than the old days because of HIV/AIDS because they leaving the children with us when they die and the responsibility with us. They depend on their parents and they are no longer working.

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This caretaking responsibility has only increased as HIV/AIDS takes hold of families and leaves younger generations in the care of elder ones. Our research sheds new light on the relationship between traditional respect for elders and the contemporary dimensions of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Nompumelelo explained that elder caretaking roles are now more difficult because of a general lack of respect children have for their grandmothers: We grandmothers we were listening to our parents but now in our days there is this new system of thinking. The kids at early ages get pregnant and from that they think they are women. So they don’t think that we are also coming from that stage. A child of 11 years at eight o’clock is not in the house, she is outside and if you ask her why she is outside she will say she is chatting with friends. Sometimes it is a boyfriend. If I am not around her she will not listen to another grandmother. There is no respect.

Grandmothers repeatedly referenced this decreased respect as a core dimension of their perception of the existing core problems within South Africa’s strained social, economic and public health context. Nompumelelo explained that the only way for the continued spread of HIV to be halted was for respect for grandmothers to be renewed: If one child can take responsibility of herself and look straight for what my grannie is doing for me and then maybe some children will say no. She will be open and say no. I will do this on the right time and I will get the right person because my grannie is suffering. Our children, some of them, they are proud of what their grandmothers are doing for them—some of them don’t care. They even steal their grandmother’s money to give to the boyfriends. If they can respect there will be less HIV. We are not scared of HIV.

Like many of her peers, this participant identified a need for increased respect as the main factor in decreasing the rates of HIV/AIDS. Two other grandmothers also related the higher rate of HIV/AIDS in the community to the inability of younger generations to heed the practical warnings of grandmothers. Nomonde reflected on her own daughter’s resistance to her knowledge and the outcome it rendered: My last born she was born in 1990 but if she gets sick I have to take care of her child. You see that is too much. The more they learn about HIV the more careless they are. Our children are getting pregnant too much. Pregnant means no condom and this means infected children. My eldest daughter is sick and keeps having children. She doesn’t want to learn. Now she’s got three children I have got a fear one day she will fall ill and die. That is too much. The more she knows she is sick the more children. At the

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end of the day I will be a mother. That means she does not practice safe sex.

When asked if her grandchildren are HIV positive as a result of the mother’s behavior, Nomonde responded, “The children are safe, no HIV/AIDS. She is too much clever for that.” The reality that Nomonde’s daughter did and does not practice safe sex has led to her contraction of HIV. Interestingly, however, her own knowledge regarding protection for her unborn children saved them from the same diagnosis. This example reflects a general perception grandmothers shared about the central link between increased sexual risk behaviors and a general decrease in respect for life among younger generations in Khayelitsha. This combined attitude and behavior creates a delicate balance for youth, and a costly predicament for grandmothers. Mary talked openly about this lack of respect as an apparent change in generational thinking: Our children now don’t want to listen carefully. If you tell them you mustn’t do that they say, “We have rights” but last time when we were the children we didn’t have rights we know what we must do. If you tell the children now they say no that is my right. It is hard for us to grow our children. They have no respect. They go out and get HIV and then they want to talk and they talk and get HIV and then I don’t know what she must do. That’s why they died.

These narratives reflect a core contradiction. As GAPA grandmothers are educated in HIV/AIDS protection, prevention and survival and carry traditional roles, they exist within a larger context of severe social inequalities, poverty and insecurity that have led youth to often choose to disobey the teachings of their elders and engage in unsafe relationships. Olivia and Gladys also correlated the lack of respect to children’s denial of HIV/AIDS and unwillingness to follow best practices: No, they refuse, they don’t accept it. If they can accept it—it’s the same as the other sick. Like me, I am high blood pressure and must take tablets for the rest of my life. What is the difference? I don’t see a difference. They don’t want to accept it. So that’s why our children die. They make things difficult for everyone. It’s getting worse because they do not want to accept it.

In some cases, children refuse to take the life-saving ARV medications, leaving grandmothers with an immediate predicament and a long-term caretaking burden, as an entire generation dies off.

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Many youth, in the midst of poverty and crime, resort to drugs and alcohol to escape the larger severe structural disadvantages that so strongly influence their life chances. Florence talked to this issue in her interview and explained GAPA’s role in assisting grandmothers facing these issues: The drug abuse and alcohol because the grandchildren are getting these drugs and that is the burden for grandmothers. (For) a grandmother it is not easy to see this child is using drugs now. They don’t know the symptoms. GAPA is empowering them. That lady came to tell the grandmothers the symptoms of the drug abuse and now they are aware.

As these narratives reflect, the demands of the HIV/AIDS crisis, and its related social issues such as drug use, force grandmothers to step out of traditional roles and talk about sex, addiction and abuse. While GAPA empowers grandmothers with vital and comprehensive education on HIV/AIDS prevention/awareness and the warning signs of abuse and drug addiction, the application of these skills requires a shift in communication patterns. With the realities of the AIDS pandemic and the role grandmothers play on the front lines of this battle, elder women are now encouraged to transcend generations to discuss the intimate dimensions of sex and personal behaviors. In many respects, the very livelihood of South Africa’s next generation depends upon their ability to do so. While elder women provide vital HIV/AIDS prevention knowledge, yet are so often denied respect from younger generations, the realities of the crisis place serious economic and survival demands on grandmothers. The spread of HIV/AIDS contradicts a traditional support process that assures the long-term care of grandmothers by their children and grandchildren. In the existing AIDS context, South Africa’s elderly can no longer anticipate assured support from their children (Kristoffersson 2000). Rather, the roles of elder women are “shifting from ‘supported’ to ‘supporters’ as they embark on strategies that contradict prevailing cultural norms, in an attempt to cope with the widening care challenges” (De la Porte 2007, 135). As director of GAPA, Vivienne Budaza explains: HIV has taken away their children. They raised them with the hope that once they have obtained their degree they will immediately access employment. Yes, there has been a shift since the intro of ARVs but still unemployment remains an issue. It isn’t helping the grandmothers and their biggest concern now is that I am burying my children who will bury me?

As Ms. Budaza reflects, this core concern from grandmothers is linked directly to the larger socio-economic context within South Africa’s transition. As these lenses into grandmothers’ experiences repeatedly

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illustrate, HIV/AIDS is a gendered crisis, with a racial and economic dimension that places the toll of this pandemic on black elder women in South Africa. The mandatory caretaking and economic resources required to cope with the AIDS crisis fall most directly on grandmothers in South Africa’s poorest communities. Within this existing social circumstance, the history of collective social movements and the strength of civil society organizations in South Africa provide a vital current to “Change the River’s Flow” through women’s organizing at the community level.

GAPA: Organizing for Empowerment and Human Security In our interviews with grandmothers, the larger community struggles with severe violence, and its disproportionate impact on women emerged as a top concern for participants. In this section, we look at how GAPA as a civil society organization responds to larger issues of human security. In the Khayelitsha context of severe poverty, unemployment and HIV/AIDS, GAPA serves as a secure place of safety and support for elder women who confront the daily violence that stems from larger socio-economic inequalities. At the same time, the organization’s core training on violence prevention, child security, HIV/AIDS prevention and income generation provide grandmothers with economic resources and knowledge skills as core tools in the larger struggle to redress sharp socio-economic inequalities and the related human insecurities. As they provide for a younger generation, grandmothers are often targets of the larger forms of gender and structural violence that continue to define South African society. Even though South Africa has committed to “non-sexism” at the public level, as reflected in the Constitution, sharp gender inequalities persist in the private households, where women are most likely to experience violence (Britton 2005). Scholars suggest that South Africa’s high levels of violence against women may express a form of “policing” the new structural norms of gender equality (GobodoMadikizela, Fish, and Shefer 2014; Moffett 2006). As one grandmother leader expressed: Someday when I was doing the abuse thing there was a man. When I told him the man must ask permission to sleep with women they mustn’t just take you for granted and the man was here and he took his things and march out and didn’t come back saying “that woman was so silly saying how our wife must handle us.”

This notion of men’s “handling of women” reflects the lingering patriarchal assumptions that limit women’s access to the promises of

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gender equality in South Africa. In the larger circumstances of persistent human security concerns, including high rates of crime and sexual violence, such assumptions and practices dramatically increase women’s risk of contracting HIV/AIDS, as well as their need to cope with its consequences as caretakers and economic providers. Given the social realities grandmothers face, GAPA’s efforts as an organization focus on redressing violence against women and promoting gender equality through workshops that reach a larger group of women in Khayelitsha. Empowered with this training, the model intends to draw upon the strengths of women and the remaining levels of respect for elder women to infuse awareness, shifts in perception and behavioral change among the next generation, including men. In a personal interview with Constance, a GAPA grandmother who conducts monthly workshops on abuse and human rights, we see the role educational programming plays in challenging norms and promoting elder women’s awareness of the intersecting layers of abuse: In the workshop I am telling about the abuse, about sexual abuse. I tell them that there are different kinds of abuse. There is sexual abuse where somebody wants to take your body by force and you do not agree. This is rape. I am talking about physical abuse where somebody has got marks. If somebody has beaten you maybe sometimes you come from work with your eyes right then the next day your eyes are blue and it shows that you had physical abuse, you have been beaten. The marks are showing. The marks show the abuse. I told about incest abuse where there is a man in the house and he gives the children pills. The children do not know what they are doing. When (he) is in the house he wants to sleep with his niece or his sister. That is incest abuse because it is happening to the family. There is financial abuse where there is sometimes the husband is working and instead of coming to the house he comes to shop and waste the money and when he comes home there is nothing to be eaten and he beats the wife.

Through the education and experience Constance has acquired in GAPA, as well as her own life experience, she is able to connect particular threats to women with larger sexual, physical and economic patterns of abuse. Like many other leaders within GAPA, Constance is educating the wider community of grandmothers to see their own relationship to these issues, while providing insight into how to gain support from GAPA members and access to larger legal protections. Throughout this study, our exposure to GAPA reinforced the notion that human security is a gendered phenomenon, with a nuanced impact that falls disproportionately to elder women. Within this particular juncture between apartheid and a new democracy, South Africa’s

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grandmothers are organizing to both gain personal support and take part in a collective resistance to the structural inequalities that define HIV/AIDS through such sharp systems of inequality. GAPA, like: most projects dealing with HIV/AIDS, aims change, not through force or legislation but population that it is in their own best interest change their own behavior in order to reduce Suzuki, and Koryu 2008, 24)

at some sort of behavior by convincing the target and within their power to their risk level. (Hubbard,

Given South Africa’s history of women’s collective organizing, this investment also reinforces a vital link between personal empowerment and collective mobilization. Through awareness and public action to redress gender inequality, women take more control of their own lives and choices, leading to a decreased infection rate for both men and women. For example, in 2010, GAPA developed a major slogan piece entitled “Changing the River’s Flow” to highlight the cultural gender norms and prevailing patriarchal systems that needed direct re-evaluation by a collective of elder women. This gender-mainstreaming project sought to highlight the harmful aspects of women’s subordination in Khayelitsha by providing knowledge and insights about the benefits of women’s empowerment, equality, and contributions to peacebuilding. When 300 grandmothers confront daily behaviors of abuse and gender-based violence in a consistent manner, their impact on communities is that much more effective and wider in reach. Furthermore, with the levels of training GAPA delivers, grandmothers link prevailing assumptions at the micro household level to larger issues of human security, violence, socioeconomic inequality and HIV/AIDS. Grandmothers in this study identified two key areas of structural inequality that led to their experiences of added burdens, violence and insecurity in their daily lives: gender inequality and poverty. In her individual interview, Florence articulated the double reproductive and domestic expectations placed upon women, stating: Women have more work in Khayelitsha than men because women are the ones that are living with kids. Men go and seek another woman. That is the thing that women carry a lot of work that makes life more difficult. Women stay with so many children without a father. She must look after the kids and go look for work and the father is outside looking for other women.

This dual burden women experience is heightened with the onset of HIV/AIDS in the community. Women continually struggle to raise

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additional children and support the family economically, as primary parents are dying at the hands of AIDS. Florence perceived that men in the community often fail to uphold family responsibility and seek multiple partners, putting women at risk of infection. Thelma links Florence’s statements about men and goes on to explain the gender difference in her own words: “Men are lazy. The people that are working are women. Women are always going to work but men stay at the house. Most of the women here are working.” The social construction of male/female roles is evident even at a young age. Many young girls often work alongside of their mothers to maintain the household. In their shared interview, Olivia and Gladys spoke to the vital need to teach youth in the community respect for women by encouraging young men’s participation in household labor. When asked about the extent to which women should teach boys to help at home, Olivia responded: You must. Yes, Yes, they cannot say I will not clean or cook because I am not a girl. Girl or no girl, because one day when you are not here what will he do? You are not here forever one day he is going to be alone. What is he going to do if you don’t learn him to do these things.

By talking about these daily practices and their power in reinforcing the gender divide and larger patriarchal systems of violence and community insecurity, GAPA is taking a major step to confront traditional gendered practices that heighten the AIDS pandemic and its disproportionate impact on girls, women and grandmothers. Throughout these interviews, grandmothers repeatedly connected the HIV/AIDS crisis to the larger context of poverty and unemployment in Khayelitsha. Nompumelelo linked joblessness, severe underemployment and gender inequality to a pervasive fear of men that is so apparent for many of the grandmothers in GAPA. She identified poverty and the cyclical problems of unemployment as the major causes of physical and sexual violence inflicted by men: I am still scared of men in Khayelitsha. I don’t blame the men because if the men in Khayelitsha could get jobs. Its poverty that makes it, the women are busy doing things, looking after the kids. The men have nothing to do in our location. If you sit there doing nothing you cannot think straight. You just think evil. You are hungry. If I can just grab that white lady I can get the purse sometimes that white lady is just a student like you and has no money and then you go to jail for nothing. If you are hungry you don’t think straight.

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Nompumelelo’s response reflects her understanding of how gender roles, economic hardships and poverty mutually reinforce a prevailing threat of violence within her community. She shifts the blame for violence away from men to the root cause: a jobless community. These direct narratives express grandmothers’ interwoven perceptions of the core relationships among micro levels of daily violence and the larger and persistent threats to human security in Khayelitsha. Similar to Florence’s assessments of the underlying causes of violence, Nompumelelo asserts that women are kept busy by the confines of the double burdens of reproductive and productive labor, while men linger without parallel outlets for productivity in the midst of massive unemployment and food insecurity. This creates a pervasive threatening environment for women in Khayelitsha. Doris’s response imparts these realities, while tying in the additional responsibility of motherhood: Yes, women are different because when you wake up in the morning you straighten your house no matter you working or not working. When you wake up in the morning you know what to do. The men go out and you saw them sitting and talking or go to taverns and sit all day. Some of the men aren’t working and do nothing in the house and when the woman comes home she has to start from scratch. That is very difficult for a mother.

Doris identifies the increasing emotional and economic responsibilities of care women face while living in poverty. The persistent patriarchal norms that free men from household reproduction and caretaking responsibilities often leave women as the sole breadwinners and caretakers for children. Through its inclusive woman-centered approach, GAPA addresses the economic and psycho-social needs of its members. With a recognition that women are serving as the primary breadwinners, while facing increased household costs of up to 80 percent with the demands of HIV/AIDS care, GAPA emphasizes income generation programs, such as sewing, vegetable gardening and beading. At the same time, the GAPA philosophy provides simultaneous attention to the psycho-social needs of grandmothers, such as grief counseling and support groups, HIV/AIDS preventative training and life skills. The organization also emphasizes the physical wellbeing of grandmothers through Nia dance and weekly exercise programs. Through this applied work with women in Khayelitsha’s most under-resourced communities, GAPA empowers grandmothers to serve as community leaders, educators and even peacebuilders. At a collective level, GAPA’s programs address the core

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dimensions of the human security crisis, with a distinct feminist emphasis on elder women’s needs.

Grandmother Advocates of Child Security While participants in this study repeatedly spoke to the severe burdens of gender injustice and poverty as systemic barriers to their ability to experience human security, through their collective force in GAPA, grandmothers upheld a very central collective commitment to assuring child security within Khayelitsha. Many stated their roles as both mothers and grandmothers, along with their position as community leaders, served as a central rationale for this focus on child advocacy. Georgina reflected upon the gendered expectations of mothering and explained the pride that comes from these defining roles: Women are proud of being women. A home without a mother is nothing. So much is coming from the mother; a mother is like a cheetah protecting her own babies.

The analogy of the mother cheetah can be directly paralleled with the collective commitment to protect children against the high rate of sexual violence in Khayelitsha—a pressing reality referenced throughout our interviews. While they confronted the daily circumstances of risk and violence, grandmothers simultaneously exhibited pervasive hope for the next generation. This motivated much of their investment in children’s livelihoods, safety and development. As the rates of sexual violence in Khayelitsha continue to rise, many grandmothers have taken a firm stance to protect children within the community through education and the implementation of an Aftercare program focused on preventing sexual crime and HIV/AIDS transmission. Because of the rising statistics of child rape and sexual violence in the community and surrounding townships, GAPA’s Aftercare program strives to provide a place of safety, particularly for children who would otherwise be left unattended during these hours. At the same time, this Aftercare program relieves grandmothers of their immediate caretaking responsibilities, as they are so often left to care for parentless children, as they lose their own children to AIDS. This frequent phenomenon of child security became evident after speaking with grandmothers about their perception of security within the community. When asked about GAPA’s role in providing security, grandmother Thelma spoke to the severity of the child rape situation as a

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result of some lingering and dangerous assumptions about HIV/AIDS transmission: There is that thing that people say when you are HIV positive and are with a young child (sexually) the HIV is gone. So it puts everybody in danger. The children in the Aftercare so they can be here for safety because outside there is rape. Now you cannot let your child play you have to see your child.

Like Thelma, many of the other grandmothers directly correlated the idea of “security” with the Aftercare project as both one of GAPA’s main contributions and a vital reflection of the links among sexual violence, children and the securitization of the next generations. Elder women’s narratives in this study denote a shift in the discourse of human security. Grandmothers’ repeated emphasis on securing a space where children can be protected from the crimes of violence reflects how individual women are taking on the role of securing the next generation. As a 2006 United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA as cited in Aboderin and Ferreira 2008, 59) report states, “political stability, social solidification, and economic prosperity [in Africa] lie in harnessing the capacities of the youth.” Grandmothers within GAPA seemed to see one of the primary roles of the organization as protecting the children from the larger context of violence, HIV/AIDS and insecurity within their daily lives. Olivia underscored the importance of raising children correctly and protecting them from outside violence: To grow up children what must they do with a small child to keep them safe? What they must do and not do? You tell them that the mother must look after the children you mustn’t leave your children with anybody. If you go you must know where is your child now. You cannot leave them outside for the whole day because there are many things. There is rape there is everything. People are cruel now. So you learn them you must do this do this to keep your children safe like me. I have got my grandchildren, is not here at school but here afternoon they come here for the Aftercare because I don’t want him at the location. You see? You must sit here because this is a safety place. Tell them this is a safety place. Many of the children that are here, many of them, their parents are at work. So you see, they stay here until their parents are coming from work. So they are safe here. Not going up and down the streets. This is a place to keep your children safe and to learn everything.

Olivia’s statement shows how GAPA represented a larger place of safety that specifically serves children through the Aftercare program. This child advocacy role GAPA plays echoes yet another dimension of the organization’s systemic approach to human security, with a focused effort

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on the empowerment of the next generation. Participants’ frequent illustration of their conceptual connections between the contributions of a civil society women’s organization in the larger context of social and political insecurity reflects one of the most important findings in this research. The impact of GAPA as a place of security, within a larger structural system of severe marginalization, provides a conduit for individuals to identify with making a contribution to the vital need to assure human security in South Africa’s ongoing reconstruction process and protect the next generation of youth. Through their own understanding and experiences with HIV/AIDS, grandmother participants continually drew from this core knowledge base to influence change within a community grappling for resources while facing severe overarching insecurity. Nompumelelo made a profound statement during her interview. In sharing her personal experience of education within the larger mission of GAPA, she claimed that no other child within her home will contract the disease. Through the skills training and support GAPA has provided, Nompumelelo believes her entire family has benefited: If a child said I am HIV positive, you say ok it’s not the end of the world you must do this and this and that but first you must go to the clinic. HIV/AIDS is not a problem it’s a program. I am also HIV positive I am on ARVs. I started in 2006. In my house I don’t think I will have another HIV child. Nobody will die in my house of HIV because I know what to deal with HIV now.

In her eyes, AIDS is a “program,” not a pandemic. The education that GAPA has provided regarding the medication, support and health required for HIV-positive individuals to continue to survive has enabled grandmothers and families to remain healthy and strong, even as they live so directly with the crisis. When we consider that 300 grandmothers acquired such capacities through GAPA, another layer of the organization’s structural impact emerges. Grandmothers who can maintain their own livelihoods in the face of HIV/AIDS contribute to the economic development and social cohesion of Khayelitsha because they are more able to generate income and provide for the increasing household needs that accompany HIV/AIDS. Furthermore, the wellbeing of grandmothers plays a central role in promoting the livelihoods and increased life chances for children within the organization’s Afterschool care program, as well as the household of GAPA’s individual members. Here again, we see the central

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connections between grandmothers’ empowerment at the individual level and the organization’s structural impact within the larger community.

Reflecting on Scholar-Activist Research among Grandmothers Throughout this research journey, we sought to document the stories of grandmothers at this critical juncture between South Africa’s transition to democracy and the swelling wave of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. By practicing a scholar-activist stance, we undertook an obligation to serve the organization we studied, while pursuing the larger purpose of “giving back” in ways that attempt to promote gender, race and class justice, in the spirit of the 1994 vision of a democratic human rights-focused South Africa. With this approach, we divert from some standard social science research perspectives on objectivity and research design. Yet, our commitment to this merger of research and action responds to a larger movement in academe toward public scholarship—the creation of a dialogue that is accessible and meaningful to the wider community and able to contribute to applied initiatives such as policy, legal and activist pursuits. In this closing section, we discuss some central moments in our experience of scholar-activist research, in hopes that these applied instances will generate ongoing discussions on public scholarship and feminist action research. Our most pronounced consideration in this research involved “getting in” to the organization, particularly as US-based scholars. The sensitive nature of HIV/AIDS prioritized important measures of trust and intent at the onset of this relationship. As white North American scholars, we continually contemplated our own potential reification of the prevailing dynamics of outsider/Western researchers operating in black communities within developing countries. Furthermore, we spanned between approximately ten and forty years’ difference in age from the population we interviewed. These identification differentials intersected in ways that impacted grandmothers’ perceptions of our roles, as well as the expectations we planted in the wider community by showing up and asking for life stories. From an organizational perspective, while we went into the project with a heightened sensitivity to the demands we would place on GAPA, our presence required additional time and resources of the leadership, the staff and the members who took part in our study. Here, we offer some approaches that mediated these realities, with the intention of integrating the intimate relationship between the scholar-activist research process and the findings that emerged from these encounters.

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To conduct this research, we drew from the seven years of former contact established by the end of the data-collection period. Through annual consecutive service-learning university classes where US students provided direct support to GAPA on projects that the organization defined as priorities, the shift to community-based research seemed generally fluid for both the faculty-graduate student team and GAPA’s membership. As students painted income generation project containers, planted gardens, developed outdoor murals, designed public relations materials and initiated fundraising for GAPA, they solidified vital relationships between the organization and the university. As the South Africa Study Abroad program returned to work with GAPA each year, while different students participated, the overall partnership established a vital foundational presence that solidified intent, a larger NGO–university partnership and a longer-term commitment to contributing to the organization’s goals. These practices served as central transferable components of scholar-activist research, particularly when working with community-based organizations. A second consideration in this approach involved the balance of seeking out particular thematic areas of emphasis in interview research, while allowing space to discuss the everyday lives of grandmothers in ways that reflected their own lives. As researchers, we sought to contribute to the theoretical body of knowledge by bringing grandmothers’ narrative accounts into a wider scholarly dialogue within the field of international relations and women’s studies. Accordingly, our efforts focused on expanding the human security conversation through a focused emphasis on how elder women experience this theoretical concept at the juncture of South Africa’s post-conflict rebuilding and the growing HIV/AIDS pandemic. Yet discussing “human security” framed our conversations in ways that favored scholarship and potentially limited grandmothers’ ability to tell their own stories, in their own words. By asking questions about safety and daily life, we hoped to gather data that would speak to human security frameworks. To a certain extent, however, we needed to resign from the power and control embedded in the standard structured interview process, where researchers define the conversations’ priorities. In our case, the narrative data that emerged did speak to human security in powerful ways, often when we did not pose questions with this direct thematic prompt. While in the field, we reminded ourselves to “trust the process,” with confidence that the narratives grandmothers offered would feed into our larger theoretical frameworks in ways we might not have imagined in a standardized structured interview format. With this approach, we intended to provide avenues for elder women to gain a powerful voice as experts in the development of new knowledge within

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the academic discourse. By positioning ourselves as a conduit between grandmothers’ narratives and analytic theories of international development, we sought to “use our credentials as a tool for social change”5 by contributing to the larger causes of GAPA while we documented the lives of its membership base. As we captured these complexities of grandmothers’ stories, at times we asked that participants re-live traumatic experiences so that we could place their lives in context. In some instances, grandmothers offered willingly, in others, our prompting led to a revisiting of longstanding pains from the apartheid era, coupled with profound grief surrounding the repeated losses of AIDS deaths. As researchers, we walked a fine line in asking for lived experiences while maintaining our commitment to allowing grandmothers to drive the research process. The content that emerged from this study forced us to contemplate repeatedly the dialectic relationship between trauma and transformation, in both the individual narratives that emerged in this study, along with our overall analysis of GAPA’s organizational impact within South Africa’s ongoing transition. As we analyzed the data that emerged from these stories, we continually questioned our own tendency to emphasize hope in suffering, strength in power, and the promise of social change in women’s organizing. We confronted our own biases, our admitted positive affiliation to GAPA and our wish to situate this civil society organization as a model of the potential for women’s collective activism to resolve the most severe social concerns. At times throughout our analysis, our colleagues asked if we might be “too optimistic” about GAPA. Perhaps our close working relationships created a bias, they suspected. How could we legitimately critique the organization while maintaining such personal connections? This question rests at the heart of feminist activist research. As the literature supports, we acknowledge this bias, and work within it. At times, this means processing the extent to which members of GAPA would support our writing and analytic findings. In many cases, we evaluated our academic goals in close relationship to the larger activist considerations surrounding elder women’s experiences of daily life in Khayelitsha. What remains underexplored in the work on scholar-activism, however, is a conversation on the more concrete undertakings between community-based organizations and researchers. As we found in this process, at their core, these very relationships can weave together written publications, public awareness and social change surrounding the core social concerns that guide both the organization and the research process. As we continue our working relationship with GAPA, our engagement with three key projects anchored the dual goals of scholarly contributions

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and the promotion of grandmothers’ stories in a wider public dialogue. We close with a short overview of these projects to widen the scope of applied feminist scholar-activist research. First, our work with GAPA provided a foundation to apply for grants and resources that strengthened the organization’s capacity to address its goals. Through our NGO–university partnership, we transcended standard lines between scholar and activist worlds. GAPA has presented at a series of academic conferences, for example, where its leaders took central roles in sharing research. Based upon the partnership we developed, GAPA earned a US Ambassador’s grant, to develop public HIV/AIDS education campaigns and widen the impact of grandmothers as community leaders. This award provided financial resources that allowed GAPA to strengthen its work, while fortifying the felt benefits of partnership for the organization. As we delved into capturing grandmothers’ stories, and listened to the leaders of the organization, we felt compelled to expand awareness of this GAPA model through a series of public events, photographic exhibitions and writings on South African grandmothers’ experiences. The affective impact of the stories we captured best conveyed through a combined visual-narrative approach. Eric Miller, South African photographer and former anti-apartheid activist, captured a series of grandmothers’ portraits, along with family images that depicted the extent of caretaking grandmothers provided in South Africa. Jo-Anne Smetherham, a leading national journalist, conducted additional narrative research with grandmothers, who later wrote short excerpts from these interviews on the final photographs for the installations. We raised funds to exhibit this collection at the Khayelitsha Community Hall and the District Six museum in Cape Town. This public event series featured 17 leaders of GAPA as “The Nevergiveups.” As a collection, the exhibition emphasized the resounding resilience and hope grandmothers carried in the face of such severe structural obstacles and tragedies. From these extensive public events, our narrative research on GAPA turned into an educational public photography series that depicted grandmothers’ narratives in creative, affective and visually impactful ways that are unavailable in standard scholarship venues alone. The wide success of these public scholarship events motivated an international tour for three members of GAPA, along with journalists Eric Miller and Jo-Anne Smetherham. With this expansion to an international level, we launched TheNevergiveups photo-journalist book containing six in-depth stories, along with an original collection of Miller’s images of South African grandmothers. This international media tour substantially widened exposure to GAPA, while providing a felt sense of international

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solidarity for the organization’s mission. With their contact in a number of community organizations, universities and faith-based organizations in the US, GAPA received generous donations, and expansive invitations to promote their work internationally. This photo narrative book and the existing photo installation received public acknowledgment from the South African Embassy and Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool, while the US Embassy contributed to the seeds of the project’s initiation. In this sense, these bridging public scholarship events took GAPA from the community to the national and international spheres. Indeed, the GAPA stories became the site of cultural ambassadorial initiatives that contributed to interstate relations and public relations for both embassies. After these events, Executive Director, Vivienne Budaza, proclaimed that GAPA is now “on the map” in the global community. With this international exposure, GAPA continues to reorient to respond to the growing level of interest generated from this global contact. At the same time, our role as researchers has expanded considerably. We became fundraisers, tour operators, public events coordinators, book promoters, international ambassadors to GAPA and hosts to its leaders within the US. Through these encounters, our work expanded beyond the organizational space where we initially drew research material, to the wider imagined and literal global sphere. At present, we continue to evaluate our scholar-activist commitment and potential to serve GAPA. At the same time, our research investment in this organization maintains a central position in our larger inquiry on the relationships among elder women, human security and HIV/AIDS in South Africa.

Study Limitations This research drew upon one organizational site as the source of narrative data to explore how grandmothers are central human security agents within South Africa’s HIV/AIDS crisis. We draw upon the longstanding relationship with GAPA to collect data and understand women’s lives within this complex landscape of apartheid’s socioeconomic residue and the new demands of HIV/AIDS. Although our relationships provided a heightened level of trust and familiarity among participants, the reliance upon one organization presents limitations and potential bias. This study is situated within a very particular context, where grandmothers have access to resources through the GAPA structural model. Yet, these results do not speak to the larger situation for elder women in South Africa. Furthermore, our analyses rely upon grandmothers’ perceptions of their experiences with HIV/AIDS. With a

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sample of 22, our analyses rely heavily upon one existing group. While this is the case with all qualitative data, the connection to GAPA focuses a certain level of specificity that links this research to those grandmothers involved in GAPA. Our further study would explore the more tangible impacts of women’s collective organization in fighting both human security concerns and HIV/AIDS. While grandmothers talked at length about their commitment to protecting children, and the safe space GAPA provides, we do not know about the extent to which grandmothers’ empowerment—through education, the psycho-social support of GAPA, improved wellness, income generation and a wider safety net—has expanded to the wider communities in which they reach. If grandmothers can access the traditional levels of respect granted to elder women from their own cultural backgrounds and utilize this status to increase the reach of the HIV/AIDS prevention, conflict resolution, women’s empowerment and peacebuilding skills they acquire at GAPA, the impact of their contributions to social change would be maximized.

Conclusions As the HIV/AIDS crisis creeps into the national vision for democratic transformation, South African grandmothers shoulder the weight of this severe impediment to social justice, as well as its daily sufferings. In the existing context, grandmothers sit between a cultural history that held reverence for elder women and the new national landscape that expresses the chaos of HIV/AIDS through socio-economic violence and insecurity. The communities in which the participants in this study live manifest the most extreme levels of these crises of poverty, violence and HIV/AIDS transmissions. In this context, civil society organizations meet the gaps in government delivery, while mobilizing the voices of those who suffer most severely under the residue of apartheid. While drawing on the former strength of historical resistance movements, GAPA represents both a collective response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, as well as an approach that works at the individual level to empower grandmothers and expand their capacity to shoulder these disproportionate burdens. As grandmothers are bound together through the tragedy of HIV/AIDS and the upheavals of the social transition to democracy in South Africa, GAPA provides its members with vital tools and resources to face the daily impacts of this crisis at the individual and family levels. At the same time, through civil society organization, grandmothers are presenting a collective force to fight the onslaught of the health crises and its intimately

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interwoven human security threats. Through the educational tools and empowerment trainings GAPA offers, grandmothers can provide for their families and teach younger generations the importance of awareness, advocacy and education in their own lives; thereby and ultimately decreasing the HIV/AIDS infection rate in their community. This model not only benefits grandmothers who continually struggle to support generations on government pensions, it also reaches larger family units through GAPA’s contact with youth and men throughout the community. This organization of grandmother activists is situated as a distinct response to the urgent socio-economic conditions of this particular community in Khayelitsha. Through GAPA, grandmothers are afforded an opportunity to share their voice—both individually and collectively. In their personal experiences and traumas, GAPA provides direct outlets for grandmothers to connect with others who are facing parallel challenges in the face of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. As an organization, GAPA sustains and reinforces the authority of grandmothers within their communities, during a time when former levels of respect for elders are under threat. At a collective level, this authority and support for grandmothers gives impetus to their cause, even as they face dire straits, ill health, violence and related issues. Rather than existing within an isolated space, GAPA presents a highly visible community force that demonstrates the collective power of women’s organization, while inherently demanding respect from the wider community. When grandmothers show up in numbers to sing as they hand out condoms at taxi stops, indeed GAPA confronts the existing social and cultural norms that ignite the threats of HIV/AIDS. As a result, through the collective agency of 300 grandmothers who gain increased authority in their households and communities, GAPA intervenes in the larger context of severe human security threats that characterize the daily compromises to wellbeing and livelihood for the entire Khayelitsha community, as well as the nation’s restorative path to democracy. The HIV/AIDS crisis constricts the jugular of the 1994 vision of South Africa’s democracy. For elder women, who lived under the most severe oppressions of apartheid, the life-altering demands of bearing the economic and caretaking burdens of HIV/AIDS, within a context of severe violence and insecurity, manifest as the most egregious violations of the promise of South Africa’s democracy. Within this gripping reality, women exercise agency in ways that express their individual and collective strength, while confronting the structural conditions that perpetrate their ability to access safety, security and economic stability. The GAPA model recognizes the distinct forms of trauma and grief grandmothers face, while redirecting these collective struggles into an organizational response that

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addresses the vital links between HIV/AIDS and human security. As one grandmother repeatedly expressed, “GAPA is keeping us alive.” The complexities of these circumstances pronounce the need for new forms of scholarship that capture the fabric of grandmothers’ lives, while offering valuable contributions to the larger human rights struggles at the core of these individual narratives. Scholar-activist research works in partnership with communities to contribute to knowledge and social change. GAPA provides a model that captures the potential to work at the borders of these dimensions, while applying scholarship to larger social activist efforts to improve the everyday lives of women and address severe socio-economic divides. The most challenging social, economic and security circumstances reveal how Khayelitsha grandmothers develop innovative forms of collective action by drawing upon the legacy of resistance movements so central to South Africa’s historical struggle for democracy. In their individual lives and their collective presence, members of GAPA serve as powerful agents of social change, community education and peace. Just as they are on the frontlines of the HIV/AIDS crisis, through this research, we contend that grandmothers are the most viable and impactful existing force to confront the larger human security threats that pose the greatest barrier to human rights and social justice in South Africa’s democracy. Our hope is that the growth of public scholarship on elder women, HIV/AIDS and human security in South Africa would begin to unwind the structural conditions that shape the daily circumstances of grandmothers’ lives, while strengthening both the organization and the academy through concrete expressions of solidarity in each stage of the process. The documentation and enactment of GAPA’s overarching plea to “respect the grannies” is vital to the restoration of the human rights democracy vision of 1994, the attainment of human security and an eventual end to the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Acknowledgements We are grateful to several key supporters who made this research possible. Vivienne Budaza coordinated our contact and ongoing engagement with GAPA over the course of the past seven years. Several generous colleagues offered critical input on this project throughout its development: Bette J. Dickerson, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Kathy Williamson, Francis Adams and Steve Yetiv. Jo-Anne Smetherham and Eric Miller provided abundant nourishment throughout our process of considering the most meaningful approaches to documenting the stories of

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South Arica’s grandmothers, while striving to contribute to the betterment of the conditions that defined their life stories.

Notes  1

The research relationship began in 2005, when Jennifer Fish made contact with GAPA to establish a mutually beneficial service-learning placement for U.S. university students in an international course on social transitions in South Africa. Over the past ten years, student–faculty contributions to GAPA shifted to more extensive community-based research projects, mainly in the form of interviews. This chapter emerges from an in-depth graduate study led by Savannah Eck Russo and Jennifer Fish. The ethical agreements of scholar-activist research were established in the initial contact with GAPA in 2005 and renewed each subsequent year. 2 We recruited interviewees from those members present at the GAPA organizational space, beginning with the core leaders. Our familiarity with the organization and invested time over the years provided a smooth segue to approaching grandmothers to take part in our interviews. In some cases, participants approached us to be part of the process. We conducted interviews in English, which limited our sample to those grandmothers with at least conversational language skills. Throughout this process, we took several measures to be sure that interviewees were aware that their participation in our research remained separate from their role with GAPA.  3 In South Africa’s existing social grant program, grandmothers over the age of 60 are eligible for the “old age pension.” Their demonstration of primary care for young children merits qualification for the foster care grant and the child support grant. 4 All participants in this study are identified with pseudonyms.  5 This concept is coined by Bette J. Dickerson, who serves as a mentor and pioneer in scholar-activist work. We reference it from several personal and teaching conversations.

References Aboderin, Isabella, and Monica Ferreira. 2008. “Linking Ageing to Development Agendas in Sub-Saharan Africa: Challenges and Approaches.” Journal of Population Ageing, 1(1):51–73.DOI 10.1007/s12062-009-9002-8. Abrahams, Naeemah, Mathews, Shanaaz, Jewkes, Rachel, Martin, Lorna J., and Carl Lombard. 2012. “Every Eight Hours: Intimate Femicide in South Africa 10 Years Later!” South African Medical Research Council Research Brief, August: 1–4. Britton, Hannah. 2005. Women in the South African Parliament: From Resistance to Governance. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

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Chazan, May. 2008. “Seven ‘Deadly’ Assumptions: Unravelling the Implications of HIV/Aids among Grandmothers in South Africa and Beyond.” Ageing & Society, 28(1): 935–58. DOI: 10.1017/S0144686X08007265. De la Porte, Susan. 2007. “Redefining Childcare in the Context of AIDS: The Extended Family Revisited.” Agenda: A Journal about Women and Gender, 75: 129–40.DOI:10.1080/10130950.2008.9674916. Ferreira, Monica, and Sebastiana Kalula. 2009. “Ageing, Women and Health: Emerging Caregiving Needs in Sub-Saharan African Countries.” BOLD, 2–12. GAPA.2011.http://www.gapa.org.za/ Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla, Fish, Jennifer, and Tamara Shefer. 2014. “Gendered Violence: Continuities and Transformations in the Aftermath of Conflict in Africa.” Signs, 40(1): 81–99. Hubbard, Susan, and Tomoko Suzuki. 2008. Building Resilience: Human Security Approaches to Aids in Asia and Africa. Tokyo: Japan Center for International Exchange, Brookings Institution Press. Krisoffersson, Ulf. (2000). HIV/AIDS as a Human Security Issue: A Gender Perspective. http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/hivaids/kristoffersson.htm Lammers, Ellen. 1999. Refugees, Gender and Human Security: A Theoretical Introduction and Annotated Bibliography. Utrecht: International Books. Miller, Eric, Smetherham, Jo-Anne, and Jennifer Fish. 2012. “‘The Nevergiveups’ of Grandmothers Against Poverty and AIDS: ScholarJournalism-Activism as Social Documentary.” Kronos, 38: 219–48. Moffett, Helen. 2006. “‘These Women, They Force Us to Rape Them’: Rape as Narrative of Social Control in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies, 32(1): 129–44. DOI: 10.1080/03057070500493845. Richard, Jolly, and Basu R. Deepayan. 2006. The Human Security Framework and National Human Development Reports: A Review of Experiences and Current Debates. United Nations Development Programme: National Human Development Report Unit. Smetherham, Jo-Anne. 2011. “Grannies Shoulder the Burden of Aids.” The Big Issue, 22. Smetherham, Jo-Anne, Miller, Eric, and Jennifer Fish. 2013. The Nevergiveups. Cape Town: Electric Bookworks. South Africa HIV & AIDS Statistics. 2010. http://www.avert.org/southafrica-hiv-aids-statistics.htm

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Tickner, J. Ann. 2001. Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era. New York: Columbia University Press. Uthando, South Africa Khumbulani Centre.2011. http://www.uthandosa.org/projects/1 Wibben, Annick. 2011. Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER FIVE “WRITING MY HISTORY IS KEEPING ME ALIVE”: POLITICS AND PRACTICES OF COLLABORATIVE HISTORY WRITING KONI BENSON AND FAEZA MEYER

Introduction It is mine but it will always be ours. I might have been the one who wrote it down but the other people were there and lived it through and reflecting at the end of the day was kind of the medication of the drug addicts. Talking about how we made the mistakes we did in our lives and then reflecting on the process of the occupation. All the times we sat and talked and thought about everything in the shacks and in meetings, it was rehabilitation. I don’t know how many addicts just stop. Reflecting is part of rehabilitation. (Faeza Meyer, presenting the history of the Kapteinsklip land occupation to the Cape Town Housing Assembly, April 2013)

Faeza Meyer was one of a group of backyard shack dwellers who in May 2011 occupied land in Tafelsig in the Cape Town township of Mitchell’s Plain.1 They set up shacks on an empty field adjacent to the Kapteinsklip train station, the last stop at the end of the Mitchell’s Plain line, thus becoming known as the Kapteinsklip occupiers. From an initial 5,000 people the group dwindled to about 30 families who continued to defend their right to erect structures under which to sleep, since they had nowhere else to go. The City left them out in the cold—offering them temporary relocation to Blikkiesdorp, a dumping ground, miles away from their families and support networks. What ensued was a round of court cases and appeals. At one point the judge reprimanded the City of Cape Town, demanding a plan for the homeless, but in the final case, eviction was granted. This is a city where the official waiting list for low-cost

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housing is over 450,000 families long; the City delivers about 11,000 units a year and criminalizes those who attempt to put up their own structures. The leader of the remaining occupiers, Faeza Meyer, kept a diary of the 18-month-long occupation, writing on scraps of paper and in notebooks; she also engaged in conversation, made use of her phone, and also kept track in her head. The diary tracks her journey to direct action and confrontation and the brutal response of the state. It also captures her own politicization of the state of being homeless, and speaks to the reality facing an increasing number of people who will reluctantly become activists, confronting the authorities and challenging the status quo and the law, in their attempts to survive. In alliance with Koni Benson, a feminist historian and housing crisis ally, Faeza fleshed out raw thoughts and put her writing on the computer. Koni tracked the unfolding events by piecing together chronologies, and by collecting newspaper articles, statistics, photos, flyers, letters, and other resources that documented this struggle and juxtaposed official narratives with the experiences of the occupiers. In this process we recorded an ongoing conversation documenting Faeza’s reflections of the unfolding events and their impact on her both personally and politically. She was able to elaborate on many of her diary pages that were blank or in point form. As we talked, we typed. Faeza reflects: When you are not that educated writing is not that easy, especially when you think someone else will read it. But when you are writing it as if speaking to someone it makes it easier. Having written to Koni, even in SMS on the phone, when I send a message as part of this project of recording my history, it’s like having a conversation. It’s not a one-man conversation. So often I would not have written had I not been talking to her, or we would have not spoken and recorded as I speak it through, so we can’t take her name out of the diary entries, because people must see that that is one way to write, one way to put your history down, one way to feel you can go on when you are not sure you can. (editing processes, January 2013)

After 18 months, we decided to turn the documentation into a scrapbook that had snapshots from the diary on the right-hand side of each page, and is supported by selections from documents from the press, from court documents, by photographs, by SMS messages, and by statistics. These sources offer another dimension to the story and put the unfolding occupation into historical, political, and social context on the left-hand side of the page. In conversation we developed a strategy and arrived at a division of labor for selecting and editing the pieces of the diary: Faeza wrote and spoke the diary out loud while Koni researched and wrote about the contextual material and its relationship to the diary pieces. This

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resulted in a collection consisting of a mix of photos, journal entries, official documents, reflections, conversations, and editorial commentary. Here, we draw on extracts of the diary entries to reflect on the role of writing in struggle: we argue that creative co-authorship for alliance building can create space to reframe authority and self-representation. The co-authored book, Writing Out Loud: Interventions in the History of a Land Occupation, tells a number of stories: the story of an occupation, of homelessness and the housing crisis, the story of Faeza’s journey to activism, of the use of writing in struggles, and the story of our own collaboration. We aimed to give readers a collage of insights into one woman’s story from South Africa, but we also wanted to provide a sense of the proportion of the housing crisis, the politics of space, and the challenges to these dynamics. The contributions from the diary include Faeza’s reflections on her experiences, on occupying land, on building and defending shacks, on confronting the law and on the violent attempts by the police and the City to remove the occupiers; these experiences are discussed in more detail below. Overall, Writing Out Loud speaks to both activists and academics searching for creative alliances, who are interested in the politics of representation and situated solidarity, and who are hungry for strategic and powerful interventions in housing debates and the broader politics of homelessness and activism in South Africa, and internationally. Writing Out Loud reflects how a creative initiative in collaborative documentation became a small but powerful part of informing and sustaining a struggle to challenge the housing crisis. Faeza’s reflections on the authorship of the history of the land occupation in the opening words of this chapter challenge conventions of methodology and the politics of representation. In this chapter, we take the opportunity of the space provided by this book concerned with gender violence and knowledge production across divides, to reflect on the process, the politics and the practice of collaborative interventions in documenting a land occupation. Drawing on literature on collaboration, feminist collaborative praxis, and activist academic alliances in writing history, we share reflections on writing as resistance and on co-authorship which developed in the course of our collaboration. After a brief overview of the land occupation and the struggle that followed, we reflect on four ways in which writing became an act of resistance, an alternative to waiting and a tool to intervene in the future. We then consider how journaling became a method of speaking to multiple imagined and intended audiences over time. Finally, we draw on this analysis to suggest ways to redefine participatory attempts to conceptualize social justice that can reshape the agendas, products, and possibilities embedded in academic research.

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Documenting a Land Occupation Writing Out Loud: Interventions in the History of a Land Occupation provides insight into life on an open field and a sense of the extreme insecurity which results from the criminalization of homeless residents as illegal land invaders. It follows the day-to-day human dynamics of the occupation. In photos taken on cell phones, and in entries written in a variety of styles, Faeza and other occupiers explore the desires and frustrations of families seeking shelter, and the harsh reality of unemployment; they record daily interactions with racism, sexism, and poverty, articulated through the desperate search for a place to build home. The document graphically shares the unglamorous reality of people who fall through the cracks—in this case these were the disabled, the elderly, women, drug addicts, the homeless, the ill, lesbians, abandoned children, and Zimbabweans rejected as “foreigners.” Faeza’s descriptions of their physical and emotional trials and tribulations show the implications of living in harsh conditions without public health facilities, social workers, police and safety. The occupiers were living in the midst of hunger, unemployment, miseducation, drug addiction, and had to deal with inherited cultural norms arguing for patience and silence. The diary also tells a story of Faeza’s journey to activism—the politicization of homelessness, the shifts from feeling like a problem, or a failure, to arguing center-stage at leftist public debates that the housing crisis is a political problem of privatization and neoliberal capitalism. Through the documentation provided, the diary tracks this transformation on Faeza’s part, and reveals a radical learning process shaped by social movement activists and NGO allies and the leftist academics that Faeza began to work with. It records the experiences of navigating a range of political parties, and dealing with charitable and legal organizations. This shift was not Faeza’s alone: people on the field began to refer to themselves as “occupiers,” and over time—as the book reveals—began to feel justified in their quest for shelter. However, the book tracks Faeza’s own self-conscious learning process, in particular with regard to social movements and the challenges of community organizing and movement building: in her role as leader she had to negotiate the politics of the land occupation, and she had to deal with real, immediate, and often extremely violent tensions. She describes episodes of intense confrontation, as well as the systemic impossibility of health and wellbeing for people without access to resources of basic human need. In doing so, she asks hard questions of herself, juggling compassion against personal security, and holding tight her belief in the need for a collective will to change the

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situation. The simple realities of sleep deprivation, human waste, and stress, as well as occasions for pride and pleasure (like birthdays, school report cards, and developing friendships), weave together with her personal experiences (of a new marriage, of the challenges in gaining extended familial acceptance, of the obstacles to child raising, and of the stresses to mental and physical health). Faeza’s journal entries are powerful. They are not airbrushed in hindsight, but written as she figured out issues, often making mistakes but deciding to keep them in the final manuscript to show that change is possible and that imperfection is no reason to stop searching. The entries reveal the steep learning curve of her initiation into a world of politics, parties, positions, and personalities. These experiences are shared in the diary, at first as a place of digestion, and later as a forewarning for new activists. She felt that if she had had the benefit of this kind of first-hand information, it would have made her own journey that much easier. Faeza’s integration into her diary of her own changing thoughts with regard to race and class, black versus “colored” identities, and family and community dynamics contrast strongly with representations by the media and legal opposition of the struggles taking place on the field and their painting of shack dwellers as leeches of the system, as people who choose unemployment, deviously attempting to jump the housing waiting list queue, who expect to live rent free, and who undermine property values in the township. The book thus also counters the narrative of the occupation portrayed in the media in over 60 newspaper articles on the “squatters” and their resistance to forced relocation, and in public debate in the neighborhood and in the city. The form and content of her story bears little resemblance to the press coverage or the courtroom documentation of these events, which generally sensationalize and exclude much of the lived reality and deeper complications of life on the Kapteinsklip field and make few links with the larger context of the housing backlog. Not only does the content stand outside the official narratives of the occupation, but Faeza’s language is different: we wrote in a conversational style that we thrived off of, and in a language she was most comfortable to speak in to multiple targets—in the vernacular Cape Flats English peppered with Cape Flats Afrikaans or Kaaps. This is a language representative of the majority of people in Cape Town schooled in white/“high” Afrikaans which was officially and unashamedly labeled Beskaafde Afrikaans (Civilized Afrikaans) in apartheid school textbooks. Faeza expressed her resentment to what felt like being taught in a third language, one she struggled with in school, and one she could never comfortably express herself in:

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Chapter Five Writing in English just how I speak it, mixing in Afrikaans kombuis [kitchen] or Kaaps is how I think and talk, instead of trying to write in formal English, or the kind of Afrikaans that I was schooled to write in, has been liberating. I hated how they called that our home language, when maybe one in twenty of our parents passed primary school and no one we knew at home spoke that language, so we did not learn to write in our first language. We failed Afrikaans in school and I adapted much better to English as a second language. I could not have written this history in either official language but I needed to fight the Anti-Land Invasion Unit so I began the diary in English and then I needed to capture hard things for myself and for people like me, so I used Afrikaans English. I never thought there was a way to make the language I am comfortable with translate, to make it readable. (18 November 2013)

Our collaborative co-authorship is the final story in the book. Faeza found herself associating with social movement circles and leftist support NGOs at Community House. This building of activist political organizations in Cape Town was established in the 1980s to support the emerging labor movement. Today it houses trade unions, labor media and resource centers, as well as a range of progressive NGOs. In particular, Faeza linked up with the International Labour Research and Information Group (ILRIG),2 where she met Koni. Trained as a historian of women’s movements for housing, and having worked at ILRIG since 2007, Koni’s work included running history and community activist courses, documenting displacements and land occupations, and doing research training for housing struggles across the city. Faeza and others from the field were part of these and other ILRIG courses, workshops, and forums during and since the occupation. Michael, an ILRIG worker, introduced us, bringing us together because Faeza was keeping a diary of the occupation and was looking for support. This clicked immediately with Koni’s passion for personal political histories and life narratives as ways to document and build movements, and raise women’s voices and experiences. There was an instant understanding between us. We did not know exactly what the diary would be used for, or how or when we would know we were at the end of our work together, but we knew that making a record was important, initially to validate Faeza’s version of unfolding events (especially as compared to responses by police, politicians, the courts, the media, and even leaders on the field who had initiated the occupation). Moreover, occupiers’ structures were repeatedly demolished by the Anti-Land Invasion Unit and the South African Police Service, and their belongings either confiscated or just thrown about by the police; the winter rains and summer winds also took turns to displace belongings, as well as scraps of papers and diary notebooks. Depositing pages in Koni’s

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tray at ILRIG, and sitting and reading aloud for transcription, was a practical way to collect the diary. These transcription sessions soon became conversations, and eventually this led to a journaling process that allowed for reflection and the recording of deeper descriptions and thoughts. Time spent on this became meaningful and useful—a space to catch up, to reflect, to think aloud, and to offload. Our conversations shaped the diary in many ways. Most importantly for the discussion here, was in the way we created a space that prioritized processing without pressure—something that is impossible without vigilance in our work environment of constant urgency/emergency, where often the ends justify the means and burnout is the norm (Barry and Dordevic 2007). As time passed and events unfolded, the sense of a history in the making—of a past playing out and influencing the present, and of the present as an intervention in the history of the occupation—became evident to both of us. Conversations that probed deeper and pushed through hard questions later played an important role in the editorial process, both for revising the diary entries and for naming the entries as part of the larger editorial framing of the story which Koni had to capture in a way that accurately reflected the layers of unfolding events hashed out in the diary pages and documentation discussions. As the opening quotes of this paper illustrate, talking and then framing and thinking through the experiences of personal and political developments on the field was a collective endeavor, between Faeza and the rest of the occupiers as well as between Faeza and Koni. Aware of our very different vulnerabilities, life experiences, and race and class positions—a black unemployed shack dweller, and a middle-class employed researcher with white privilege—we came together on the grounds of a shared political commitment to confront the housing crisis, and through a common passion for working through hard persistent questions by journaling. Documenting the unfolding events at Kapteinsklip together became one part of an alliance, a set of practices that were inspired by the anti-capitalist popular education work of Paulo Freire and a feminist collaborative praxis: we attempted to confront the power dynamics inherent in the relationship between “educated” and “uneducated,” “teacher” and “student,” and “researcher” and “researched.” The aim was to produce knowledges that could challenge systemic oppression. Valuing the combined insights of different persons, places and contexts, collaborative research is based on the following premises: (a) authority does not remain exclusively in the hands of the researcher; (b) neither the interpreter’s nor the narrator’s perspective is necessarily privileged; and (c) meaning forged through dialogue is not necessarily

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arrived at through agreement—a shared perspective can evolve from constructive disagreements (Pratt 2004; Rouverol 2003; Sangtin Writers and Nagar 2006). This starting point for knowledge production can overcome the assumptions of reciprocity between “expert” and “subject” in older debates on the role that inequality and privilege play in research (Bullington and Lock Swarr 2010; Gluck and Patai 1991; Peake and De Souza 2010). We engage issues raised in the critical literature on positionality to address power dynamics and challenge an assumed sisterhood across geographic, socio-political, and racial borders. Thus the chapter draws on scholars who pose difficult questions regarding who can or should write whose history and what kinds of struggles research and theory can enable (Larner 1995). Kruzynski (2003), for example, draws on a wide range of feminist writing on collaboration to argue for the adoption of community organizing methods through a collaborative oral history project. Similarly, Rouverol’s (2003) discussion of research with insider– outsider teams moves conversations beyond discussions of who can study and write what, to how studying and writing can advance social struggles on the ground. These arguments help counter the privileging of a “reflexivity” that emphasizes the researcher’s identity and that overshadows a more explicit discussion of the economic, political and institutional processes and structures that provide the context for the fieldwork encounter and shape its effects (Nagar and Geiger 2007). Similarly, Mohanty (2003) has argued that these problems are rooted in structural processes that have increasingly deradicalized feminist politics. One way through these dilemmas is collaboration, which has been recognized for its ability to play a critical role in generating new dialogues and knowledges across socio-economic, geographical and institutional borders. Our book experiments with applying the emerging principles of feminist collaborative methodologies to explore new ways of co-authorship that expose silences and address oppression in both the process and the end product of documenting a land occupation. While attempting to place in plain sight the dynamics between us and our different roles in this project, two years in, it is impossible to neatly mark and consistently specify analysis and editorial voice in the co-produced history. However, we purposefully choose to foreground Faeza’s story of the land occupation as the focus; her articulation of this history is the primary thread of the book.

Writing as Resistance How can writing enable struggle? Beyond documenting the day-to-day events on the field, writing became an empowering tool in the

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Kapteinsklip land occupation. Drawing on examples from the diary, in the following discussion we explore how writing helped form community, how it worked as a tool of active resistance against passive waiting, how it provided a space for relief and rejuvenation, and how it became a way of building alliances beyond the field and beyond the 545 days of the occupation. Journaling, as part of documenting the unfolding events became an intervention in history, a way of challenging the boundaries of authority and representation, and of naming an alternative experience and perspective into being (Jordan 1997; Lorde 1984).

Writing to Create Community In the early days on the field, occupiers sat around a fire at night, checking in on the day, and going over what Faeza had written, discussing it, and signing off as witnesses. The process contributed to a growing sense of self-confidence and affirmation, feelings that worked against the criminalization of the occupiers as homeless “land invaders.” After the police and army attacked the 5,000 people who originally occupied the field, most fled, leaving about 100 people huddled together in an attempt to stay put. Contrary to the press coverage and to neighborhood accusations of being “queue jumpers,” and in spite of the embarrassment of their already overstretched extended families in houses nearby, those who remained on the field needed to assert the truth that they had nowhere else to go. They did so as a newly formed collective: We sit around the fire at night and listen to each other’s sadness. Our family is growing day by day. How can Law Enforcement and Land Invasion take from people who has nothing? (2 July 2011)3

A sense of community was built in these hard times of violent raids, as well as through the concerted effort to take care of each other, in the celebration of Eid on the field, or at the baptism of a newborn child (for which Faeza insisted the press be invited). These were important parts of writing a disparate community into being. In an early conversation about the purpose of documenting, Faeza and her partner, Ebrahiem, noted how the diary was playing an important role in giving them the confidence that they were the authority of their own experience: Ebrahiem: The thing I want to get out of keeping a record is that the people there by us are not stupid, maybe not so educated, but you can get something constructive from people on the field. They are an asset to

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Chapter Five society. I want to show that to them and to the rest of the world, or at least the rest of Cape Town. Faeza: The only thing they lack is education. Or they had kids young, and were told that that is the way to get a house. And when I come from ILRIG I talk to them, they know what I am saying, they have the same idea, just not the education to put it on paper. We need to put it down and print it out and give it to each person, because our story gives a sense of pride. It is our history. It is our story. Even if it is not published. People are excited to include everyone. To sit at the end of the day and put all of it together and say this is what we decided happened for the day. (28 June 2011)

The land occupation initially attracted a lot of attention, from Christian and Muslim aid organizations, from political parties, lawyers, charity organizations, and from a range of social movements. This interest needed to be navigated and raised issues of who represented the occupation. While law enforcement officers routinely told the residents “hold your bek,” or “shut your mouth,” and claimed that nobody knew they were on the field and that they should just “disappear,” friction also occurred with assumed supporters speaking on behalf of occupiers. In particular, the court case and the rallies held outside the court were contentious, and Faeza had to fight to be allowed to speak to the crowds. As a result of her persistence, she was pleasantly surprised to become known as “the lady who made the speech” by the Mayor, who then sent her law enforcement team, who had previously been extremely rude and violent, to engage Faeza on the occupation—but only after Faeza had embarrassed this Mayor in the media. The documentation of events in the journal contributed to the confidence that was needed for the occupiers to insist on speaking for themselves: it specified in detail what had happened, but also framed the struggle in a wider context. Writing became a discursive struggle for the authority to represent experiences on the field, and for a way to articulate the wider social issues that had led people to occupy the field. Putting words to experiences was something that named a struggle, and delineated stages of a struggle, and in so doing, advanced the struggle. Having the final say on what went into the diary, gathering a collective sense of what the day was about, as well as having the pages available to everyone, became a form of community building. This process worked against the many experiences of exclusion and the withholding of information that people on the field faced from the bureaucracy that controlled the waiting lists, as well as instances of disappointment with supposed supporters who refused to share court documents regarding the eviction case. Writing in outrage, Faeza asked their lawyer how it was possible, and which “we” was he a part of, when a:

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white woman from Newlands who does not even live here, and who runs a charity organization that claims to help us could see our documents, while we could not. This is the first time I heard that people don’t have access to their own documents. It doesn’t even involve her yet she has access. (5 May, 2012)

Aware that knowledge is power, in documenting moments of disempowerment, the occupiers used the journal to articulate and then protect their own story and to expose injustice. This was one way of building and positioning a collective confidence on the field. Writing both against injustice, as well as to promote community building in the moment and into the future, Faeza reflected on how: this journal would have helped me—to read about people who walked into the same walls all the time—I would have walked around! We will walk into the wall unless we learn different—and this diary could have warned me. People can learn from my mistakes. (4 April 2013)

This sense that the documentation process could help in the present and possibly impact on future struggles echoes Armstrong’s (2000, 111) findings that: unlike nostalgia, which reconstructs and/or reinterprets a self-contained past for itself, memory work – including that in the form of diaries, stories, and testimonials—seeks to imagine “new sets of beginnings.”

Perhaps as profoundly, Faeza was inspired to write through a growing consciousness of the repercussions of normalized and racialized “not knowing.” Beyond keeping a record of events, of times and dates calls were made to lawyers, or received from the police or politicians, beyond noting when Anti-Land Invasion Unit officers came with duct tape over their name tags, writing and disseminating the diary to occupiers on the field was an attempt to expose and counter larger unspoken debates that normalize poverty, racism, and sexism in South Africa, the diary sought to find ways of speaking to and encouraging movement building.

Writing to Resist Waiting When we are in that oppressed problem, it is so close to home we don’t see it. The problem is we so-called Colored people were taught not to care. You are supposed to wait on the waiting list, or live in your mother’s backyard. The saying we have is “jy moet eerste kruip”—you must crawl first before you get up to walk. Or, “7 swaar jare,” which is the first seven

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Documenting a history and tracking learnings in this collaboration was a way to actively intervene in a seemingly hopeless situation. In a similarly bleak and oppressive and unequal context in Villa Flammable, an informal settlement on the margins of Buenos Aires, Auyero and Swistun (2009, 128) describe the domination of waiting: Waiting time: waiting (while becoming hopeful and then frustrated) for others to make decisions over their lives; surrendering themselves, in effect, to the authority of others residents in Flammable are condemned to live in a time oriented to and by others.

As a counter to a similar experience, Writing Out Loud was written in direct opposition to waiting in a state of passive victimhood. Writing became an action and everyday survival on the field was framed as a minor victory. For example, the entry for “Day 75” documented the daily grind of finding food, carrying water, and figuring out how to deal with the most basic things like sanitation and rain while living through winter on an open field. Tracking thus became a way of legitimizing the work and agency needed just to survive, thereby challenging the daydream of people in positions of authority who wanted to wish the occupiers away. The journal also marked critical moments. For instance, Faeza describes how for her, their victory in their second court case was not just that they were allowed to remain on the field, but that it was the first time the courts had deemed the housing crisis, and not the people on the field, to be “the problem.” Writing helped in a defensive battle of perspectives to address the root causes of the occupation, specifically, and the housing crisis, in general. The links between personal pain and structural inequality proliferate as the diary unfolds. Writing was used as a way of countering the everyday violence and shame of life without public services and a way of re-framing and politicizing encounters with humiliation. Faeza was able to claim authority over her own experiences. An entry entitled “A Terrible Experience at the Day Hospital” describes how Ebrahiem, Faeza’s partner, was having headaches to the point where he had to cover his head to avoid light. After overcoming the hurdles of having no money for a phone call for an ambulance, and no identity card (needed to access hospital services) he and Faeza waited hours with no more than a blood pressure check by the nursing sister in charge; she insisted that only a doctor, after an

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examination, could prescribe anything for his pain. Faeza was instructed to wait outside. When she later went to check on Ebrahiem, he was missing in action; she found him crouching on the floor in the hallway covering his head in pain. Throughout the day spent waiting, Faeza wrote about her experience and about the stories of an old man who was also waiting to be helped. Ebrahiem subsequently wrote a letter of complaint, which he insisted be submitted for response, about the treatment at the hospital. This written set of reflections sparked a debate between Ebrahiem and Faeza: was the nursing sister to blame? Or, was the problem the privatization and exclusivity of the health care system, which prioritizes profit over people, leaving overworked nurses to administer sparse resources, and to defend against people in dire need of urgent medical help? As documenting came to be seen as actively tracking and intervening in a story, a search for signs of change and of progress began to counter some of the feelings of passivity of waiting on a housing list that the City has admitted is defunct. There was now something to do about feelings of being confined by a policy that criminalizes attempts by the homeless to build shelters. In writing up achievements—from calling for and chairing meetings, to assisting in protests and negotiating with police and local councilors, to organizing across geographic and racial divides in the city, to planning youth education sessions and plotting demands—Faeza recorded her own learning process and her reflections on change over time. By tracking her own journey, Faeza bravely tackled new ways of thinking and acting: these were not limited to her political activism, but included shaping her relationship with her extended family. Her writing helped her challenge the stigma of being deemed a criminal, a squatter, and one of the “greedy” people refusing to wait their turn for housing, accused of manipulating the system by attempting to jump the queue. Although legal aid representatives attempted to counter this misrepresentation in court, these feelings and prejudices permeated family and community life. The ability to challenge these stereotypes and articulate a counter discourse came as a huge revelation, and helped legitimize the active resistance of people on the field.

Writing to Sustain Leadership Faeza’s burning desire to dig down to the roots of hard questions, and to pull together a flailing community, to share information, and to act, resulted in many exciting moments but also caused severe pain. Writing became a space of stress relief and rejuvenation; it offered a kind of rehab. Faeza used writing as a way of actively reflecting on her role as leader. By tracking developments on the field as well as changes in her own thinking,

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writing the journal became a tool for self-reflection and self-authoring. For instance: I am 36 years old and when I became an active activist, it felt like me being me, the me I wanted to be the whole time. I could never be that me, because the so-called Coloreds have a tradition of how you are supposed to look at things a certain way and accept things. Then I found that there is a whole other world out there who looks at things the way I do. (14 December 2011)

Pushing against the grain was both rewarding and stressful. At the end of a particularly difficult day, for example, when the occupiers were evicted by a violent mob after attempting to relocate to a new piece of land, Faeza commented: I write and it’s like when you read a book and you hear the story and you respond—no don’t do that, or don’t give up, or this doesn’t make sense, it is not right, you can’t give up. So I read it like that, like it is not mine, like it is somebody else’s story. So I read it and give advice and say, I wouldn’t do that or that is not worth it. I then think of a good friend, as if it is their story. And I can then say, no my friend, go that way instead. And that really helps me a lot—to re-read what I write. If I am crying and it feels sore, I don’t try and be brave, I just say I don’t like this, or I hate that, or I am sick of this, or I am giving up. Then I put the book down. I go get coffee. I come back and I re-read it like it is my best friend. And I write over the top of all of it. It will be ok, or she doesn’t really hate you, or so-and-so is confused. And it works for me. That best friend in me, helps me. Otherwise long ago I would have given up. I think that is what most of us need—the best friend within. For me I hear that voice when I read what I wrote and write back to that voice, talk to that voice, with a different perspective. (13 October, 2011)

Reflection in writing was one way to tap into and replenish emotional reserves that were exacerbated by isolation, something commonly felt by leadership in these situations. Faeza’s journal describes her stress, and its manifestation, but also describes the small but useful, and desperately needed, opportunities for situated solidarity and support. She describes her response to a difficult situation, such as when she confronted the police Brigadier about the rumors he had spread that she was responsible for the police raid against other occupants, and the accusation that they had dagga (marijuana) in their house:

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More stress. Less sleep. The earliest I ever sleep is 2 a.m. I am up at 5a.m. I am starting to lose weight. I am bleeding with piles, or is it my ulcer? I don’t even know. The day hospital said come at 4 a.m. for the queue for the people without appointments. I made an appointment but it is only for August. I told them by August I will be dead! This bleeding is making me weak. It hurts when I eat. I bleed when I go to the toilet. The water intake is not enough on the field so I can’t drink. Sometimes I feel guilty loading all my stress and sadness on you, but you have to write it down. (26 March 2012)

In the midst of all this activity, taking notes “to come back to” enabled important but neglected issues to be acknowledged and witnessed in vulnerability and trust, and be put on hold. It was a terrible day for me because I had a headache and was tired and could not really concentrate on what the Judge and Advocate was saying and everybody around me was asking what is happening, so they expect me to translate whatever has happened. It was difficult for me to think of how to translate when I could not even concentrate myself. Writing helps, helps to put words, and when I do not have words, I do not throw away the page like I feel like doing, I keep it because Koni will find the word, and will know how to make it fit in. (24 January 2012)

The hard-earned trust in the co-constructed meaning and use of recording these moments, gave Faeza space to let down her guard, decompress, delegate some of the responsibility for her own wellbeing to an imagined best friend and to a supporter, and re-group for the next day. As Faeza’s leadership spanned political organizing and the work of addressing the daily needs of people on the field, the pressure on her mounted. With less time available, but an increased need for writing, she jotted down notes like, “I can’t get sick,” and stayed up late into the night to vent on paper, or sent messages on her phone, so that Koni could keep a running list of conversations to flesh out when we had time. Often Faeza played the role of mother to people on the field, but had very few moments to make sense of the madness and sadness she and others who were desperate enough to set up home on a field faced. There were many stories of both children and adults that Faeza mothered through violence and despair on the field. This included one woman whose husband refused to let her leave her shack, bath or dress herself, and who was convinced he could hear and see her every move when he was away by placing a SIM card in his ear. In face of this abuse, Faeza and Ebrahiem intervened, gaining an interdict against the husband and building an extension onto their dwelling for the wife and children. Writing up the increasingly

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disturbing, unfolding details of this husband’s actions and the repercussions on the children, helped her to figure out how to intervene: how to untangle the webs of oppression at the heart of this conflict became an important theme in the book. Thinking through the dynamics that pit people against each other on the field, she wrote: He doesn’t live there anymore but he visits. We have built her an extension and closed it at the back and made it so that if he wants to get to her he has to come in via us. As long as I am there and can see him I allow him to see the children. He is not a bad person. In a sick way, he takes care of them. In his mind he thinks it is right. Ebrahiem said to him when he was crying when we chased him away that he had been at the same place and nothing will come right until he stops using drugs. (3 January 2012)

There were times when being a mother to mothers on the field pushed Faeza to the limits of her enormous capacity. This included an occasion when a baby, Ismail, died and the morgue gave his stitched-up postautopsied body to Faeza in a plastic shopping bag, expecting her to scrounge for train fare and figure out a burial plan. Faeza wrote and spoke out and rewrote the journal entry about “the most traumatic day,” many times. Likewise, she wrote about the abuse of a five-year-old boy, Jimbob, who was eventually taken to a children’s safe house. In her writing she explored how hard it was to capture Jimbob’s story in a way that could account for her outrage and fears, as well as her conflicted feelings regarding responsibility for the welfare of this child, and the role of the state, given the context of the parents’ difficulties. She concluded: I have most of it in my heart and the words are not coming out right. A year or two ago I could have taken something and hit the father. But now I am seeing him as a working class member, and I know he wasn’t born like that—nobody is born bad. (16 February 2012)

Writing offered a reflective space to step down from the brave front she put up and to digest difficult emotions and think through relentless difficult decisions. Writing is the thing that kept my sanity. I said to Ebrahiem I feel I am slipping into depression. The children are depressing me. I look at Winston and I can’t look at him. His stepfather killed his mother in front of him when he was nine and up to today he can’t find his sisters. He was 11 living under a bridge, he had to leave his two sisters so he could go and find work and get money from other people washing windows in Cape Town. They were gone when he came back. Yet he is active today. Puts up a structure in a few minutes. I look at him. He has no family. Nobody. He

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will tell people I am his mother. He is plus/minus 25. He is still looking for his sisters. If anything happens, he looks to me. People like him in times like today, I don’t want around me. I don’t want to see them. I can’t look at him. Because I think what will happen if we get evicted and go our own separate ways. What will happen to Winston? (12 February 2012)

Over and over again, the journal acted as “a friend,” providing a space for Faeza to step back, to advise, or to reflect. From feeling the loss of encouragement as leader facing a pending eviction or facing family crises, Faeza often despaired: “I can’t keep putting ointment on wounds that I can’t heal.” However, again and again she emphasizes writing “kept me sane and going” (10 February 2012): I feel despondent Koni. My husband almost went to jail for child abuse that he did not commit – he was confronting the man next door who was abusing his kids. Only when they took the kid to the hospital, the doctor saw it was not that the kid was hit across the nose like the father said, it was that the father had stuck four sponges up the kids nose. The man is crazy. He walks around with a sim card in his ear, and then puts the sim card down on the table and tells his wife he can hear everything she says when he is not there. The social worker said they would come a month ago, but they didn’t. I called the police four times. Yesterday was the first time they came. Concentrating on my history and writing, helps. My husband feels what I feel, so I have to keep it to me, because if he feels it he might slip into depression. Writing helps me so much. It’s like a conversation with me about me. Sometimes I come to solutions. My history keeps me alive, thanks to you. It makes me sit down and think, talk, and write. I find it amazing—it’s like I didn’t write the words, they come out, I don’t know what I will write next. Another idea just comes. When they say write an article for a newspaper, I say no, I can’t write, because I don’t know how I do it. For me it is writing to figure it out. (16 February 2012)

As crucial as this writing partnership became, the harsh and enraging reality remained that these stresses continued to be lived out by Faeza, and not Koni, who lives in a house with running water, daily food for her children, and a pay check at the end of each month. While our alliance developed out of a belief in solidarity, not charity, and with the shared political goal of confronting systemic change, the space for the personal as political in the journaling exposed the differences in our lived experiences of inequality in the city, including especially the unequal positions which we lived and worked across. These unrelenting inequalities are not resolved. They fuelled incongruent discomforts, unfinished and only

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partially recorded conversations, and an ongoing urgency to intervene in the politics of housing and homelessness.

Writing as Alliance Building With an incredible ability to reflect and draw on her own experience and fearlessly take a public and political stand, Faeza was quickly swept into a world of public opinion and debate. The journaling process played a role in strengthening her analysis and confidence to put words to her experiences and to reach potential allies, including those with whom she did not immediately interact. Her documented experiences could be read and shared further afield and into the future. When Faeza, for instance, was asked to make a presentation on unity to a group of housing activists (her first presentation ever) she drew on the diary to help her make her case. The details and the narrative helped her build the confidence to speak publically and act politically as a leader. In this presentation, she began by addressing an audience of shack dwellers who were weighing up the pros and cons of occupying as an alternative to waiting on the 50-year-old waiting list for subsidized housing. She explained: “I have only been an activist since May 14th. I did not choose activism, activism chose me” (30 May 2012). Over the next two years she became the Secretary and then the Chair of the Cape Town Housing Assembly, was featured in documentaries, was asked to speak at activist rallies all over the city, and to present her views. She was the only woman on a panel of high level public figures at an event that was publicized in the Mail & Guardian, about the state of moral authority and leadership one hundred years after the founding of the liberation party. She flew for the first time to Johannesburg as representative of solidarity action around the massacre of the Marikana mine workers, to Bloemfontein to make a presentation to the group of academics represented in this edited book, and to Canada to give input at a political school for union activists. Through writing, we shared newly gained knowledge and aspired to assist other people in similar situations to the Kapteinsklip occupiers— people who would, for the first time, be compelled to break the law and thus become activists, not through any desire to enact the inherited glorified images of liberation struggle heroes, but simply in order to survive. It was crucial, we felt, to show people that change is possible. In the editing process, we grappled over including initial mistakes and misconceptions (to show shifts), and with our desire to put forward a strong and coherent challenge to the City and to the press, particularly with regard to their views that people should silently wait their turn on the

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housing waiting list. In turning the documentation process into a book that could be read beyond our immediate activist circles, we felt that a brutally honest first-hand account could challenge and re-frame the notion that people should simply wait, passively, a notion which is central to official discourse and to the framing of debates on the housing crisis, homelessness, and land occupations. Beyond presenting an alternative view, Connolly (2012, 172) suggests that writing in alliance can create solidarity on the part of readers: “Co-authoring stories can empower activist efforts by allowing for an explicit pedagogical rhetoric that encourages readers to become potential allies.” This is the theme and focus of the final section of this chapter.

Writing out Loud: Feminist Collaborative Methodologies A feminist collaborative practice attempts to center processes, power, and positions and offers one way of re-thinking what solidarity can mean in our work in challenging the status quo. It requires a constant analysis of where each person is coming from and where he or she aims to go. This needs to include an ongoing assessment and acknowledgement of power, and of the positions of different people or organizations involved who can then move forward from positions of strength and motivation. It takes time and constant questioning, as well as creativity to imagine and enact ways of moving forward that combine effective means and ends. Co-authoring stories in alliance work, as Nagar (2012, 5) suggests, opens up rich possibilities for creatively grappling with questions about representation and authority, as well as for mobilizing experience and memory work to meet challenges in organizing, leadership, and movement politics. Through reflecting on the experience and process of Writing out Loud together, we challenge traditional forms of authorship and co-authorship, redefining participation in research and struggle. The process and product of documenting the occupation allowed both of us to advance our political agendas. For Faeza, journaling was initially one way of explaining herself to her children and countering the accusations of criminality and challenging the violence against the occupiers. For Koni, the writing proved a meaningful way to develop appropriate and accountable research methods through which to destabilize dominant assumptions about who can produce knowledge (Benson 2009). Her initial goal was to piece together documents and information that would contrast dominant narratives of the occupation with the perspectives and experiences of people on the field, but with caution and time, her role shifted from facilitating the journaling, documenting the struggle, and supporting various campaigns

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around the occupation, to co-writing this history. Our method of writing was not determined in advance, but developed over time. Our division of labor was decided in relation to what we could each do best at any given time. Far from hand-holding, our situated solidarities were rooted in the idea that the labor of sustaining long-term, on-the-ground struggles against multiple forms of structural violence and injustice was as important to the process of producing histories through activities like diary writing, interviews, transcriptions, analysis and writing the final text (Benson and Nagar 2007). As one part of a larger struggle, it was not practical, desirable, or even possible to do every part of the writing together. While we tried to use our different positions as strategically as possible, at times our division of labor felt like defeat: we were at the mercy of the constraints and the realities of living hand-to-mouth in the midst of a flurry of urgent crises for Faeza, and in the midst of the demands of an institutionalized working life for Koni. However, the urgency and contingencies of these struggles also allowed us to create spaces to co-imagine and engage in discussions around coauthoring—hence the innovation and energy of this project and book. This work speaks to a growing literature concerned with exposing silences in the production of history that justify ongoing oppression (Trouillot 1995). Writing history “for” someone is a far cry from working with people so that they can write, disseminate and participate in contestations over their own histories. Breaking the boundaries and power dynamics that frame traditional ethnography, we took inspiration from the diary work of the Sangtin Collective and Richa Nagar, Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India, and from books like Let Me Speak! by Domitila Barrios de Chungara and Moema Viezzer in Bolivia in the 1970s. Both of these collaboratively co-authored works refuse to limit the idea of authoring to those who sit with a pen and paper, or at a keyboard, and write. Writing out Loud follows in the footsteps of these creative methodologies that come out of solidarities that challenge power both in terms of their content and in their process and formatting. In Playing with Fire, an academic, an NGO worker, and five peasant women use creative writing and journaling to critique and assess the power dynamics of gendered struggles in India. They produce a narrative woven together from this process that critically challenges the norms and assumptions underlying gender development politics and practices in the global south. Let Me Speak! is based on speeches by a woman leader in the mines in Bolivia in the 1970s, who could not write, yet clearly authored this book. The personal and political alliances and alignments in these works advance the dilemmas and previous debates in

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feminist academic work on representation and authority and develop products that work to this end. Co-authorship in Writing out Loud is re-imagined as a collaborative intellectual and political journey in the making of both the analysis and authorship. Through dialogue, the terms of the narration, translation and framework were negotiated and recast across social and institutional locations. We prioritized an accountability to the unfolding short- and long-term needs of the struggle for and in the Kapteinsklip occupation. In praxis this meant that the shifting audience of the diary impacted on the various uses of the journaling over time, resulting in a healthy tension between authoring and authority in the process. From initially aiming to firstly set the record straight, to recording the violent behavior of the police, the army and the Anti-Land Invasion Unit secondly, Faeza began to read the relevant legislation and to produce an alternative record of events and challenge the logic and politics that inform them. Her initial sense that if the truth were recorded then people on the field would be treated better, evolved into a belief that there was no misunderstanding— the authorities were intentionally criminalizing the homeless. This precipitated a shift in terms of audience away from the authorities and to other shack dwellers struggling for shelter; this corresponded with Faeza’s introduction to housing activism and her involvement in political education processes. The diary became a place to let off steam and think aloud about a range of processes to do with extended families, intensified political education, interactions with unions and NGOs and religious institutions, and tensions between people on the field. Thus a third and fourth audience developed—Faeza was speaking to herself, and also, in a different way, to Koni as an ally with a shared belief and commitment, using writing as a place to think through struggles and to rejuvenate. In this process Faeza became slowly convinced that writing this record could benefit people in the future, and a fifth audience emerged, of activists new to struggle who could learn from those who went before, inspired by Faeza’s wish that she had had a diary like this to read along this journey that turned around her life and her world view. Over time, we began to refer to our work as a history writing project. The expanding audience informed the shifting product and the division of labor. Koni was an archivist and then a facilitator of the diary writing, transcribing and collecting supporting documentation and researching the context. Over months, our conversations became writing sessions and then later we began to produce the piles of papers into a book, informed both by the dairy entries, the collected documents, and by the work of framing and editing. This evolving methodology shaped our alliance and our roles

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as co-authors with a confidently shared purpose. In this way the collaboration (re)defined itself over time, helping us move beyond the impasse of “who can and should write history,” to questions such as “what can history be used for and how can it be produced in solidarity?” The way that this kind of partnership developed and worked defies any simple recipe for practical support, and makes theorizing collaboration an important part of the project. Ongoing discussions of how power works, and a constant unpacking of this, remained central to our dialogue. This impacted how we worked, and whom we felt accountable to, and finally how we then framed the journal entries. From Faeza’s perspective, the division of labor was both a matter for negotiation between her and Koni, as well as between her and the rest of the occupiers, while at the same time knowing that the stakes and possible repercussions of sharing her most personal thoughts and experiences were highest for her. Without a doubt, Koni’s thoughts and imprints have contributed to the format and framing of what we present, but we were clear all along that this is Faeza’s diary: it is the story of her experience of occupying land and her journey of initiation into the world of social movement activism, specifically around housing politics in Cape Town. For this reason we ensured that the dialogue sections were obvious to the reader, and we did not smooth over the two-person construction of the book. We usually chose not to record Koni’s questions or comments in our conversations, something we recently decided we would do differently if we could go back in time. While the diary does not provide all the answers, presenting our documentation process in this way shares the power that comes with being armed with information, and from a way of thinking that developed through relentless questions hashed out in dialogue with multiple audiences and recorded in a language audible to those we felt ultimately accountable to. We took our cue from the shifting audiences that Faeza felt she needed to speak to as her journey unfolded— and through this, answering the question of accountability. Mohanty (2003) warns that co-authoring is a limited way of conceptualizing shared authority, especially when it does not translate into challenging dominant intellectual practices where there is often little “co”imagination in the framing of the project, and where the academic gains more from authorship than do her/his interviewees. Indeed, creating legitimacy for new forms of authorship demands interrogating, reevaluating and redistributing authority at each stage of the project (Edmondson 1993; Frisch 1990; Scott 1999). These stages include not only the activities that translate into concrete, written products of collaboration, but also the labor of sustaining long-term, on-the-ground

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struggles against multiple forms of structural violence and injustice. Throughout Writing out Loud, writing is seen as action, as a form of resistance to waiting, as a method of challenging the legitimacy of the status quo and the law that criminalizes the homeless, and as a way of naming the present as it becomes history, in an attempt to shape the future. With the politics of knowledge creation front and center, Writing out Loud became a method of speaking to power and fleshing out hard questions, and a space to create a framework for intervening in and documenting a land occupation. This method of collaboration opened up a new form of creative struggle and enabled us to move beyond confining or limiting notions of representation in order to challenge authority. It opened up new possibilities for creating a record and providing the space to collect and reflect on a struggle that puts words to some of the silences that make organizing that much harder in our city and in our contemporary context.

Notes  1

Mitchell’s Plain was one of the largest townships built on the periphery, 32 km from the center of Cape Town, for black people designated as “colored” who were forcibly removed from white areas with the implementation of the Group Area Act at the peak of apartheid in the 1970s. Today there are approximately 300,000 residents, with a range of working-class, overcrowded housing scenarios and a growing majority living below the poverty line.  2 ILRIG grew out of the Department of Sociology at the University of Cape Town. It grew from a core of professors using an internationalist approach to political education on alternatives to apartheid and lessons of democratic dispensation elsewhere; it sought to facilitate debate on the way forward for South Africa in the 1980s. As an independent NGO today, ILRIG engages in research and provides education to support social movements and labor unions looking for working class alternatives to neoliberal globalization. 3 All references to “the book” and all dated quotes in this paper are drawn from the journal documentation which is in the process of being published. See Koni Benson and Faeza Meyer (forthcoming 2015), Writing Out Loud: Interventions in the History of a Land Occupation (Cape Town: African Centre for Cities and Chimurenga Press).

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References Armstrong, Ann E. 2000. “Paradoxes in Community-Based Pedagogy: Decentering Students through Oral History Performance.” Theater Topics, 10(2): 113–25. Auyero, Javier, and Debora Swistun. 2009. Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown. New York: Oxford University Press. Barry, Jane, and Jelena Dordevic. 2007. “What’s the Point of Revolution if We Can’t Dance?” Boulder: Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights. Benson, Koni. 2009. “Collaborative Research in Conversation.” Feminist Africa, 13(October/November): 107–17. Benson, Koni, and Faeza Meyer. 2015.Writing Out Loud: Interventions in the History of a Land Occupation. Cape Town: African Centre for Cities and Chimurenga Press. Benson, Koni, and Richa Nagar. 2007. “Collaboration as Resistance? Reconsidering the Processes, Products, and Possibilities of Feminist Oral History and Ethnography.” Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 792: 581–92. Bullington, Sam, and Amanda L. Swarr. 2010. “Conflict and Collaborations: Building Trust in Transnational South Africa.” In Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, edited by Amanda Lock Swarr, and Richa Nagar, 87 – 104. Albany: SUNY Press. Chungara, Domitila, and Moema Viezzer. 1978. Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, A Woman of the Bolivian Mines. London: Stage 1 Press. Connolly, Patricia K. 2012. “Staging Cross-Border (Reading) Alliances: Feminist Polyvocal Testimonials at Work.” Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Minnesota. Edmondson, Laura. 1993. “‘Saving Whiteface’ in Tanzania: Intercultural Discomforts.” Theater Topics, 9(1): 31–49. Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder. Frisch, Michael. 1990. A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History. Albany: State University of New York Press. Gluck, Sherna B., and Daphne Patai. 1991. Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History. New York: Routledge. Jordan, June. 1997. Naming Our Destiny. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press.

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Kruzynski, Anna. 2003. “Doing Transformative History with Communities: The Bridging of Historical Methodology and Community Organizing Practice.” Unpublished PhD thesis, McGill University. Larner, Wendy. 1995. “Theorising Difference in Aotearoa/New Zealand.” Gender, Place and Culture, 2(2): 177–90. Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider. New York: Crossing Press. Mohanty, Chandra T. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. London: Duke UP. Nagar, Richa. 2012. “Storytelling and Co-Authorship in Feminist Alliance Work: Reflections from a Journey.” Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 1–18. Nagar, Richa, and Susan Geiger. 2007. “Reflexivity, Positionality and Identity in Feminist Fieldwork: Beyond the Impasse?” In Politics and Practice in Economic Geography, edited by Adam Tickell, Eric Sheppard, Jamie Peck, and Trevor Barnes, 267 – 278, London: Sage Press. Peake, Linda, and Karen De Souza. 2010. “Feminist Academic and Activist Praxis in Service of the Transnational.” In Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, edited by Amanda Lock Swarr, and Richa Nagar, 105 – 123, Albany: SUNY Press. Pratt, Geraldine. 2004. Working Feminisms. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Rouverol, Alicia J. 2003. “Collaborative Oral History in a Correctional Setting: Promise and Pitfalls.” Oral History Review, 30: 61–87. Sangtin Writers, and Richa Nagar. 2006. Playing With Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Scott, Joan. 1999. “Evidence of Experience.” In Feminist Approaches to Theory and Methodology: An Interdisciplinary Reader, edited by Sharlene Hesse-Biber, Christina K. Gilmartin, and Robin Lydenberg, 79 – 99, New York: Oxford University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.

CHAPTER SIX OUGHT ANTI-RACIST MALES BE (PRO)FEMINIST TOO? ENGAGING BLACK MEN IN WORK AGAINST GENDER AND SEXUAL-BASED VIOLENCE MBUYISELO BOTHA AND KOPANO RATELE

Introduction A (seemingly) simple lesson for black men as far as unlearning the use of violence against women and masculine domination is concerned is to be in spaces where issues of gender and sexual equality are on the agenda and to learn to hear feminist women’s voices. As African feminist Sisonke Msimang (2013, 6) contends: Simply for men to be present in the room when important explicit discussions of gender inequality are being held, to be listening without being dominant, and to be on the side of the interests of gender equality, is a game changer.

The political significance of this apparently basic, though potentially game-changing observation, for thinking on how to engage African men (African and black are used interchangeably) in gender and sexuality work is that it addresses them as men. Interacting with men as men instead of, or better, in addition to hailing them as economic, racial, national, or cultural subjects, is an invitation to them to consider their manhood as something they can do something about. It says masculinities are open to alteration. It indicates that masculinities are a cultural construction, not an unchanging destiny. These observations pose various interesting political and personal questions: Why have African men been absent when gender equality is

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discussed? Why do they not want to listen without being dominant? And why might they be opposed to gender equality, if that is the case? There are many reasons for the absence of African men from genderand sexuality-related issues. Men’s power over women is one, possibly the key reason. In trying to understand the intractability of gender-and sexualbased violence we need to appreciate heterosexual patriarchy. Men benefit from the subordination of women as a group. Regardless of their class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, age, or any other social markers, male subjects benefit from the social structures of power whereby males as a group make decisions and are listened to over females as a group. Some of that decision-making power includes the decision on what women can decide with regard to their bodies. Differences of power among men are plain. Some men are abusive while others are not. Some men commit violence and others are victims of violence. A disproportionate burden of homicide, attempted homicide, and grievous non-fatal, non-sexual violence in fact falls on males. Though figures are hard to come by, rape is common in South African male prisons. And some men are victims of women’s violence. The fact that not all men are violent towards women, children or other men, and that some women are violent towards other women, children and men, need not be minimized (Holter 2013; Jewkes et al. 2012; Norman et al. 2007; Seedat et al. 2009). It is critical for the project of gender equality and preventing violence to avoid making unsupported generalizations about men and women as a group. However, a man need not be personally sadistic towards women for the violence of capitalist and racialized hetero-patriarchal ideology to persist. And to achieve a society intolerant of gender and sexual violence a critical minority of males need to support gender equality. Since not every male is necessarily rich, racist, sexist or homophobic in his subjective life we must explain the attraction of power over others (and resistance to exercising the social power available to men as men). Keeping an eye on structures, we must ask what attracts some men and not others to exercise power over women, what makes some men non-violent while others turn to violence. In other words, in a capitalist and racialized hetero-patriarchal society which inconsistently discourages the use of gender and sexual violence, why is it that not all men use aggression against women? We might find some answers in men’s gender-based affect, specifically men’s gendered and sexual fears. Men’s fears are the soft underbelly of the ideology of male supremacy.

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Structures of power are certainly key to analyzing and acting against masculine domination. But so are structures of attachment. A focus on men’s affective structures helps to explain the apparent lack of interest by many men in gender equality and work against gender-based violence. Men absent themselves from spaces where gender issues (including issues of transforming dominant models of manhood) are discussed because they are afraid of facing up to their own internalization of patriarchy. The father is to be dreaded rather than loved. From a very young age, boys internalize the fear of their fathers and, where biological fathers are gone, other adult males around. Children want the father’s warmth but instead they suck up the nervousness that surrounds and radiates from the father figure. The boy wants to be like the father and instead learns that to be a father—a powerful representation of manhood— is to make others silent, obedient, apprehensive, or afraid. Fear and lovelessness become overriding emotions in men’s relations to themselves and to others. These feelings are diffused into our relationship with women and other men. Fear of being seen as unmanly by other men is the great yet open secret of American manhood, according to Kimmel (1994). Yet men also live with the angst of being found out by women—afraid that a woman will think one has a small penis, or is a ke lekwala (coward), or is stabane (gay). The point to consider then that many black men live with a complex of adverse emotions in which fear and unfeeling might predominate is a crucial one. Patriarchal socialization thus implies that men are not only afraid of being unmasked by other men, but also fear not measuring up in the eyes of their mothers, girlfriends, wives and female friends. As African-American cultural critic, bell hooks (2004, 120), has intimated, one effect of patriarchy has been to privilege the emotion of fear (as opposed to, for instance, care) in defining masculinity and males’ relations with other males. The pose of having “no fear” is just that—a front—employed especially by young black men as a way to deflect feelings of deeply buried affective and material insecurity. As it has been said, affective and material insecurity may be formative of colonial and apartheid as well as contemporary black South African masculinity (Ratele 2013). What all this suggests is that men might be afraid of feminism because of the questions that it places before them: question about their fathers, about their lives of feeling, about untenable forms of masculinity. All that out of the way, now with the assumption that it is worthwhile to consider both men’s power and men’s emotions in relation to genderbased violence, the question we want to pursue for the rest of the chapter is not to what extent can men be feminist—because of course they can— but rather, ought black anti-racist men be (pro)feminist too?

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Anti-racism is unavoidably central to our existence as black men. We were brought up in a racist society. Anti-racism is part of the political and intellectual resources that awaken black men and women to reject the ideas that would want to dehumanize them because of their color. Anti-racism, as a set of political and theoretical positions whose chief aim has been to confront the domination of white people over black people, and feminism, as a project created to contest the domination of men over women, might appear to be made to mutually support each other. But it has not been necessarily so. Entangled with several other questions about the place of feminism in black life and African cultures and traditions, and the purpose of feminists in a racist society, it seems that the question of men as feminist subjects—as co-authors, allies, or supporters of feminist theory and activism—is one which sooner or later must engage critical male actors involved in struggles around equality more broadly, and gender equality and gender-based violence specifically. It seems that just as feminism shorn of anti-racist insight will always be on the defensive in Africa, so will anti-racists without a (pro)feminist consciousness be challenged by the issue of sexual and gender-based violence. Reservations on the part of some women gender activists and scholars with regard to accepting men co-authors of feminist theory and sponsors of activism stem from a suspicion about men’s real interests. The issue is articulated in various ways. One argument is that, as with any group in power, as beneficiaries of patriarchy men cannot willingly give up the benefits they receive from the system and embrace feminism. Furthermore, it is argued, that it is problematic for men to enter a discursive space that has been made by women for women. Obviously, there are different feminisms and a number of feminist women do work on masculinity. However, it remains important for us to engage with the antimale feminist discourse that remains skeptical about accepting men as coworkers for gender equality and in projects against gender-based violence. When posed by patriarchal women and men, the question—can black men be feminist?—is part of an argument against feminism. Considered to be a “white, middle-class women’s thing” first concocted in North America and Europe, feminism is perceived to be antithetical to the development of a flourishing and culturally authentic black manhood. Feminism is viewed as part of a revised agenda for white domination. This anti-feminist current is made up of various constituents, including patriarchal or masculinist traditionalists. However, of particular interest here is a non-feminist or anti-feminist Black Consciousness position which sees black men’s current condition as arising out of the colonial white racist order. We identify with the fundamental tenets of the Black

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Consciousness ethos as a necessary intervention towards the full emancipation of the black self (Biko 1996/1978). Yet we believe that a Black Consciousness position that over-emphasizes racial conscientization at the expense of gender conscientization is untenable. Black Consciousness has also been critiqued as having blind spots, specifically on questions of women’s subordination to men’s social power. Thus we argue that racism is only one of many social forces that prevent black men from attaining liberated masculinities. Patriarchy is one of the other forces responsible for the violence of men against women (and other men). Men need a feminist Black Consciousness if they are to negate any enjoyment they might have previously derived from women’s oppression, and a feminist Black Consciousness implies taking an anti-patriarchal position, not only an anti-racist. Black men who want to engage with feminism in their work on masculinities or against gender-based violence find themselves therefore caught between the hard rock of anti-male feminism and anti-feminist males and females. How might we go about representing issues of gender equality to black men as “pro-black”—and not a white women’s thing?

Interlocking Systems of Inequality: Why Anti-Racist Black Men need to be Feminists Introducing the 1996 edition of Biko’s collected essays on Black Consciousness, I Write What I Like, Mpumlwana and Mpumlwana (1996, xiii) argued: The struggle to re-order the attitudes and relationships of women themselves, between women and men, is as fundamental as the struggle ever was for the re-ordering of race relations for blacks in South Africa and the world.1

It might sound strange to black feminists and anti-sexists, but there was a time when gender was regarded as a less important issue in comparison to race in the struggle for liberation of black people. And in the face of the prevalent attitudes and practices around gender and sexuality we doubt that the struggle for women’s empowerment and transforming masculinity is now settled. What the comment by the Mpumlwanas suggests is that because many political activists and scholars tended to privilege one struggle over another—whether class over race, race over gender, gender over sexual orientation, or vice versa—some people were compelled to choose between belonging to their race or gender (among other identities).

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African women in particular may have borne the brunt of living with the strangling sense of being forced to keep some parts of their lives in the dark. A number of African and black women authors have articulated the experience of being almost compelled to consider racial liberation as a more urgent priority than gender rights. In a similar vein, it is self-evident at the current historical moment that for South African black lesbians and transgendered individuals’ equality on the basis of gender and race without specific attention to sexual identities and freedoms can mean the difference between death and life: race-based rights do not protect one from violent injury. For these subjects the struggle for recognition of their gendered sexualities obviously continues. However, the feeling that some people are compelled by prevailing narratives to choose between one of their multiple identities is not confined to heterosexual women, lesbians and transgendered individuals. Gay black men might also experience anxiety and privilege their racial identification over their sexuality. Black heterosexual men who do not subscribe to culturally dominant forms of masculinity may also feel compelled to remain silent when forced to choose between racial solidarity and questioning unequal or violent practice by other black people. For black women liberationists and feminists the world over, amongst whom there are, to be sure, important internal contestations, what the Mpumlwanas came to recognize is widely accepted. Yet, if activists and critical writers also at times fail to see the struggles against different forms of inequality as interlocking, it behoves us to talk more, teach better, protest more effectively, march longer and write more powerfully against race-based oppression (or gender-based oppression, or other forms of oppression); these forms of oppression as part of an underpinning grid of injustice. In order to better perceive the nature and changing faces of inequality, men and women must come to see that the struggle against racialized inequality does not do away with the need to struggle against gendered, sexual and economic inequalities and other forms of injustice. Inequality structures the world. Power over others is attractive and systemic. Through various channels patriarchal power and heterosexism, just like racist domination, is rendered psychosocially enjoyable to many men and women. The same is, to be sure, true for other kinds of power, and perhaps power related to money is the clearest embodiment of the enjoyment that can be derived from power over others. Oppression, then, takes on various entrancing guises in different contexts. As such, women’s and men’s struggles are ultimately always against unjust power. It is not against symptomatic injustice that we ultimately struggle. Although it might be more urgent at different points of history and in different

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contexts to mount resistance, we do not need merely to fight against isolated oppressive acts – whether these are produced by racism, gender and sexual violence, economic exclusion, nationalism, culturally oppressive practices, or any other monistic form of oppression. For black women and men, especially, this all-embracing view of struggle should be meaningful. However, it would seem that it is not. All of us are misinformed on a daily basis about how to think about the world and our own lives; as a result we are prevented from thinking for ourselves. The media, the formal education system, and our social relationships are the most powerful vehicles in this process of alienation. None of us therefore can do without ongoing critical political education or conscientization. The Mpumlwanas noted that though they shared Biko’s passion for the liberation of black people from apartheid, they slowly came to admit the masculinist politics implicit in his emancipatory project. It is possible that this insight on their part is the foundation for the transformation of (antiracist) black men’s masculinities. The two activists observed that they realized that the experience of being oppressed because of one’s sex is no less important, and no more important, than being subjugated because of one’s skin color. The two black consciousness activists would also concede that the gender prejudices in Biko’s work must be seen in the context of his historical period, and that Biko was a product of his time. This may read like a careful attempt not to say something negative about Biko. It may come across as a justification of the gender biases that characterized Biko’s politics. The truth is Biko was in many ways ahead of his time. He was a man who did not quietly accept what the apartheid government intended black people to be: docile, unquestioning, and politically unaware. He stood up against the racial order that wanted to put him in his subservient black place. He questioned the world, and not only for himself. As one of the founders of a new progressive movement in South Africa, he led black people forward towards the ongoing task of imagining themselves anew. By initiating projects informed by a selfbelief in black abilities and beauty, he initiated the continuing endeavor to give a new content or meaning to blackness in South Africa. Biko’s inquiring attitude was not only directed at the racist system. He also questioned his would-be student fellow-travelers in the then dominant and white-led student organization, the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). As is well-known, he led a walkout from NUSAS. He convincingly rejected representations about black conditions from both the white and black media, as contained in his “Letter to SRC presidents” (Biko 1996). He, publically, and cuttingly, questioned the recognized black political leaders, who included the leaders of the African National

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Congress (ANC), the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania, and the South African Communist Party, as well as stalwarts of the national liberation struggle such as Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Robert Sobukwe, not to mention people like Gatsha Buthelezi and other homeland leaders. In brief, if Biko was a product of his patriarchal racist time, he was, thankfully, a bad factory design (he didn’t neatly fit). He challenged both the apartheid order and the conservative black order. Because of his insubordination, and his psycho-political insight into the workings of power, Biko is the best starting point for black self-aware men who are committed to gender equality. Now we could have made our lives easier and concern ourselves with the gender politics of another stalwart of the national liberation struggle, the current president of the ANC and the head of state of South Africa, Jacob Zuma (cf. Ratele 2006). Or we could delve deeper into the sexual politics of the expelled leader of the ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, who was taken to the Equality Court by Mbuyiselo Botha and the Sonke Gender Justice Network—and they won their case against him2 (see Ratele, Shefer, and Botha 2011). When we started on this chapter we were challenged by and considered using the chapter to critically engage with the retrogressive discourse of gender represented by the businessman and television personality, Kenny Kunene, and his fifteen or more girlfriends (who know each other and live in his house). Such news items currently dominate the South Africa media space (Cilliers 2013; Gqola 2013; Morden 2013).Or we could concern ourselves with that discourse of black masculinity. However, we cannot only examine the seemingly easy cases. It is that which we hold dear that sometimes we must question.

Black Manhood is a Gender Value, not only a Racial Attitude We have noted that there are many reactionary discursive currents undermining the development of anti-patriarchal masculinities in South Africa that must be addressed. The hyper-visible pattern of masculinity, which tends to attract attention in certain kinds of mass media, and that champions consumption, is represented by Kunene and other prominent men. It seems to us that men like Kunene, and more generally forms of masculinity (and femininity) that revolve around capitalist consumption attracts media attention for the very reason that it is an effective check against the real liberation of young black men and women from capitalist patriarchy. Such media coverage sends confusing messages about sexual relationships, money, masculinities and femininities.

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Researchers and journalists have also highlighted the resurgent traditionalist gender position that seeks to recreate tribalistic masculinities and femininities, represented by traditional political leaders such as Chief Phatekile Holomisa, Zulu king Goodwill Zwelithini and South African president Jacob Zuma (Ratele and Botha 2014). In 2012 the Zulu monarch was reported to have called people with same-sex desires “rotten.” According to media reports, King Zwelithini said: Traditionally, there were no people who engaged in same sex relationships. There was nothing like that and if you do it, you must know that you are rotten. I don’t care how you feel about it. If you do it, you must know that it is wrong and you are rotten. Same sex is not acceptable.

The king was speaking during the 133rd commemoration of the Battle of Isandlwana at Nquthu in Northern KwaZulu-Natal (Mdletshe 2012; SAPA 2012). Chief Phatekile Holomisa, Head of the Congress of Traditional Leaders and ANC member of parliament, was reported to have said that “homosexuality was a condition that occurred when certain cultural rituals have not been performed.” He also said that the National House of Traditional Leaders “wants to remove a clause from the Constitution which protects people on the grounds of sexual orientation” (Rossouw 2012, 5). President Jacob Zuma also employs the discourse of Zulu culture and tradition to support his gender and sexual practices (Pillay 2012). One of the main problems with gender traditionalism is its refusal to critically reflect on the contents of culture and aspects of tradition that reflect prejudice against women and are supportive of an injurious patriarchy (Ratele 2013). While we take cognizance of differences within the women’s movement and among gender activists, and are also aware of the many feminists who work with men, there is also a discourse that appropriates the discourse of gender and argues that men cannot change—they may be seen even as the enemy. This discourse may also be tied to a view that is largely indifferent to men’s lives except in relation to violence against women. bell hooks (2004, 112) suggests that this type of reformist talk sees gender “freedom as simply women having the right to be like powerful patriarchal men” (as opposed to being like “poor and working class men”). Interestingly, this reactionary discourse mirrors the monist anti-racist discourse (which we referred to above) which understands black men’s social condition as primarily a result of white racism—thus minimizing black men’s and women’s oppression (both white and black) by patriarchy. It must be obvious that we regard both racism and

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patriarchy, among other factors, as responsible for imprisoning black men (and women) and preventing them from living truly free lives. Defining ourselves as “black” (in the way Biko spoke of blackness) is to learn to question the prevailing socio-political and economic order. To claim to be “black” (as opposed to non-white) is to begin the process of unlearning a still hegemonic view of what it means to be a black in the world. Yet Biko’s black subject needs a gender and sexuality. Black men (but also black women and other black genders) need a liberating sexuality and gender education. Liberated black gender practices are about developing a questioning attitude towards the patriarchal and sexual order (and not only the racial order). Black manhood, like black womanhood, is a gender value, not just a racial attitude. Progressive black masculinity and femininity is a stance and a perspective on the patriarchal, heterosexist, white world—where all the terms carry equal weight (although we are well aware that these terms are by no means exhaustive in the struggle for justice and equality). We are not aware whether Malusi and Thoko Mpumlwana were gender and queer activists at the time of writing their introduction to the writings of Biko (1996). However, it is clear from their introduction that to be part of a struggle whose aim is to achieve a freer, more inclusive society, we need to realize that we are not only black men (and women); we also need a consciousness of women’s liberation and feminist struggles. The transformation of black men towards an awareness of the need for gender and sexual equality demands engaging deliberately in education for social justice. It is only through a consciousness of women’s liberation struggles and feminist insights that men will come to appreciate that a racist injury is no worse than sexist traumatization. An understanding that sexual and gender-based violence is a systematic weapon of hetero-patriarchal masculinity will not happen by itself (Again, we admit that the picture is more complex, and the violence more entwined). Conscientization in feminism and women’s struggle for liberation is the surest route towards grasping the perversity of the patriarchal condition, where biological femaleness reduces a person to the status of a perpetual minor, a secondclass citizen, a person without a voice. It may be obvious to some readers of this chapter, but it is important to note that the authors are not only men; they are also well-employed black heterosexual subjects. While critical work with men and masculinities gives privileged focus to men as a gender, and to the constitutive power of gender in relation to the racial order, the converse also applies. In other words, we need to understand black men’s gender construction from the

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perspective of racialized identities. If some men see their problem with gender equality as resulting from the colonial destabilization of their culture by Western white traditions, we cannot afford to be dismissive of such views. We are influenced by hegemony and subordination. Therefore anti-patriarchal black projects on masculinity must grapple with not only one issue—patriarchy. To be successful, they must consider all of the entangled roots of inequality. It goes without saying that the authors have other identities besides both being well-employed black heterosexual men. Deserving singling out is that Mbuyiselo Botha is an activist, working as a media and government relations person for a non-governmental organization; and Kopano Ratele is a researcher, employed as a professor at a university. These identities— activist and researcher—have implications beyond categorizing the authors as belonging to different groups in society. One implication is that in working together on masculinities and other gender and sexual topics we have learned to understand how our daily work, one as an activist and the other a researcher, calls us to value different things and focus on different outcomes. Most of the work that Botha does demands that he is in the public eye, responding on a daily basis to issues such as violence against women and girls, and interacting with people. Because of his activism he wants to react to social issues there and then. Ratele’s work largely involves conducting research, writing academic papers, supervising students, and delivering addresses. He would rather take time to reflect at length on an issue. Our differences as far as where we work and what our employers demand of us have obliged us to learn to find ways, and appreciate the value, of working together. When Botha is roused to react to an injustice that has caught his eye, and calls on Ratele, who may be focused on finishing a piece of a research article that he has been working on for months, to join him on radio or write a newspaper article, they are required to dialogue about the injustice. Conversely, when Ratele is struck by how Botha has conveyed something in the media or in conversation with him, and feels that issue might deserve a longer piece of writing or to be reframed or researched further, more dialogue is required. Learning to work across the boundary of research-activism—in the process learning how to be better researcher-activist and activist-researcher—is a work in progress. Something else worth remarking is that we have ongoing disagreements. For instance, we disagree with each other about whether it is appropriate for men to call themselves “feminist.” On the one hand, Botha is convinced that it is not only conceivable for men to be feminist,

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but that it is also courageous and ethically desirable, and that (African male) feminism is in fact an elaboration of ubuntu/botho. The concept of ubuntu/botho, found in many African cultures in South Africa and African cultures further afield, underpins the philosophy of black life. It is encapsulated by the saying (in Zulu), umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (meaning “a human being is human because of others”). According to Botha (and Ratele fully agrees), ubuntu/botho is a negation of any form of oppression, of justice, and feminism is thus an articulation of this philosophy of non-oppressive relationality: I am because you are, and you are because I am. As Botha (2012) has said, “at the most simple level to be a feminist male means to embrace values that seek gender justice for all.” On the other hand, Ratele feels that, given the power of words, the term “feminist” should be used with caution by men. For him a suitable term for men who work with women on gender equality is “(pro)feminist.” Other terms may even be better: egalitarian, anti-patriarchal or anti-sexist. But this disagreement over what to call ourselves—feminist, (pro)feminist, egalitarian, anti-patriarchal or anti-sexist men—if it was significant at some moment in time, it is not as important as even a “minor” issue as men learning to do the dishes and care-work. Frankly, we agree, what men call themselves is not as vital as their active support for struggles against gender inequality and sexual and gender-based violence—or any other issue relevant to women’s struggles against patriarchal domination. It may be worthwhile to note that men have to refrain from being opportunistic and avoid hijacking or undermining the gains made by the women-led feminist movement. We are agreed that the struggle should be fought side by side, but with women leading the gender struggle. A similar lesson about who should lead in the struggle for social justice was learned in the course of the national liberation of South Africa, when it was said the liberation struggle must be led by African people. It is important to underline that when the authors on occasion disagree with each other, and often challenge each other, this is done with love. Our occasional disagreements notwithstanding, we are clear about what connects us. Above all, we are connected by the idea that for men like us both patriarchy and racism hurt our health. We are agreed that the aim of the project to liberate black masculinities is to challenge the twinned ideologies of male and white superiority (as well as other social injustices). We are opposed to sexual and gender-based violence and hetero-patriarchal racial power. We seek to reveal the injurious effects of men’s gender power over women. Following the insight of feminists such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1988) (and, significantly, other feminists from the global South or black American feminists), who showed that

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women are not an ahistorical, universal, fixed category, we are aware that men are also not homogenous and that due to their economic, racial, political, cultural, and sexual positions they exercise power over other men. We challenge the structural and episodic violence by men on men. We want to contribute to founding new forms of healthy manhood. Following bell hooks (2004, 115), we think our work, in partnership with feminist women and gender activists, will show that “patriarchal culture continues to control the hearts of men precisely because it socializes males to believe that without their role as patriarchs they will have no reason for being.” This is what we have learned from the black consciousness movement and more generally from the struggle for national liberation. We have learned to love justice for all women and men. We have learned to learn from women, to listen without fear, aggression, or prejudice. We have learned to question power. We have learned about what a critical black self-awareness entails. We have learned to love ourselves quietly again. We have learned, therefore, that we would never be true to ourselves if we went back to an obedient, “yes baas” (“yes master”) unreflective kind of existence. A reflective, (pro)feminist black view implies always approaching our condition and practices as heterosexual, married black men with a constructive questioning attitude. This entails always examining and “doing” race, gender, sexuality, and the other categories within which we are socially positioned, and casting a critical eye more generally over men’s and women’s practices. Thus, whereas we learn from the anti-racist project of the Black Consciousness Movement to love blackness and overcome the ideology of white superiority, from feminism we learn to reject male superiority and to create new self-definitions that liberate masculinities from patriarchal, homophobic and capitalist power.

Conclusion We have come to the conclusion that what we are doing in claiming the space of (pro)feminist African masculinities is contributing towards shaping a different gender and racial order, one that will allow our children to flourish. We are investing in a future where the boys and girls we are raising and teaching and conscientizing can live in a world where they can be anything they set their minds to be. There are times when we recognize that we might not get to such a world ourselves. Nonetheless, with Martin Luther King in mind, we see ourselves as fertilizing the ground for a future where girls are educated for feminist, confident, happier and healthier lives, and black boys and white boys genuinely

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believe, in their hearts and not just their brains, in girls’ and women’s rights to their views, goals, feelings, bodies, health and independent lives. In that future boys, too, will be empowered with a progressive education which will prepare them for egalitarian, democratic, non-violent and healthier lives. We must admit that at one or other point we have held contradictory, ill-informed, and fearful views about men who do work that are “traditionally” thought to belong to women. Yet, if feminism can be described as the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes (with no mention of who does the advocacy), this appears to give us and other men working for gender equality the right to be part of the work done by women for the advancement of women’s rights (including the right not to be violated). In this sense, there seems to be no contradiction: men are born within a system from which they automatically benefit because of their gender, a hetero-patriarchal system which feminism seeks to destroy, yet they may choose to align themselves with feminism. The key, here, as we have said, is conscientization or raising consciousness. There is in our view nothing wrong when as men we unlearn our acceptance of women’s subordination and learn to desire to undermine patriarchal ideology. Having gained a critical gender consciousness, it becomes difficult for anyone to simply “go with the flow” and continue to enjoy the benefits that accrue to men as a result of living in a patriarchal society. Put differently, a (pro)feminist consciousness destroys any enjoyment men might have previously derived from women’s oppression. A (pro)feminist consciousness implies taking an anti-patriarchal position. To see nothing wrong in the powerless position of women, and to avoid questioning the system of patriarchy, is clearly cowardly and unethical as it effectively supports the status quo. Given this reality, it is not only possible for men to be (pro)feminist; it is also brave, just, and desirable. At the most simple level, to be a (pro)feminist man means to embrace values that promote gender justice for all. There should be no contradiction between Black Consciousness and feminist consciousness because patriarchy is not only injurious and unfair to women and girls. It is injurious to men and boys too. Patriarchy denies men and boys the opportunity to experience the benefit that can be derived from equitable relationships between men, as well as between men and women, and boys and girls. Such relationships can only be brought about when one embraces the values which underpin feminism. Contrary to the oft puzzling and misplaced critique of feminism—that it seeks to place women in positions of domination over men, and in effect to subjugate men to the whims of women—in fact feminism does the

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opposite. Feminist-inspired calls for equality between the sexes are good for both females and males. Feminism demands respect for all people. It encourages justice and equality as a foundation for marital, sexual, workplace and political relationships and participation. The fact is that feminism is a multifarious response to the denial of equality to women and prevalence of structural, representational and interpersonal violence against women. The continuing high rates of men’s physical, sexual and other forms of violence against women, in intimate relationships, at work, and on the streets, is proof enough of the continued importance of feminism. While young black men are disproportionately represented in homicide in South Africa (Seedat et al. 2009), women have higher rates of intimate partner victimization and rape (outside male prisons). Men commit most of the physical and sexual violence against women and other men. (Pro)feminist men have an important role to play in advancing and supporting women in working for gender and sexual equality by seeking to turn men and boys away from violence. The alternative, that men are naturally violent towards women and that this ought to be accepted, is so outlandish as to be anti-human. Although it is often seen as white or foreign, feminism appears to accord with African culture and traditions. The concept of ubuntu/botho affirms the pivotal role that embracing black feminism plays in creating an egalitarian society. Suspicion of feminism for being Eurocentric misunderstands it. It arises from paying attention to where the feminist movement first took shape, rather than to the values that inform the movement. Feminism goes hand in hand with the African values of ubuntu/botho because both vehemently oppose any form of human abjection.

Notes  1

This section relies heavily on Ratele and Botha (2013). Julius Malema, ex-president of the ANC Youth League, told a meeting of students in January 2009 that “when a woman didn’t enjoy it, she leaves early in the morning. Those who had a nice time will wait until the sun comes out, request breakfast and ask for taxi money.” Malema’s comments were an oblique response to the woman who had charged ANC president and current head of the state, Jacob Zuma, to court with rape in 2006. Zuma was acquitted of the charge. At the time, the Young League leader appeared to be close to Jacob Zuma, who was president of the mother body, the ANC. Malema has since been expelled from the ANC for behavior unrelated to his sexism.

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References Biko, Steve B. 1996/1978. I Write What I Like. London: Bowerdean Publishing. Botha, Mbuyiselo. 2012. “I May Be a Proud Feminist, But I Am No Sissy.” City Press, October 6. Accessed April 17, 2013 http://www.citypress.co.za/Columnists/I-may-be-a-proud-feminist-butI-am-no-sissy-20121006/ Cilliers, Charles. 2013. “Inside the Sushi King’s Sexy Sandton Harem.” City Press, April 7. Accessed April 17 http://www.citypress.co.za/entertainment/inside-the-sushi-kings-sexysandton-harem/ Gqola, Pumla D. 2013.“Sushi King’s Monster’s Ball.” City Press, April 14. Accessed April 17http://www.citypress.co.za/columnists/sushikings-monsters-ball/ Holter, Gullvag Ø. 2013.“Masculinities, Gender Equality and Violence.” Masculinities and Social Change, 2(1): 51–81. DOI:10.4471/MCS.2013.21. hooks, bell. 2004. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Washington Square Press. Jewkes, Rachel, Nduna, Mzikazi, Jama Shai, Nwabisa, and Kristin Dunkle. 2012. “Prospective Study of Rape Perpetration by Young South African Men: Incidence and Risk Factors.” PL0S ONE, 7(5): e38210. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0038210. Kimmel, Michael S. 1994. “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity.” In Theorizing Masculinities, edited by Harry Brod, and Michael Kaufman,119 – 141.Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mdletshe, Canaan. 2012. “Gays are Rotten, says Zulu King.” Times Lives, January 23.Accessed May 11 http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2012/01/23/gays-are-rotten-sayszulu-king Mohanty, Chandra T. 1988. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Feminist Review, 30: 61–88. DOI: 10.2307/1395054. Morden, Lizl. 2013. “The Case of Kenny Kunene and the 15 Girlfriends.” FeministsSA.com.http://feministssa.com/2013/04/15/the-case-ofkenny-kunene-and-the-15-girlfriends/ Mpumlwana, Malusi, and Thoko Mpumlwana. 1996. “Introduction.” In I Write What I Like, by Steve B. Biko, x–xxiv. London: Bowerdean Publishing.

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Msimang, Sonke. 2013. “Chairperson’s Letter.” In Sonke Gender Justice Network Annual Report: March 2011–February 2012. Johannesburg/Cape Town: Sonke Gender Justice Network. www.genderjustice.org.za. Norman, Rosana, Matzopoulos, Richard, Groenewald, Pam, and Debbie Bradshaw. 2007. “The High Burden of Injuries in South Africa.” Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 85(9):695–702. DOI: 10.2471/BLT.06.037184. Pillay, Verashni. 2012. “Zuma: Women Must Have Children.” Mail & Guardian Online, August 22. Accessed April 18 http://mg.co.za/article/2012-08-21-zuma-women-must-have-children. Ratele, Kopano. 2006. “Ruling Masculinity and Sexualities.” Feminist Africa, 6: 48–64. —. 2013. “Masculinity without Tradition.” Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies, 40(1): 133–56. DOI:10.1080/02589346.2013.765680. —. 2014. “Currents Against Gender Transformation of South African Men: Relocating Marginality to the Centre of Research and Theory of Masculinities.” NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 9(1): 30–44. DOI:10.1080/18902138.2014.892285. Ratele, Kopano, and Mbuyiselo Botha. 2013. “Profeminist Black Men: Engaging Women Liberationists, Undermining Patriarchy.” BUWA! A Journal on African Women’s Experiences, 2(2): 14–9. —. 2014. “Black Business Should Leave a Gender Legacy.” Sowetan, August 4. Ratele, Kopano, Shefer, Tamara, and Mbuyiselo Botha. 2011. “Navigating Past ‘the White Man’s Agenda’ in South Africa: Organizing Men for Gendered Transformation of Society.” In Men and Masculinities around the World: Transforming Men’s Practices. Global Masculinities Series, edited by Elisabetta Ruspini, Jeff Hearn, Bob Pease, and Keith Pringle, 247–59. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Rossouw, Mandy. 2012. “Stop Protecting Gays, Traditional Leaders Tell ANC.” City Press, May 6. Seedat, Mohamed, Jewkes, Rachel, Van Niekerk, Ashley, Suffla, Shahnaaz, and Kopano Ratele. 2009. “Violence and Injuries in South Africa: Prioritising an Agenda for Prevention.” Lancet, 374(9694): 1011–22.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(09)60948-X. South African Press Agency (SAPA). 2012. “Zwelithini: Gay Comment was a ‘Reckless Translation’.” Mail & Guardian, January 23. Accessed May 11

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http://mg.co.za/article/2012-01-23-zwelithini-gay-comment-was-areckless-translation/

PART III FEMINIST REFLEXIVITY: ETHICS AND RESEARCHER– RESEARCHED POWER RELATIONS

CHAPTER SEVEN RESEARCHING THE PRIVATE SPHERE: METHODOLOGICAL AND ETHICAL PROBLEMS IN THE STUDY OF PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS IN XHOSA FAMILIES ELENA MOORE

Introduction The idea for this paper arose in the course of several seminar discussions as I presented the findings of a paper based on transmission and change in motherhood amongst black South African mothers in threegenerational Cape Town families (Moore 2013). I had presented the findings at a symposium and the central theme of the symposium led me to explore some of the implications of the intersection between the social contexts of the researched, the positionality of the researcher, and the research product. I welcomed the opportunity to explore this aspect of the research more deeply, as methodological and ethical aspects of the study had raised several tensions during the research process. Observing and participating in the emotional-social worlds of the participants assisted my understanding of “power relations” in the process of the production of the research and in the lives of the researched. While understandings of intimate relations can be deeply affected by observations in the field, I had not considered how some of the observations, made in the course of an interview, would be particularly discomforting for a feminist researcher, but at the same time highly informative for the research product. This chapter is reflective. It is crafted from field notes, memories, interview transcripts and recent reflections. Looking back on the time spent in the field, there are two major areas of tension that I would like to discuss. The first arose during the process of approaching participants and obtaining consent, while the second arose during the data-collection stage of the research process. Examples from the research will be used to

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illustrate and explore some of the dilemmas associated with the power relations which influenced the interaction between the researcher and the researched. I hope to convey how tension in the researcher’s position and relationship to the participant emerged in unpredictable ways while developing rapport with the participant and observing the local setting.

Feminist Methods Feminist research prioritizes and is based on women’s own perspectives and experiences. Feminist researchers seek to eliminate hierarchies of knowledge construction. However, there is no such thing as a feminist ethical practice which seeks to remove asymmetrical power relations. There is considerable literature about the dangers of women researching women and about the need to recognize power relations in the methods of data collection (Brannen 1988; Duncombe and Jessop 2002; Oakley 1981). There is also considerable disagreement about how researchers should treat and approach the interview. On the one hand some feminist scholars argue that the social interview should be non-hierarchical and the researchers should invest their personal identities in the exchange (Oakley 1981). On the other hand others have raised moral concerns with the interview model on the grounds that this encourages friendship between women but has the potential to exploit the interviewees in the attempt to gain more data (Cotterill 1992). Feminist researchers have argued that the process of “doing rapport” and the “ethic of faking friendship” which goes with feminist interviewing highlight the unequal power relations between the researcher and the researched (Duncombe and Jessop 2002, 107). They have argued that the skills of developing rapport include the “ability to draw boundaries around the range of subject matter and to limit the emotional depth of the interview” (Duncombe and Jessop 2002, 110). However it is not as straightforward to limit the emotional depth when talking about family experiences, as emotions are a normal part of such experience (Daly 2007). Morrell, Epstein, and Moletsane (2011) illustrated how, in the process of rapport building and gaining access, ethnographers are faced with ethical dilemmas and have to make complex and difficult decisions regarding their ethical commitments. Moreover, it is not feasible for an investigator to determine the boundaries in complex situations, for example, when the interview is located in the participant’s home and other observations are made. Neither the researcher nor the participant can control what happens in the home (the local context of the interview) in the period before, during or after the interview. When the researcher is

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located in and observing local settings, there is a possibility of involuntary disclosure. The researcher may, for example, witness the father come home drunk or observe how the mother feels threatened by the father. It is simply impossible to know in advance where to set the boundaries. Other family researchers have also discussed the difficulties in setting boundaries when working with family sets. Gabb (2010, 24) reminds us that it is not feasible to curtail what a family member may reveal about another family member, even when this is information that the member may have preferred not to be disclosed. Whilst interactive methods can help to break down the hierarchical relationship between the researcher and participant, ethical concerns remain over such issues as disclosure, confidentiality and divergences among “related” stories; these are all factors that have to be considered when doing research with family sets. Despite efforts to develop reciprocity and a good rapport, power as a factor can never be removed from the interview encounter. A great deal of literature exists on how the pursuit of equal interaction in interviews is misplaced because the interviewer retains the power to collect, analyze, use and abandon versions of the participant’s life, with consequences that cannot be fully known or controlled (Kelly 1992; Wise 1987).

Disclosure of Private Life Family life and personal relationships are shrouded in intimacy and privacy. Doing research on families concerns important personal events and experiences in people’s lives. Gabb (2010, 26) outlines some of the complexities of researching private lives and describes how going into family homes presents multiple practical dilemmas for the researcher, including issues of disclosure and confidentiality. These issues are crucial as the participants are not simply revealing information to the researcher; they are also revealing the secrets of other family members (Gabb 2010, 26). Until recently, most sociological work on the private sphere has adopted the interview method (Duncombe and Marsden 1996, 146; Gabb 2010). In doing so, the researcher navigates a difficult terrain: she has to establish a degree of trust and rapport sufficient for participants to “reveal” or disclose personal and sensitive information. While some scholars argue that spending considerable time with the family can develop rapport and thus enable participants to feel more comfortable when disclosing personal information (Burgoyne and Clark 1984), others argue that participants are more likely to disclose information if the researcher remains a stranger and spends less time “hanging around” and developing rapport (Brannen 1988).

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Universalist approaches to ethics are however ill-suited to the local context of the personal lives of men and women in South Africa. Methodological and ethical concerns also need to be placed in the context of the everyday experiences of the researched, rather than allowing these to be determined by the researcher or by institutional review boards (Boden, Epstein, and Latimer 2009). Riessman (2005) argues that an “ethics-in-context” approach should be adopted when exploring issues around informed consent and confidentiality in specific “situated” contexts. In her research, she identified several risks involved in “exporting” ethical principles based on Western assumptions (when conducting research in clinics in South India) (Riessman 2005). What specific norms or practices should be taken into consideration before going into the field in South Africa? It is well known that family matters within black South African families are not discussed with outsiders, but there is very little discussion or understanding with regard to this cultural norm. Research evidence suggests that it is frowned upon and forbidden for Xhosa people to take family problems to outsiders (Mzondo 2001, 20). Mzondo, in an unpublished thesis, discusses the challenges social workers and professionals face when trying to work with and assist Xhosa families. The findings suggest that the way disclosures are made is closely related to cultural practices, and that “professionals” (including researchers) need to observe such norms and rules when researching sensitive matters in the private sphere. It is with this knowledge in mind that I would like to tell the story of situated ethical problems and decision making in family research amongst a group of Xhosa families in Cape Town. It is well understood and accepted that the participants’ right to stay silent or to evade questions in certain areas needs to be respected, but how does a researcher get an insider’s understanding of family life if the interview proves to merely uncover a layer of publically acceptable stories, which have no more validity than these people’s public presentation of their lives (Duncombe and Marsden 1996, 149). Researchers have previously found that “even private testimonies given in research interviews are themselves publicly scripted” (Burgoyne and Clark 1984, 33). Individuals taking part in social research on intimate family life may shape their interview responses in order to conform to an ideal of a normal relationship or family. Skolnick (1983) reveals that families have myths, secrets and processing rules that determine the kind of communication that takes place—what can be said and, more important, what can’t be said. However if cultural norms in Xhosa families prevent family members from discussing personal matters with outsiders, what is

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the potential risk or harm to the participants? What implications does this have for the methodological approach to studies of their personal lives? In the following sections, I reflect on the tensions and contradictions between feminist ethics and methods. My approach to obtain greater respect and equality with the research subjects masked a deeper, more dangerous situation of exploitation. Tensions arose with regard to two aspects of the research process, in the recruitment process and the datacollection stage. Each in turn will now be presented.

Negotiating Participation in the Study In 2011, we conducted qualitative interviews primarily with women who were members of extended (three-generation) families. The research aim was to explore the intergenerational dimensions of family life. The researchers first had to identify families from a sampling frame which included three-generations1 of mothers in a household. The Cape Area Panel Survey (CAPS) was considered an appropriate sampling frame as it provided the details needed to inform selection. It also provided a sufficient number of potential participants to allow for high quality selection. Most importantly, the sample frame provided all the information required to make contact with selected people—names, addresses and telephone numbers. The CAPS is a longitudinal study of the lives of young adults in Cape Town. It began with the first wave in 2002, with almost 5,000 selected young people, aged between 14 and 22. The panel was re-interviewed in 2003-04 (wave 2), 2005 (wave 3), 2006 (wave 4) and 2009 (wave 5). The rate of attrition rose from 18 percent (wave 2) to almost 40 percent (in wave 5) but the dataset included information over an extended period on almost 3,000 young people. Attrition was highest and applied mainly to older, and especially to white, members of the panel.2 Participants for the study on which this paper is based, were selected from wave 5. The wave 5 questionnaire updated the household, school, work, childbearing and sexual behavior data that were the core components of the CAPS. Although there was considerable overlap between the survey and the qualitative study in terms of the objectives and coverage, the two studies were not conceived of together. To be selected in our sample, a woman in the youngest generation had to be a mother. As is routine practice in largescale surveys, permission to re-contact participants for a follow-up study was obtained. The fact that there was an existing relationship with the research team/organization smoothed the way for participation in our follow-up study.

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I had come to the study with a clear understanding of my power as the “Other,” of my role as a researcher at the University of Cape Town with a PhD and as a white European woman. My difference from the interviewees may have been a limiting factor. At the time of the interviews I was married, childless, could not speak Xhosa and was considerably younger than the middle-generation interviewees. However I was approximately the same age as (or a little older than) the youngest generation of interviewees. The age difference was experienced as a considerable barrier in developing rapport with the middle generation, but this was less problematic with the younger generation interviewees. According to Mzondo (2001, 47), younger “professionals” who intrude on family life are looked upon as “child[ren] without life experience.” Mzondo (2001, 47) found that older family members doubted that the professional (outsider) would be able to treat their stories confidentially. As a white person who did not speak Xhosa, the participants may have believed that I did not have adequate knowledge of specific Xhosa cultural practices and norms, or that I had no personal experience of such practices. To overcome some of these challenges, I enlisted the support of a black, Xhosa-speaking, female interpreter who was older than me, and who was a mother. The first indication of trouble came when I heard the interpreter speak to a member of a household on the telephone. In negotiating participation in the research, she said to the potential participant, “These UCT researchers want to speak to you again.” We had spent some time with the interpreter explaining the purpose and aims of the study. We explained who we needed to recruit (two to three members of a two-to-three generational household) and why we were interested in talking to particular members of the household. I asked the interpreter to obtain permission for us to visit via telephone. We also asked her to set up a time for us (the researchers) to speak to the participants at a location that was convenient for them. They were also assured that all transport costs would be covered, should they prefer to be interviewed at a location other than their home. Participants were also offered a gift token for their participation in the study. At this stage of the research, I had not considered that the mode of inviting families to take part in the research, in their homes or elsewhere, could have a significant impact on the situation of the researched. Looking back with a more attuned cultural lens, I recognize that I did not sufficiently consider the importance of the mode of inviting family members to take place in the research project. According to Mzondo (2001, 43), the mode of inviting families to take part in family therapy is

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critical for demonstrating respect and developing good rapport. Family members in this study were contacted by telephone and the research team only spoke to one member of the family. I did not consider the implications for the participant or for the research of speaking only to one household member and not other family members, such as the head of the household. I came to realize this mistake when two of the men in the households appeared to be unhappy with our presence when we arrived to interview the women in the household. It was unclear to us whether the participants had informed men in the household about the research study, the researchers, or the interview. We did not follow up on this aspect and we simply tried to explain why we were specifically interested in speaking to women and why we needed to speak in private. While I do not believe that we need to obtain permission from male members of the household in order to speak to female members of the household, I believe that it would have been more appropriate for us to make sure that all members of the household were informed about the research study given that information relating to each member may be disclosed over the course of the interview. The responsibility of informing other household members about the research rested with the researchers and not the researched, given the gendered position of women in the household. While I was hoping to gain access to two to three members of the household, we spoke initially to a member of the youngest generation in the household. This family member, if willing to participate, provided information to other female family members, and their willingness to participate was discussed among themselves and communicated back to the researchers. The researchers discussed the research project with family members in the home before obtaining consent and commencing the interviews. Mzondo (2001) argues that the “call” to take part in family therapy is often linked to poor responses to and poor engagement with professional practices. It became quite clear during the data-collection stage that while some of the participants agreed to take part in the research, their attitudes were negative and were linked to distorted perceptions about the intentions of the research. They did not relate well to the researchers and they did not “open up.” A second problem arose once we were in the field and conducting the interviews with some of the participants. In our naivety, we hadn’t considered that the interviewees might have become accustomed to “UCT researchers” who asked a large number of close-ended questions (from the previous waves of the CAPS). Through previous contact with UCT researchers, the participants had become accustomed to a hierarchal, objectifying and the “objective” stance on the part of a neutral, impersonal

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interviewer. There was a clear separation of subject and object, thought and feeling, knower and known in their previous encounters with UCT researchers. In contrast, our study was hoping to obtain narratives on negotiating family support in “extended kin” groups. Unlike our colleagues, we were hoping to investigate feelings and experiences in an egalitarian research process characterized by reciprocity and intersubjectivity between the researcher and the participants. Although we had several topics to cover, there was no specific order and all questions were open-ended. The participants had not been asked about “their experiences” in previous rounds of the survey and they had become accustomed to presenting the “short answer” to a question. Our first few interviews resembled a highly structured interview and we had to rethink our approach. Although we had considered whether the burden that we were placing on the participant was unreasonable, we had not considered that they might understand the “interview” as consisting mainly of a series of highly structured questions and answers. Across the sample, regardless of the age group, questions designed to elicit a narrative from the participants were largely ineffective. The sample who had become professional interviewees, akin to the notion of “over-researched communities” (Crow 2013) and “research fatigue” (Clark 2008), were accustomed to answering research-driven closed-ended questions. They hadn’t been given the freedom to express their own experiences. It was possible to inform the participants that this research was different from previous UCT–CAPS led research, but this did not eliminate the problem of authority, and it raised a host of other tensions for the researcher. Even after several attempts to elicit a narrative from the participants, they continued to provide short, brief responses. What feminist ethical principle could I invoke to ensure more adequate responses? Were the participants unwilling to share private stories? Were they unaccustomed to expressing their personal lives to outsiders? Did they not trust the researcher? Did they not understand the aims of the research? A third difficulty arouse when I sought to speak to one member of the family confidentially. It was difficult, almost impossible, to isolate any one member of the household and speak to them on their own without other family members joining in for part of the interview. I recall an interview in which we were hoping to speak to the 48-year-old mother of two adult children. The mother, two young adult women, her male partner and a toddler were present. We introduced ourselves and we went through the informed consent form in the sitting room—but all the family members remained in the room. When asked if there was anywhere private we could

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go, the youngest daughter understood what we meant, and one sister, the child and the mother’s partner went to another room. However the other room was not a room separated by a wall; it was another section of the shack and only separated by a rail and a curtain. In effect, the mother was speaking to two different audiences and she did not open up. After observing some of these problems in the field, with onlookers and relatives seeking to take part and understand what this was about, I realized that this method exposed participants to the danger of being accused of “revealing family secrets”: the greater the need for intimacy, the greater the danger to the participant. Some of these issues only arose during fieldwork; they were not something the interviewer or participant could have anticipated prior to being in the field. Looking back now, I am troubled by the differences in power that arose from the researcher’s ability to access participants and to compile an agenda ahead of other considerations. As I reflect back on each stage of the process of recruiting participants, I begin to ask myself whether I had adequately considered the burden that was placed on the participant. I encountered these problems in the field when research aims and designs had already been agreed. Linking experience and reflection, these examples highlight the problem of the power relations between the researcher and the researched. The following three cases highlight how the researcher observed another set of power relations between the researched and their partners. It may be that these power relations arose from the presence of the researcher but it is also clear from the stories of the respondents that such unequal relations existed prior to the research. It is important to note that there were stories of abuse and domestic violence in the life histories of some of the participants. Despite not specifically being asked about it, abuse, both physical and emotional, was a dominant feature in almost all the mothers’ responses. The inequality and potential treacherousness of “systems of relationships” that Stacey (1988, 21) refers to, remind us that the researcher is far freer than the researched to leave. Field notes are used to illustrate the observations of the researcher in the world of the participant. In presenting the findings in this manner, it is hoped that the reader will gain an understanding of the process.

Case 1: Finding Homes, Finding Space Three visits, one room and two different houses. The room was the same every time—bench, brown armchair and table crowded into a corner, flowered cloth draped over a smudged window. The same bare light bulb hung from the same silver corrugated ceiling; the same flat-screen television proudly separated sitting area from compact kitchen. The first

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This example draws out several conflicts and shifts regarding the researcher’s position and relationship to the participant. Witnessing these events presented an unanticipated discomfort/tension. This environment disempowered the mother and thus served as an example of the oppressive dynamics in her local context. Although her voice was silent, her gestures were telling the story. It was emotionally heart-breaking for me to witness such gross violations of freedom and autonomy. How could I conduct research in such an unequal setting? As a researcher, the goal was to get as close as I could to articulating the participant’s experience of family life and this assumes the participant was willing to take part. The witnessing of such events was painful. I did not know how I could communicate with this participant whilst she was hidden under these blankets. As a feminist/woman, I did not want to participate in the production of knowledge that engaged in or condoned what I understood to be unequal power relations between the participant and her partner. After several minutes the interview was abandoned. After the interview I began to think that it was the presence of the researcher that had placed the participant in such a vulnerable position. Xhosa people believe that sharing family matters with outsiders demonstrates the inefficiencies, failure or inadequacy of culturally sanctioned strategies for bringing about change. Heads of families may feel humiliated when one of the family members participates in research which is conducted by an outsider. As a result they may become reluctant to take part in the research (Mzondo 2001, 52). It is the head of the family who is expected to make decisions. It was not clear whether the participant had spoken to her partner about the research. She and her two daughters were willing to take part in the research but the male partner may have considered it inappropriate for young adults and females to take this decision without his consent. The partner’s hostile reaction to the presence of the researchers may be attributed to the participant’s failure to inform him about her participation in the research in the home, or it could result from the researcher’s failure to obtain consent from the non-resident social “household head.” I wondered if we could isolate her voice from the voice of the family. Did her voice belong to the family as a whole?

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The third time, everything changed. The mother sat up straight and smiled—even giggled at times. Her daughters floated around the house, bringing water back and forth; one girl lightly tangled her fingers in my hair as I spoke. The third time—for the first time—the mother’s partner wasn’t there. When N and her sister, K, were still young—and living in the Eastern Cape—their parents separated after the father, a migrant worker, began an affair and subsequently diminished his provision of financial support. Since then, the two girls, along with their 5 siblings, have lived with both a financially abusive step-mother and a physically abusive stepfather. Currently, they live with their mother in a shack; the mother’s partner, abusive when drunk, visits almost every day but doesn’t co-habit. (Extract from fieldnotes 17 July 2011)

After interviewing the participant on the third occasion, I learned that domestic abuse also took place outside of the specific research period. The participant explained that when she lived with her partner in another part of Cape Town, her partner was “a drinker.” She explained how: he does wrong when he drinks. We lived with him and he would beat the children and even beat me too. So I decided that I must not allow him to do that. It wasn’t nice at all. He would beat us —all of us. We were living at his cousin’s place. And when he was getting silly drunk he would say “leave this place—it’s my cousin’s place.” And then when he is sober he would apologize.

The participant and her children developed a pattern of leaving every Friday and returning on a Monday—they would stay with a friend for the weekend. However this temporary situation was not sustainable and it became more troublesome after the friend left Cape Town. She had thought about leaving her partner but she “tolerated the circumstances. It wasn’t nice at all.” In response to a question about why she stayed with him, she explained how she did not take responsibility for leaving him: There was no reason. But if you have reached the day in which you ultimately decide to take that decision—well the decision eventually was made. He still lives there. Yes. But my daughter just decided to pack everything, TVs and take them here. And that was when we also moved, to come and live here—she had that shack there. And then we came and built a house. He still comes over.

The mother was unable to leave this partner until her adult children were able to assist her financially. Until the time that her adult child assisted her to move out, she endured physical abuse. She was unable to find an alternative to the abusive relationship as she was a woman

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burdened by poverty, with considerable childcare responsibilities and lacking in job skills. Pulling the blanket over her face was a reminder to us of her continuing vulnerability. The research interview, located in the home and without the partner’s consent, revealed her broader exposure to abuse in her life.

Case 2: “She couldn’t get away from him” The following case is used as an example of how my position in the field, in order to conduct an interview, afforded greater insight into the participant’s lived reality. Ndecka3 was born and raised in Cape Town and she had a two-year-old son. She was living in Guguletu with her grandmother and other family members. She had obtained her matric in 2007; she completed a two-year professional diploma in 2009; and she had been employed by a medium-sized national company for the previous two years. I interviewed her mother and grandmother in the family home; they were available to be interviewed during the day. Ndecka, on the other hand, had only agreed reluctantly to take part in the research. Working full time and commuting for three hours a day left her with little time for anything else. Prompted by the desire to secure the interview, I tried all the harder to make sure this would not inconvenience her: I offered to conduct the interview while I drove her home from work. She suggested that we go for coffee after work and then I could drop her home, and I agreed. During the interview in the coffee shop, she filled up with tears when she mentioned that she found out her boyfriend is dating two other women. This news was even harder to accept as she was already pregnant with his child. They had discussed whether they wanted the child and both agreed that they were happy to raise the child together. Upon finding out about the affairs, Ndecka sobbed and told me how much she had trusted him and looked forward to parenting with him. When I asked her about their current relationship, she continued to say, she hated him, she hated him but she couldn’t get away from him. I didn’t quite understand why she didn’t break up with him. She had been enduring his behavior and these relationships for over two years. (Extract from fieldnotes 25 August 2011)

My impression of her family context was taking shape: she was a young working mother with strong familial support in practical matters such as housing and childcare. She had an unreliable partner, however, unlike some of the other young mothers in the sample, she was involved in a long-term relationship with her boyfriend and they had discussed the pregnancy. However my understanding of her relationship with her boyfriend shifted halfway through the interview:

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Her phone began to ring. We had been chatting for 30 minutes and her “ex” boyfriend (as she referred to him) wanted to know where she was. She told him that she was still with me and she would be another while. He rang nine times within the space of one hour. Every five minutes when her phone rang, she raised her eyes up to heaven and told him that she was “on her way.” She continued every time with her story. I could infer from her body language that she just wanted to keep him happy: “oh we are nearly there, oh we are now on the N2, oh there is an accident” . . .it continued. She found different excuses to justify her “delay” although she had told him that we were meeting. At one point, perhaps the sixth phone call, he asked to speak to me. He wanted verification that she was, in fact, with me and not with someone else. When I spoke to him, he hung up the phone. She turned to me and uttered: “you see when people cheat; they often don’t trust others anymore. Because they lied, they think other people lie.” (Extract from fieldnotes 25August 2011)

The telephone incident provided another shift and introduced further tension in my relationship to the participant. I began to empathize with her more deeply and my view of her intimate relationship changed. Although she had described him as an “ex-boyfriend,” I witnessed that she was still involved with him. I believed I had a better understanding of why she “couldn’t get away from him.” The power and control he exerted over her was evident from her behavior. I began to wonder whether conducting the interview had made her more vulnerable to abuse from and conflict with her “ex-boyfriend.” Did he consent to her talking to me? Did she think that it was important to obtain his consent before she talked about her relationship? Did she tell him what the interview was about? Taking the turn off from the N2 and driving into the township, I began to feel uneasy. We turned left and right and left again. I kept thinking about why she would stay in this relationship. She asked me to stop at the corner house. It was a large, formal colorful house but it was not where she lived. I had already been at her family home and this was not it. It was her “exboyfriend’s” house; she told me she was going to spend the night there. It didn’t make sense to me. How could one be treated so poorly and continue to remain attached? Why could he not trust her and why did she not just leave him? (Extract from fieldnotes 25 August 2011)

It was discomforting to witness such events. It suddenly cast some doubt over her recorded story. I did not know how I was going to include this event in the data I collected. Did she want to stay with him or was she afraid to leave him? I realized the importance of these observations as a researcher, but as a feminist and observer it raised serious concerns about the nature of the relationship. As an observer, I thought I was witnessing a

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different side of the same story that I had just heard as a “UCT researcher.” In pursuing my aim, in obtaining an interview, I had potentially caused or aggravated a conflict in her life. What happened to Ndecka when she entered the house? Was she treated poorly for being late, for talking about personal matters with a stranger, or for doing something that was not approved of? Over the next few weeks I tried to contact her but she did not respond. Although I had developed a good rapport with Ndecka and she had trusted me enough to share information about personal relationships, there were still real differences in our positions. Ndecka was to return to her everyday life. I was far freer than Ndecka to leave. I left the township, turned on to the N2 and went back home.

Case 3 The third case demonstrates how participants’ accounts of sensitive topics, such as domestic violence from multiple family members, may reveal something about a family member’s willingness, or even ability, to discuss the experience. There are serious ethical issues with using information obtained from one family member to report the actions or behavior of another family member, who was in fact unwilling to discuss such matters. Can the researcher include the daughter’s account of the mother’s response to domestic violence if the mother was unwilling to discuss this? The following case illustrates these difficulties. Lindiwe, a 27-year-old mother, moved to Cape Town at the age of 18 and started living with her estranged mother and her stepfather. She openly shared her experience of domestic violence. Lindiwe grew up in the Eastern Cape with her great-grandmother; at first, she didn’t know that her great-grandmother wasn’t her mother. Her brothers lived with the grandmother; the mother, meanwhile, was in Cape Town and the father was absent. Her aunts, however, would visit every December; when Lindiwe asked about her mother, they explained that she was remarried and had a child. Finally, at age 18, Lindiwe travelled to Cape Town to find her mother, at her great-grandmother’s suggestion. When she got there, she tracked down the mother with the help of the aunt—when she found her mother, she moved in with her, the stepfather, and the new child. The house became a dangerous place for her; the stepfather was abusive and wouldn’t allow her to leave. Once, when she snuck out and came home, he refused her food for two days. He also frequently cursed at her and beat her mother: “He was not giving my mother money, he would get paid on Friday and he wouldn’t come back home until Sunday, he’d come back and want his lunch and if there’s no lunch then he would beat my mother.”

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After watching her mother being beaten, Lindiwe went to the aunts for help, worried that she could be beaten too; the aunts went to fetch the mother and take her to live with them. After two weeks, though, the stepfather came to talk to the mother; she returned, and brought Lindiwe back soon after. When asked if she thought the mother would have left the stepfather if he had beaten her (Lindiwe): “No. . .she wouldn’t because she went back to him and she fetched me to come with him back to that man who beat her and who swears at me.” In 2000, the brothers came from Eastern Cape; when they arrived, the tension in the household escalated and the stepfather told the mother to find a new place for her children: “I told myself that he didn’t like me because I’m not his own child. My stepfather said, our stepfather said, that our mother should try to find us a place because we were old enough. He’s got his own kids, so he can’t support us and his kids.” He explained that because he had his own kids, he couldn’t afford to take care of hers; indeed, she would have to pay for the new place. The mother found one, and she and her children moved out. The stepfather visited, once, to find out if other men had been there; afraid, Lindiwe called the police, and he left. At the time of the interview, Lindiwe was living with her boyfriend with whom she has a five-year-old child.

Lindiwe was willing to discuss these experiences of domestic violence. Throughout her narrative she emphasized how she continued to try and change the circumstances at home but her mother didn’t discuss such matters: “When I asked her such questions—she would just shut me down, she would say something else.” After several years of being a victim of domestic violence from her stepfather and witnessing her mother being beaten, Lindiwe ran away from home. According to Lindiwe, the stepfather’s response to her returning home after she had ran away for several days, was mainly focused on the shame she had brought on her family: “What will people say if my mother stays here and you stay there at my aunts?” Lindiwe reported that the mother said that she “should never leave again, because I would give her a bad image amongst the relatives and it will look like I am ill-treated.” Such responses contribute to the silence around domestic violence. The violence that accompanies this will to control is devastating, not just for the victims but for the community as a whole. Lindiwe’s mother was unable to share any details of her experience of domestic violence. She became angry when the researcher probed for more personal information. As Gabb (2010, 24) suggests, when a participant is unwilling to respond to probes or questions the researcher should respect this closure. However it may be legitimate to nudge along an interview when pauses or silences become awkward, or to pick up

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threads, presented by the participant. It may be that the mother felt obliged to attend the interview but she became resistant when she was “nudged along.” The mother claimed that she didn’t understand why her family stories should be of interest to others. She believed that family secrets should not be discussed outside the home and she was resentful at being induced to reveal family matters outside the family circle. She ended the interview abruptly: after a short period, and said she wanted to leave. The sensitivity of the research topic may have influenced the dynamic. Attempts were made to follow-up the interview but we were unable to reach her. She was extremely closed and ostensibly unwilling to talk. Although consent had been given, this encounter was an example of how fully informed consent is almost impossible to obtain. Had our questions probed too deeply? How should the researcher treat and analyze this experience in the field? The refusal to discuss private matters, when we know there are serious matters of domestic violence, is alarming. Lindiwe’s mother is still married to her husband, although she has been living separately from him for several years. When the children moved out, he told her that she should move out with them. Although there were considerable (and obvious) differences between the researcher and the researched, the inability to discuss these sensitive topics may also arise from the nature of the investigation and the situation of the participants. How do I make sense of this? The chance to compare the mother’s account with the daughter’s account unearthed the “silence” around domestic violence even if it was not shared in the older participant’s telling. Upon reflection however, I also realized that I had believed that participants could make sense of and verbalize accounts of challenging intimate relationships. Despite gender congruity and the presence of the interpreter, the joint construction of the account was hindered by my expectation that accounts can be fluidly articulated and told. There are costs and benefits to being an insider or outsider and matching interviewee characteristics with interviewer characteristics is not always possible. It reminds us that what matters is how we interpret experiences shared and how we establish a joint collaborative approach to telling. In some cases an account needed expansion to make sense of the versions of events and I was unable to probe in ways that made them feel comfortable to tell or share their experience. However I did not fully consider how different generations perceive the interview. The middle generation appeared to have not rehearsed or provided their histories or accounts to researchers before. Older women were less practiced in the art of being participants and showed more trepidation. Younger informants

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may perform well in interviews because they perceive doing interviews as a “performance” and an opportunity to share their knowledge, and interviews could be challenging for older women because they may not want to expose their uncertainties or shortcomings in that “performance.” I could have considered more seriously how the interview was performed and emoted (Ezzy 2010). My own fears of inadequacy in the ability to empathize and understand the experience of everyday violence in the social world of the participants may have shaped how I felt and how the questions were embodied, emoted and performed.

Some Concluding Thoughts Inequalities of power in the interview process were identified in the course of interviews between the participant and the interviewer and the participant and her partner. The attempt to arrive at greater respect and equality with the research subjects masked a deeper, more dangerous exploitation. I had not been fully aware, when choosing my research methods, of the effect that gendered power relations would have on my interactions in the field. The method I used was intended to assist and facilitate the interviewee. However experiences in the field revealed more situational dilemmas that I had not anticipated. Did the participant feel compelled to participate in the research because of authority portrayed by the researchers and the researchers’ ongoing presence in their lives? Did such issues of power further disempower women who had not negotiated participation in the study with their male partners? However if the aim is to advance understanding and interpretation of family life amongst Xhosa women, the participants’ reactions, behavior and emotions in the field should be used as data. For example, the way Ndecka stayed with her boyfriend that night gave an insight into the gendered dynamic in their intimate relationship. The interviewer’s own emotional response to the field experience (as seen for example, in Case 1) can be used to interpret data and is a necessary part of the reflexive process. Linking experience and reflection, it is concluded that research involvement in this context may carry intra- and inter-personal risks associated with harm and intrusion. If we are investigating intimate partner relationships and participants disclose such information and experiences, do we run the risk of placing them in danger? Without returning to the participants and asking these questions it is uncertain how research involvement places the researched at risk. A disturbing discomfort arose when I sensed a tension between my failure to negotiate confidentiality, and the need for safety if the

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participants were to tell their stories. Emotions came into play when I witnessed a troubled relationship or when I saw the power of inequality as manifested, for example, in a lack of freedom of speech. I began to wonder whether voices belonged to the family as a whole. The majority of the men in the households were not keen to take part in the research. However this did not prevent me from speaking to mothers and their daughters. As a feminist researcher I could not exclude women from being heard simply because their male partners were disapproving. Their gestures and silent voices in earlier meetings were telling particular stories. Interestingly the women whose male partners were disapproving secretly arranged interviews with me after the initial encounter, and made arrangements which would ensure privacy from male partners. Their voice, once silent, was heard. However amongst the women who spoke to me, there were often discrepancies between the reports of the mothers and the daughters. The researcher was unsure how much information should be revealed when disclosure from the older generation was not forthcoming. The chance to compare the mother’s account with the daughter’s account unearthed the “silence” around domestic violence. As a result, the accounts varied in their depth and version of “reality” and I had to figure out how to manage multiple accounts of shared family relationships, whilst respecting the reality presented by each participant. In doing so, I had to remember the need to advance our understanding of gender and generational relationships in families. I did not believe that the discrepancies led to a reduction in the quality of the data. Rather than weighing up one reality against the other, I tried to understand each generation’s way of understanding her reality and meaning-making processes in an interview setting with a researcher. At one level this chapter serves to explore the difficulties of doing research on intimate family issues in the South African context. For me, this paper is a reflection on what happened in the field. I hope it serves as a caution with regard to the practical and ethical challenges faced by qualitative researchers in the field of intimate relationships in specific contexts. The chapter also outlined the problem of taking a standardized approach to ethics and informed consent instead of attending to the uniqueness of the local context. The research experience presented here demonstrates the ethical concerns which arose at all stages of the research process; my responses to these challenges may not, on reflection, have been always ethical. The considerations and reflections which have occurred since the fieldwork will, however, help others approach research from an “ethics in context” perspective. It is important to note that many of the participants were not married to the men who had fathered their

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children; these men were at the heart of the abuse that took place. Conventionally, a woman is supposed to consult her husband and is not expected to make decisions on her own. In the case of our participants, it may be a normalized gender role to consult with the man of the household, in which case the “live-in” partners assume the function of the male head of the household. It is hoped that some of the cultural norms and practices governing disclosure of personal life and participation in social research can be investigated, as this will support and encourage advances in our understanding of personal and family life for future researchers. The relationship between the researcher and the researched is full of tension and ambivalence. I think it is important to reflect on them, I do not think they can be removed. There will always be ethical issues involved in any research process. There is room for research that is rigorously selfaware and is able to represent the everyday lives of others. Some researchers do form valuable relationships with those whom they study. This chapter merely adds to the growing corpus of “stories that researchers provide of their own situated ethical problems and decision makings” (Plummer 2001, 229). Linking research experience and reflection, I begin to question how family researchers in South Africa should approach families and participants with a greater awareness of the women’s situated experiences. This paper has examined how the process of pursuing an interview, confronts interviewer and interviewee with serious ethical and emotional difficulties that might not have been anticipated when the respondents consents to the research. For example, finding a convenient location for the interviewee, such as the family home, may put the interviewee at risk when interviews are conducted within earshot of family members or friends. In practice, even skilled interviewers find it difficult to know how to conduct the interview in such circumstances (Brannen 1988). While the presence of an active audience was a challenge in the field, the research team did manage to develop ways to try and counteract this. The way we found to change this in subsequent interviews was to try to make sure that the interviewer-to-participant (household member) ratio was the same. By doing so, we could ensure that the consenting adults in the household could all be interviewed at one time. The benefits were obvious (for us): there were fewer interruptions to the household schedule; two to three members of the household could be interviewed at the same time (which meant that they could not be part of the other interviews). However the chapter, analysis and reflections are limited as we still know very little about research involvement. We are not able to interpret how research fatigue, interview style, or racial/ethnic incongruity with the

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interviewer impacts on the quality of the data and the research experience. We know little about the utility of research involvement. Furthermore, it is unclear whether the participants in this study encountered harmful consequences for participating in the research. The researchers did not return to the interviewees to examine how they experienced research involvement and how they regard the interviewer’s interpretations of their accounts. Investigating how participants experience research involvement would assist both the researcher, researched, and the research output. It may reduce the harm involved in participating in research, improve representations of the lives of the participants, and the quality of the data. More research and understanding is required of how Xhosa respondents experience the research process, particularly when researching aspects of the private (family) sphere. It is important for future research to understand the implications of recruiting/inviting family members to participate in research. What specific cultural norms should be incorporated into plans for and design of an appropriate research methodology? A better understanding of cultural norms or processes would support research engagement. Therefore further research investigation is required in order to understand the issues that are considered important for participants when they are recruited and participate in research.

Notes  1

For the purposes of this paper the three generations will be referred to as the young, middle and older generation. There were eight mothers in the youngest generation. These mothers were born in the mid-1980s. There were six mothers in the middle generation who were born in the mid-1960s and there were two mothers in the oldest generation who were born in the mid-1940s. 2 For more details on the Cape Area Panel Study, see http://www.caps.uct.ac.za/ 3 All names and identifying information for each participant has been changed.

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CHAPTER EIGHT AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND THE RESEARCH CONTEXT: A REFLECTION ON UNBECOMING THE “NATIVE” ANTHROPOLOGIST ELAINE SALO

Feminist ethnographers such as Richar Nagar and Susan Geiger have urged us to consider “how we can serve as useful channels of communication between scholars and activists located in different places and who are not as mobile as we are” (Nagar 2010, 185). This imperative Nagar has argued, asks us to rethink issues of reflexivity, positionality and identity in fieldwork—these now taken for granted critical epistemic and methodological engagements that speak to how the knowledge we produce IS located, and informed by our subjectivity. These issues have always been key for African feminists writing from the South and in a context where, especially in the recent past of nationalist struggles, many of us have sat uncomfortably across the spaces of the academy and civil society activism (Benson 2009; Kempet al. 1995; Salo 2009). The questions for African feminists have always required that we interrogated the praxis of knowledge production and of methodology that goes beyond the usual normative acknowledgements of ethics, consent and commitment that underwrite standard social science research. These questions inform the need to push our ontological and epistemic envelopes and ask hard questions about the co-production of knowledge for which we in the academy routinely claim sole authorship, often exclusively in the interest of individual career advancement. For those of us who continue to engage across the spaces of the academy and activism, the questions and critical examination of shared temporality and gender with the women we write about and about whom we claim “expert knowledge,” become increasingly messy and difficult. However these questions require careful scholarly reflection. My aim in this chapter is to

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present some critical insights about the implications of co-existence, or shared temporality and space for feminist scholars in post-apartheid South Africa. In the essay that follows below I want to pose some critical insights about the implications of intersectional histories, referred to here as temporality, as well as shared gendered and raced identities for understanding structural inequality and power. The issue of temporality or our perceptions and experiences of time as lived differently by diverse gendered bodies—has for the most part, not been a central concern for mainstream Western-based feminist theorists, as they have been for feminists living, working and writing in the global south such as South Africa. In such contexts we occupy the same historical moment, and co-exist within the same geopolitical space as our so-called informants (Morsy 1988; Nagar and Sangtin Writers 2006; 2010; Oldfield and Salo 2009; Salo 2009). Increasingly these “informants” in the “community” engage with us in the hope that we, feminist researchers are able to facilitate improvements in their quality of life, even if this simply means recognizing them as people, with some ability to bring value to our perspectives about their lives and their everyday worlds. This hope requires post-colonial feminist scholars to scrutinize these apparently messy issues carefully. Certainly the hope for change to a better quality of life requires political and strategic interventions in the immediate and the long term and requires an admission that we cannot bring about that change as individual scholars (Nagar 2010). For us at least, as feminists writing in the post-apartheid moment such scholarly critical engagement requires difficult, honest reflexivity about shared identity and assumptions about our co-existence, with our interlocutors in the same geopolitical space in which the field is home. This requires interrogation of our personal social locations and of power that goes beyond just a mere discursive nod acknowledging one’s personal conflict over our own better-off positions vis-à-vis the Other, those troubling “informants.” In recent publications (see for example, Fortun 2012; Ross 2003), the concept “interlocutor” has replaced the term “informants” as means to both acknowledge and blur the power hierarchy between the scholarly researcher and the women and men who inform the scholarly work. The concept “interlocutor” goes some way in sketching the reality of conversations or discussions occurring between researchers and the men and women informing their work. However the concept “interlocutor” with its related synonyms “converser” or “discussant,” does not address the question whether such people are able to access or engage in the knowledge produced about them in the scholarly journals or whether they are even remotely considered to be the recipient audiences for such

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knowledge. Use of the concept also begs the question about what registers of knowledge should be (co)-produced if we define local interlocutors as one of the primary sets of audiences that we want to engage. Such questions become especially pertinent for us, the feminist scholars who share the national, gendered and raced identities of our interlocutors and who want to extend our intellectual engagements with them, in addition to our engagements with the relevant scholarly audiences and publication in the peer-reviewed academic journals. If we properly consider the meaning of the men and women we engage with in the co-production of knowledge, as interlocutors whom we should also address as audiences to be engaged about the products of our work, then we need to engage questions about how we can usefully (co)-produce and extend agency associated with subaltern knowledge registers whilst acknowledging co-existence across the divides of power and status. Such critical engagement requires three actions: first that we begin to reflect on how and where apparently shared raced and gendered identity hook up with geopolitical and socio-economic structural divisions; second, that we recognize that the knowledges about local peoples and communities are co-produced, and that we legitimate the co-authorship of so-called key informants in multiple registers beyond that of the academic register submitted as a publication (Benson 2009; Nagar and Sangtin Writers 2006; 2010). My aim in this essay is to engage with these three challenges systematically. In this paper I begin by reflecting upon assumptions about shared identities and power as I examine my own biography as a “native anthropologist” doing research at home, in Manenberg, an apartheid township in Cape Town, South Africa. These reflections then lead me to examine the importance of local women’s knowledge as they informed my own production of an academic text. These local women also enabled me to reflect upon my own taken-for-granted assumptions about shared gendered epistemologies and the need to examine how my own intersectional identity linked up with wider structural inequalities. These issues are suggestive of the need to extend my interrogation about feminist intersectionality at the margins and the importance of co-production of knowledges in diverse formats if I wish to make any difference in local women’s material lives in the short and the long term.

On being the Native Feminist Anthropologist Unlike anthropologists who choose to study societies very different from their own located far away from home, I decided to become the



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“native anthropologist.” I turned the anthropological gaze onto the place I consider to be home, namely South African society, and onto the colored women with whom I shared a gendered and racial classification under the old apartheid system. In so doing, I sought to understand the social processes from within the cultural and racial community that might be assumed to be my own, in order to interrogate the apparent homogeneity of racial classification, from within and to excavate the diversity within this assumed homogenous group. I began my research in Manenberg in November 1997, and continue to work in the area to this day. I was motivated to conduct research in the area by three key factors. My interest in the Manenberg women’s lives was selfish—to produce a thesis to acquire a doctorate—I had to confront the interest of my research for my own personal gain and whether and to what extent my work would make a strategic intervention in their structural location of disempowerment. Firstly, I was interested in documenting Manenberg residents’ experiences of a specific history that I shared with them. Like Manenberg women I was classified colored and we shared the apartheid experience of being “made” into colored through legislation during this historical period. The formal South African racial classification rigidly structured our multiple and diverse experiences so that we shared common historical events like forced removals and the subsequent legally enforced physical, social and linguistic separation from South Africans who were differently classified. But unlike almost all of the Manenberg residents I was a member of a family who was middle class educated with access to economic and cultural capital to which they had very little access. And as I indicated earlier, my interests were primarily motivated by my personal need to produce a text that would meet the standards of the academy to confer a doctorate on me and only secondarily to make any meaningful structural intervention in these women’s material lives.

But First a Note on Autobiography Like most of the township’s first residents my extended maternal household was forcibly removed from our ancestral family home in Beaconsfield, Kimberley, in the early 1960s, when I was a year old. We were resettled in a newly legislated colored residential area on the periphery of the city. I was educated in a racially segregated education system, attending schools for coloreds only. Here we were taught fluency in the two official languages of the time, English and Afrikaans. My leisure hours were similarly structured by my participation in colored-only sports and other activities, held in separate amenities such as sports fields,

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public swimming pools and libraries. These experiences were also layered over with those of gender, as parents, teachers and other members in our community socialized us girls into the mores of respectable femininity. Yet, despite our common racial classification and shared gendered experiences of coloredness, I had to acknowledge that I was different from colored Manenberg residents. While most of the colored population were and still are impoverished, I was firmly embedded within the small middle class. My family’s class status was entirely due to my parents’ careers in building construction and education. The shift in language preference between two generations in our household also marked its social mobility from Afrikaans-speaking colored working class to English-speaking middle class. My maternal grandparents spoke Afrikaans in the home and used English only in formal contexts such as the church or business environments. My parents, in contrast, preferred to use English as a means to register their opposition to the Afrikaner-dominated apartheid state and as a signifier of their status as members of the educated class. During this process, I learned that English-speaking communities were considered to be socially and economically superior to Afrikaans-speaking communities. My experiences of racial homogeneity was also colored over by our privileged class access to privately owned swimming pools in relatives’ and neighbors’ backyards, my family’s ability to purchase books and magazines fairly freely, and the economic ability to travel. Young women’s education was considered as important as that for men, even while domesticity was still regarded as a core aspect of my own and other girls’ upbringing. As a result, my siblings and I only used Afrikaans as a demeaning language and as a means to register contempt or to insult. Furthermore, unlike my less-well-off girlfriends, I spent my afternoons reading, playing the piano or completing homework rather than cooking or cleaning house. Later as I shared these experiences with middle-class white English-speaking or Afrikaner girlfriends, or with middle-class black, Xhosa-speaking girlfriends, who grew up in the same economic circumstances, albeit on the other side of the walls or the tracks, we discovered that in retrospect, my experiences were no different from their own. Most Manenberg women claimed Afrikaans as their preferred language and formed part of the working-class poor in the city. Moreover they spoke Kaaps, a different, more creolized version of Afrikaans than the version I commonly used, and commonly referred to colloquially as “regte Afrikaans” (schooled Afrikaans, denoting my location as an educated woman) and that which I had to learn to speak when I moved to Cape Town in the early 1980s. My parents and other family members considered themselves to be colored. Yet during my student years in Cape



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Town, they and various friends instructed me to keep my distance from Manenberg residents because they were perceived to be “rough.” I actively rejected the label “colored” as an apartheid construct, having been politicized during the era of Black Consciousness in the early 1980s and during my studies at a liberal, English-speaking white university. I redefined myself as black, and continue to do so, as I still experience discomfort with the term “colored.” Manenberg residents’ lives therefore represented both a familiar and a different experience of coloredness to my own sensibilities of race and of gender. Secondly, however, whilst defining myself as black, I had to come to terms with the relatively favorable position coloreds occupied in the black hierarchy of deprivation vis-à-vis people classified African, and the undeniable fact that many people classified colored considered themselves to be different than those classified African, and still do so today. Most importantly, I also had an intellectual interest in understanding how diverse communities developed within, and in spite of, apartheid’s legislative attempts to create racially homogenous societies within the confines of these segregated townships. Clearly these interests developed from the questions about race, gender, personhood and agency that emanated from my autobiographical personal and political experiences. They also emanated from my critical engagement with the relations of power and of knowledge production in the process of doing research. These questions are also of central importance to critical social theory within anthropology as well as with the political economy and the power relations of representation and knowledge production as well as claims to legitimacy of voice in different public spaces of intellectual engagement.

Reflexivity, Critical Epistemology and Methodology My preoccupation with these issues haves informed questions such as: how were the very structures of subordination kept in play over long periods, despite subordinated women’s resistance? Or how and why do ordinary women’s daily interactions that appear to be everyday acts of resistance necessarily require a degree of compliance with the very system of domination? Why did their discursive and embodied acts of resistance not carry any legitimacy as a means of intervention in their structural locations of disempowerment? More importantly for me these issues raise key questions about research practice and methodology. In our normative practices of methodology we tend to invoke claims to ethical treatment of informants, the practice of consent and of commitment to protect personal identity and leave things at that. But an African feminist engagement with

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power and ethics require an interrogation of the assumptions of power that inhere in supposed ethics, and the like. Furthermore I had to ask whether the term “resistance” so often invoked by feminist academics and critical social scientists, inherently imply that the dominated and dominators necessarily share the same systems of cultural values or meanings and that communication of “resistance” is facile and readily communicated? Or do these two groups occupy different cultural and discursive worlds, different temporalities that are not readily crossed not even by social scientists like myself who assume a positionality and a subjectivity that seems to sit across these two worlds? All these questions are shot through with complex questions about epistemic worlds, about assumed notions of shared gendered identities within the perceived homogeneity of “black women” and of femininity and power that go beyond our commonly held assumptions. These questions Richa Nagar and Sangtin Writers (2006; 2010) argue also insist that we foreground and interrogate the structuration of gendered inequality in the everyday spaces and how these gendered practices of research methodology hook up with wider geopolitical and socio-economic structures of power and inequality, the assumed agency of academic knowledge and the signifiers of agency and the concept found at the intersection of these three issues, namely the multiplicity of knowledge systems, the legitimacy of voice whose representation of knowledge matters in the context of the academy and public intellectual engagements. Unfortunately, many feminists have reduced these nuanced, complicated questions of power to those grandiose though blunt binary theoretical concepts, patriarchal domination and feminist resistance, and to normative discourse of research methodology such as ethics, consent, and protection of identity through anonymity. I was attempting to understand how the women residents in Manenberg negotiated their way through, partly complied with, reproduced, resisted and reconfigured the “colored world” that the state had imposed upon them. I recognized that the only meaningful way I could begin to address these issues was to excavate the social and historical processes whereby community, personhood and agency are constructed in a colored place like Manenberg. This required life histories and the local women’s narration and construction of the meanings of the place through their own intimate memories and their selection of what they wanted to foreground either in photographs or through a guided tour of the neighborhood. This knowledge interrogated the information I was acquiring via the archives and city urban planners’ documents about the history of Manenberg. Consequently dominant narratives of the geospatial structural location of



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place were interrogated through the local women’s gendered narratives of history and of place.

Negotiating access to Manenberg Feminist anthropologists such as Palestinian American Abu-Lughod (2002) and Japanese American Doreen Kondo (1990) have indicated that the role of the ethnographer who embodies the identity of the insider– outsider brings its own set of benefits and trade-offs. Kondo (1990, 11) shows how the insider–outsider anthropologist’s apparent common identity with the community in which she works, can present a “conceptual anomaly” to its members, because she is perceived as being the same as, and yet different to them. My experience conducting research in Manenberg was similar. My access to Manenberg was facilitated in a number of ways by my familiarity with the language spoken there, as well as my intimate knowledge about the township’s history and location in the city. Many residents perceived me to be colored or rather “bruin” (brown), the race label preferred by local residents, because I traded in the same cultural and linguistic codes as they did. I did not have to negotiate a linguistic barrier because I am fluent in English, Afrikaans, and Kaaps, the creolized form of Afrikaans commonly spoken in the area. In addition personal relationships became a primary means to obtaining access to the residents and to their dominant concerns. I had worked with anti-apartheid activists in Manenberg during the 1980s and so I relied on an existing personal network of friends and activists, the public intellectuals who live and work there, as well as the Anglican faith community, to inform me about the current issues that dominated peoples’ daily lives. However, I gradually became aware of the local women’s perception that I operated within a more powerful space of middle-class Cape Town that they had little or no access to, because their trade in the local cultural and linguistic codes that held cultural capital in these spaces was very limited indeed. These women’s awareness of my more favorable social location and the power associated with it, became apparent as they increased their requests to accompany them to the local school to mediate their children’s relationship with the school head, or to a private medical doctor to seek for a second opinion on a health matter, or to the offices of Social Development, the state agency where they applied for child support grants. I found myself intervening, albeit uncomfortably, in conversations between the professional service provider and my individual women friends as I attempted to re-assert the latter’s perceptions, questions or

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opinions usually in English that betrayed my social location. I soon learned that the women’s assertions, expressed in Afrikaans or halting English often went unheard by these professionals. I was often astounded at the extent to which the local women’s opinions, protestations and questions were ignored. These professional service providers had learned a social deafness to these women’s voices, supported by systemic devaluation of poor communities in the city through their geopolitical separation from socio-economic resources. Most times, the women would perform a satirical imitation of the professional service provider’s speech and actions once the appointments were over. These women were certainly keen observers and interpreters of behavior and of the webs of social power. More importantly they were indicating the relative lack of power the professional providers held over their social and psychological autonomy. These women’s interactions with such professional service providers and their requests for my interventions revealed a finer textured layering of power and knowledge in the context of individual encounters, which my community activist friends seemed to ignore. These women’s subaltern experiences and information revealed much about the multiple sets of knowledge and of cultural capital that existed in Manenberg. The local women friends were keenly aware of these nuances of power and the divides in cultural capital between them and the community activists as well as between them and me. The social network of Manenberg political activists that I was embedded in provided a rich source of knowledge on the historical and social events that shaped and informed the collective women residents’ everyday experiences in Manenberg. However, as I grew aware of the finer distinctions of power and the layered character of social fields in the township, I learned that these friendships were also limiting. My activist friends subtly confined me to a tightly knit circle of similar minded acquaintances whom the ordinary women perceived to be insider–outsiders too, “conceptual anomalies” because these activists possessed greater cultural capital and wielded enormous authority in the local government structures in the township. In addition, these activists were inserted into spheres of political and social influence beyond the confines of the township. Ordinary residents deferred to them as power brokers, because they possessed high levels of formal education; they were able to move across the social and racial boundaries with great ease, and they were often exempted from the local normative codes of social hierarchy based on generation and gender. I later learned that ordinary residents quickly perceived me to be another power broker, because I could switch between different linguistic and social codes with the same ease. I also learned that I was initially perceived as an ingénue



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because I really wanted to spend more time with the ordinary women who saw me as a readily exploitable individual especially because I owned a car despite my gender. In this area where most people relied on public transport such as mini-bus taxis and buses, most residents, especially men, prized cars both as a means of physical mobility and as a signifier of successful masculinity and better social status. Ultimately I could not rely upon the initial activist friendships to gain ready access to the ordinary women residents, even though the former assisted me to begin the research. I had to negotiate my relationship with the ordinary women independently, without the mediation of the local power brokers. I had to give over the power of legitimate knowledge to the ordinary women, who socialized me into their worlds, directed my social interactions and guided my way into local households. Their knowledge of and guidance in the world of ordinary Manenberg women’s residents and their households were ultimately drawn upon to write my dissertation. These ordinary residents would teach me about the dilemmas, the triumphs and the ambivalences that arose as they negotiated and constructed gendered personhood in the daily round of life in Manenberg. One of these women was Vonna, a respected head of a household in Rio Street, Manenberg.

On being the Bumbling Primitive in the Township Vonna welcomed me into her home, and with the passage of time, provided me with numerous insights into the construction of personhood in that community. Initially I had intended to focus my research on the younger women in Manenberg in an attempt to understand the meanings of female sexuality. Through my friendship with Vonna I realized that I had to reorient my attention and my behavior first and foremost to the older women in Rio Street. As I show later, these women embodied an ideal of personhood in the community, making them the arbiters of and gatekeepers to its membership. These older women, in their role as mothers, were the nexus through which others negotiated and defined their status as persons, within a field of relational values that constituted the local moral economy.

The Power of Working Class Feminine Knowledge and the Meanings of Social Mothering: Learning about Motherhood and Power in Manenberg Vonna’s home rapidly became my local research base and provided the social space from which I met other residents. Neighbors, friends, and

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acquaintances constantly sought Vonna’s advice on one issue or another and clearly she was regarded as a key advisor and leader in Rio Street. My association with Vonna enabled me to demonstrate my good standing to the local inhabitants by allowing for me to engage across the two worlds of legitimate knowledge that I was being helped to straddle. However this was only possible because we had to negotiate power and the legitimacy of each other’s knowledge through numerous conversations, sometimes heated sometimes easy, in which the situatedness of my knowledge was identified and in which the power of Vonna’s and the other women’s knowledge was acknowledged as legitimately resonating in Manenberg and in which their voices held greater power over my own. When the women sought her advice on how they could negotiate the daunting bureaucratic labyrinth of the employment market, the social welfare, prison or education system, I was also able to provide additional assistance to them learned from the academic setting. Vonna often accompanied individual women to the welfare or education offices or the courts, and when I was visiting she requested me to drive them to these locations. In this manner I rapidly became the unofficial driver for Vonna and the various women whom she accompanied on their missions to seek bail for a son, apply for a social welfare grant for a child or mediate conflict between their offspring and a teacher. The conversations begun in the living room continued during these car journeys, interspersed by the women’s comments about the younger, adolescent, women’s dress or about the young men’s behavior. Very soon after our initial meeting, Vonna’s remarks about my dress pointed me to the outward signs of respectable, adult femininity in Rio Street. During my first visits to her home, I gradually grew aware of her critical assessment of my dress. I had deliberately chosen to wear blue jeans and simple shirts during my visits, so that I could appear youthful enough to the young women whom I had originally intended to befriend. Approximately a week after I had begun visiting her, she drew me aside and instructed me to wear dresses and skirts more often “want my mahulle sê Elaine moet toemaak, sy’s ’n ma van ’n kind” (because my mother and others say that you should cover up, you’re the mother of a child). Vonna apparently held a poor opinion of me as a respectable woman, more so, because she expected me to “know” how to dress respectably, as I was more educated. When I began wearing dresses, she admonished me almost impatiently, to wear a nylon underwear slip as well, to “prevent men from seeing everything.” In contrast to my apparently flimsy garb, Vonna always wore modest, knee-length dresses covered by a housecoat and a cotton headscarf. In winter she replaced the headscarf with a woolen hat,



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and added a pair of loose-fitting trousers under the dress. She insisted on making me into an “ordentlike ma” (respectable mother) with persistent encouragement, cajoling and chiding about my dress, and later advising me about my relationships with my husband, my son, and other Rio Street residents. In the same manner she advised a number of younger mothers and other residents in the street about their problems. Vonna’s gentle but determined efforts to reshape my behavior and that of the other young women was one of the means through which I came to recognize the importance of the “ordentlike ma” (Salo 2003) as a concept that defined both a central type of personhood in Manenberg and a set of values that were key to the moral economy. Her persistent interventions pointed to the ways in which feminine personhood and the moral economy were inextricably intertwined. I also witnessed the claims to such respectable feminine personhood being publicly claimed in marches to the local police station to demand state intervention in gang wars. She ignored the status that my education gave me, through her persistent re-education, making a pointed though unspoken judgment about the relative futility of my formal education in navigating the local social networks. I learned that I was not an “ordentlike bruin moeder” like her and that I was therefore not as socially powerful in the local context. Young men, whom the Rio Street residents identified as “ouens” or streetwise men, often sought out Vonna’s living room to request that she or her husband pray for them when they were in trouble with the police. Vonna and her husband’s actions were unlike those of non-residents, who would have identified these young men as criminals who should be handed over to the police. Vonna also supported the informal system of community justice, in which the male residents beat up young men who deliberately committed crimes against local residents, or vandalized their property. “Hulle is net ’n klomp skollies, hulle steel van hulle eie mense” (they’re just a bunch of thugs, they steal from their own people) she would say contemptuously. These interactions and relationships enabled me to identify and begin to examine the different kinds of persons that were identified in Manenberg, how they were differentiated by gender and age and the implicit values that informed their interactions. Clearly mothers like Vonna were central persons in this community. Her advice, gossip and anger about some individuals’ behavior in the street, indeed her intimate knowledge of the meanings of femininity and its embodiment in the local place sketched the central values of the moral economy that shaped the relations between the different persons who were identified in the Rio Street community. Her insights, which were later layered over, countered and nuanced by the social relationships I

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developed with other men and women, enabled me to distinguish how people demonstrated or negotiated their gendered personhood in Rio Street. Her knowledge assisted in co-producing a thesis on “ordentlikheid” and the moral economy of motherhood and femininity in Manenberg (Salo 2003). However despite this co-production of knowledge our respective journeys along the promised road of modernization and development would move in opposite directions. The completion of my doctoral thesis wrote me firmly into an upwardly mobile track in a career in higher education and social recognition within the global academic market. From my viewpoint, Vonna seems stuck in time, in her role as a mother, in a tiny township flat. Yet from her vantage point grounded as she is in the local context, she is able, to some degree, to define her own temporal passage as a powerful respectable mother in Manenberg. My reflection on Vonna’s agency albeit constrained by the existing socio-economic and racial structures (Wardlow 2006) made me wonder about her own perspectives on development, power and knowledge. This led me to consider how one could legitimate the naturalized power we so readily tag onto academic knowledge, especially knowledge that informs and supports gender discrimination, racism, and inequality.

Living the Activist Academic Divide and Co-producing Knowledge As I wrestled with the uncomfortable question, “Who produces knowledge in the research process and how is it produced?” I considered the possibility of multiple knowledge registers, as well as the intended audiences for research findings. How indeed did the information I gathered assist and promote the image of Manenberg beyond the dominant image as a place of social chaos, violence and danger? I will reflect upon two collaborations that I engaged in with some Manenberg women as a means of acknowledging their co-authorship of knowledge that informed my own academic work too. The first collaboration was a photographic exhibition, the second activity involved experimental pedagogy. These collaborations were attempts to speak back to supposedly trendy portrayals of the township at the time that presented a single narrative of the place and its people. David Lurie’s (2004) portrayal of Manenberg, in his photo-essay Manenberg Avenue is Where It’s Happening further cemented the prevailing image of Manenberg as a post-apartheid dystopia. This book was launched amidst much controversy at the People’s Centre Manenberg in 2004. I attended that launch and was witness to the palpable anger as people confronted the images of their community as only that of



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tattooed gangsters’ bodies, beer-guzzling women in shebeens with babies at the breast, and gun-wielding gangsters. At the time I had provided a group of young women living in Rio Grande Street Manenberg with disposable cameras and asked them to tell me the story of their community through pictures. The images that emerged from these adolescent women’s pictures provided a powerful contrast to Lurie’s dystopia. They took pictures of babies learning to walk, children’s games played in the street, smiling images of friends and neighbors as well as girls’ netball games played on Saturdays. I collaborated with Paul Grendon,1 to put together a small exhibition of these images that we presented as part of the District Six Museums of Conscience conference held in Cape Town in 2004. This exhibition was displayed at the People’s Centre Manenberg, where community members and other conference attendees could view them. Our intention was to speak back to Lurie’s images of the township that presented a single narrative that served only to stigmatize its residents. The second collaboration was an experiment in pedagogy in a postgraduate seminar co-ordinated with Sophie Oldfield at the University of Cape Town between 2007 and 2008. My reflection on the meaning and value of local knowledge pushed me to collaborate with another colleague Sophie Oldfield in bringing local knowledge into the classroom (Oldfield and Salo 2009). In 2008 we began a two-year experiment entitled Body Politics and Gender Justice in which we took postgraduate students in Cultural Geography to sites in Cape Town where a local community activist would lead the seminar discussion. Seminars were held at sites such as Café Manhattan in De Waterkant, the gay village; Sewende Laan, an informal settlement on then Modderdam Road; Mzoli’s restaurant in Gugulethu, and the Peoples’ Centre Manenberg. In Manenberg, Christine Jansen, a lifelong community activist for women’s rights spoke forthrightly about the disastrous consequences that the decline of the local textile industry in the face of cheaper Chinese imports held for local women’s economic agency and for their physical safety. She then took us on a tour of the indigenous nursery that she had begun with local women at the Centre with the help of ecologists at the Edith Stephens Nature Reserve, as well as a food garden. The Manenberg women, whose cultural respectability as mothers and economic power as household heads were undermined by the loss of their jobs in the textile factories (Salo 2003) certainly did not benefit from South Africa’s entry into the global trade market so celebrated as part of modernity. In fact their very lives were threatened as they faced greater threats from gender-based violence (Salo 2009). Christine Jansen provided students with insights

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about how the Manenberg women were attempting to become selfsufficient in the aftermath of large-scale retrenchments from the factories. We found our students wrestling with their own naturalized assumptions about their taken-for-granted beliefs about the linear passage of time embedded in terms such as development, modernization, and globalization. As Sophie Oldfield and I (2009, 89) wrote about that experiment: Analyzing gendered everyday practices in Southern African cities produces a more complicated understanding of material and social processes in the interstices of which women negotiate their agency. These contexts lead us to question and complicate the ways in which global notions of modernity play out at a local scale, inhabited by particular gendered, raced and aged bodies, in turn producing multiple, overlapping, often conflicting interpretations, narratives and experiences of space and socio-economic change.

Here we suggest that our experiences of temporality and development are by no means the same as women such as Vonna. Our taken-for-granted assumptions about modernity as it was expressed in globalization in the 1990s, and all the positive change it would introduce in South Africa was by no means positive for all. Our pedagogic method, in which we converted the peripheral contexts such as the township into the university classroom where locally situated knowledge (Benson 2009) was valued helped students open the Pandora’s Box of concepts such as modernity, development, modernization and globalization. Through these township-taught seminars, they learned that our perceptions of development and change at the local scale are experienced differently and are contingent upon our multiple intersectional identities as raced, gendered, and generational bodies with specific histories anchored in place. Such intense critical perspectives about the relevance of prevailing theoretical concepts for our analysis of the production and experiences of local space were only possible because we were willing to value the importance of local women’s knowledge.

Conclusion In this chapter I have tried to draw attention to our need to consider what we assume to be shared feminist epistemologies, dominant feminist perspectives of modernity and our taken-for-granted assumptions about normative ethics in the context of research. I suggest here that we need to carefully consider the implications of research relationships and of power



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that are necessarily different for post-apartheid feminist scholars who are doing research at home. I argue that a change in the research discourse from “informants” to “interlocutors” to refer to people in research sites who are properly co-producers of research knowledge does not quite address the theoretical complexities about imagined audiences for such knowledge and ethical authorship and ownership of knowledge. These concerns arise when we begin to consider the implications that globalization and contemporary modernity hold for women with whom we share the same gendered and sometimes raced identities, but who occupy different socio-economic statuses to ourselves. We need to interrogate our assumptions about the idea of shared epistemology with these women. Finally, these concerns also challenge us to take on board deeply ethical engagements about the co-production of knowledge and acknowledgements of shared authorship. As post-colonial feminists we would do well to follow the lead set by Nagar and Sangtin Writers (2006; 2010) and begin to acknowledge the role of women “informants” as co-authors of knowledge in the multiple registers that are available to us. Such registers will provide the multiple narratives of complex, lived realities and indeed of agency, albeit often constrained, in post-apartheid South Africa. I congratulate the participants in this book who have all begun to interrogate these issues in meaningful, complex ways.

Notes  1 Paul Grendon is a Cape Town-based professional photographer and a member of Afripix, a critical anti-apartheid professional photographers’ cooperative. His work consistently portrays the human image of black township life as a means of speaking back to the stereotypical images of black areas as sites of danger and social chaos.

References Abu Lughod, Lila. 2002. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and its Others.” American Anthropologist, 104(3): 783–90. DOI:10.1525/aa.2002.104.3.783. Benson, Koni. 2009. “Collaborative Research in Conversation.” Feminist Africa, 13: 107–16. Fortun, Kim. 2012. “Ethnography in Late Industrialism.” Cultural Anthropology, 27(3): 446–64.

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DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01153.x. Kemp, Amanda, Madlala, Nozizwe, Moodley, Asha, and Elaine Salo. 1995. “The Dawn of a New Day: Redefining South African Feminism.” In Challenge of Local Feminisms, edited by Amrita Basu, 131–62.Boulder: Westview Press. Kondo, Dorinne K. 1990. “‘M. Butterfly’: Orientalism Gender and a Critique of Essentialist Identity.” Cultural Critique, 16: 5–29. Lurie, David. 2004. Manenberg Avenue is Where It’s Happening. London: Double Storey Books. Morsy, Soheir. 1988. “Fieldwork in my Egyptian Homeland: Toward the Demise of Anthropology’s Distinctive-Other Hegemonic Tradition.” In Arab Women in the Field, edited by Soraya Altorki, and Camillia Fawzi, 69 – 90.Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Nagar, Richa, and Sangtin Writers. 2006. Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press and New Delhi: Zubaan. —. (2010). “Still Playing with Fire: Intersectionality, Activism, and NGOized Feminism.” In Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, edited by Amanda Lock Swarr, and Richa Nagar, 124 – 146.Albany NY: SUNY Press. Oldfield, Sophie, and Elaine Salo. 2009. “Nurturing Researchers, Building Local Knowledge.” Feminist Africa, 13: 87–94. Ross, Fiona C. 2003. “On Having Voice and Being Heard. Some AfterEffects of Testifying Before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Anthropological Theory, 3(3): 325–41. DOI:10.1177/14634996030033005. Salo, Elaine. 2003. “Negotiating Gender and Personhood in the New South Africa: Adolescent Women and Gangsters in Manenberg Township on the Cape Flats.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6(3): 345–65.DOI:10.1177/13675494030063005. —. 2009. “Coconuts Do Not Live in Townships: Cosmopolitanism and its Failures in the Urban Peripheries of Cape Town.” Feminist Africa, 13: 11–21. Wardlow, Holly. 2006. Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.



CHAPTER NINE INTERROGATING OUR RESEARCH PROCESSES: REFLEXIVE POSITIONING IN AN IPA STUDY OF WOMEN FAMILY CANCER CAREGIVERS JENNIFER GITHAIGA

Introduction The question of reflexivity, with regard to whether or not and how to incorporate the researcher’s position in qualitative research, has been debated upon severally by scholars. Conceptualizations of reflexivity include functional versus personal reflexivity, realist versus confessional tales, and strategies to manage researchers’ experiences. Personal reflexivity refers to acknowledging one’s position as a researcher and how one’s values influenced the research process. Functional reflexivity refers to an incessant scrutiny of the research process with the aim of keeping track of how a researcher’s understanding developed throughout the study (Wilkinson 1988). I concur with Wilkinson’s argument that both personal and functional aspects of reflexivity are inseparable as will be demonstrated in later discussion of my own research process. In presentation of realist accounts, the researcher’s voice is silenced by adopting an impersonal stance in writing up what is deemed an objective account of research findings (product). This is in contrast to confessional accounts where the researcher’s voice is foregrounded with emphasis on the process of one’s subjective research journey rather than on the end product (Finlay 2002; Smith 2006). Between the two ends of the “realistconfessional” continuum are various possibilities of integrating both genres in varied proportions. Wilkinson and Kitzinger’s (2013) account of four main strategies employed by feminist researchers’ in presenting their personal research experiences presents potential possibilities of incorporating reflexivity in qualitative research. The cited scholars noted that researchers may, on one extreme, employ a minimizing strategy by completely omitting any personal experiences in presentation of research.

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On the other extreme, maximizing one’s research dwells, for the most part, on the researcher’s personal experience. Between the extremes, are two possibilities: utilizing personal experience to the researcher’s benefit at strategic points in the research process, and incorporating personal experience through the researcher’s playing the dual roles of researcher and research participant. In this chapter, I draw from some of the concepts of reflexivity highlighted in preceding paragraphs to engage with reflexivity in the context of interactional dynamics between my research participants and me, the researcher. Such engagement inevitably entails interrogating my various positions (woman, researcher, bereaved family cancer caregiver, counseling psychologist) and how these shaped each step of my entire research process as I explored the lived experiences of women caregivers of family members with advanced cancer in Nairobi, Kenya. The study, which utilized an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach, is based on my doctoral dissertation. Ethical clearance to conduct my doctoral research was granted by University of Cape Town Research Ethics Committee, Department of Psychology (Githaiga 2013). Of particular relevance to this chapter is the following definition of reflexivity, framed in the context of experiential qualitative psychology: In effect, reflexivity involves turning your gaze to the self. It evokes an interpretivist ontology which construes people and the world as interrelated and engaged in a dialogic relationship that constructs (multiple versions of) reality. A reflexive study will therefore assume the co-constitution of meaning within a socially oriented research framework. (Shaw 2010, 234)

The next section furnishes an overview of my theoretical framework where I explicate the assumptions on which my research was based. This section elaborates on the tenets of Shaw’s (2010) definition of reflexivity. The overview is followed by an account of my engagement with reflexivity, throughout my research process, in two key areas, namely (a) oscillating insider–outsider positions, and (b) reciprocity and blurred boundaries. The chapter proceeds with a discussion of the implications of reflexive positioning for feminist research practice and concludes by highlighting the limitations of my study and recommendations for future research.

Overview of IPA IPA is an approach to qualitative inquiry in psychology that focuses on experiential meanings with a specific interest in how individuals make sense of significant life experiences (De Visser and Smith 2007; Smith,

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Flowers, and Larkin 2009). The beginnings of IPA are traced back to the mid-1990s and specifically to Jonathan Smith’s (1996) article in which he proposed an experiential qualitative approach to psychology that would fit in with mainstream psychology (Shinebourne 2011; Smith, Flowers, and Larkin 2009). Though much of earlier IPA inquiry was focused in the area of health psychology, its use has spread to clinical, counseling, social and educational psychology. Most early IPA studies were centered in the UK, but IPA is now being utilized in regions where English is not a first language, my study being a case in point. Three defining tenets of IPA are idiography, phenomenology and hermeneutics. IPA is idiographic in terms of (a) its focus on particular detail of individual accounts and depth of analysis of these accounts, and (b) understanding particular experiential phenomena from particular participants’ perspectives and from within the framework of their specific contexts (Smith, Flowers, and Larkin 2009). IPA’s idiographic focus implies the possibility of multiple subjective realities as experienced by particular individuals in particular contexts. Thus, ontologically, IPA may be described as relativistic (Willig 2008) because it acknowledges that individuals may experience a similar phenomenon and yet ascribe different meanings to it because experience is mediated by factors such as personal thoughts, beliefs and opinions. IPA’s idiographic focus renders the approach particularly suitable for the individual interview method. However IPA is flexible as evident in its application in various methods other than individual interviews. These include postal questionnaires, focus groups, electronic email dialogue and observational methods (Brocki and Wearden 2006; Smith, Flowers, and Larkin 2009). Phenomenology is derived from a Greek word phainomenon which refers to the appearance of things as they are experienced as different from the objective reality of things as they really are (Spinelli 2005). In phenomenological study the starting point is the lived experience or the life world (Van Manen 1997). IPA draws from both descriptive phenomenology, based on Edmund Husserl’s ideas, and hermeneutic phenomenology which stemmed from Martin Heidegger’s ideas. Husserl posited that to gain access to one’s life world, an individual must step aside from their everyday experience or natural attitude and adopt a reflexive or phenomenological attitude, a process which entails bracketing (epoche) (Klein and Westcott 1994; Moustakas 1994; Spinelli 2005). Husserlian Phenomenology has influenced IPA’s emphasis on the process of reflection (Smith, Flowers, and Larkin 2009). Hermeneutic phenomenology has led IPA scholars to reconsider the position of bracketing in qualitative research (Smith, Flowers, and Larkin



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2009). Hermeneutics scholars argue that it is impossible to bracket one’s presuppositions as these not only constitute one’s existence, but are essential to the interpretation of a given phenomenon (Gadamer 1986; 1988; Heidegger 1962). These presuppositions, present in all interpretations, include one’s foregrounding or historicality, that is, the background that is usually taken for granted, and meanings arising from interactions with a given phenomenon (Dreyfus 1991; Heidegger 1962; Johnson 2000). Rather than bracketing one’s prejudices, the inquirer engages with these biases through the process of self-reflexivity. Understanding is produced through negotiation as the researcher dialogues with personal biases and human actions or texts in the hermeneutic circle. The implication is that emergent interpretations are relative rather than absolute (Bontekoe 2000; Schwandt 2000; Titelman 1979). In hermeneutics, “reflection and interpretation, in dialogue with description, are the paradigmatic modes for comprehending the experience and behavior of the investigator and the investigated” (Titelman 1979, 183). Interpretation occurs through a hermeneutic circle which depicts the iterative process of oscillating back and forth between the parts of an experience and the entire experience with the aim of arriving at an indepth understanding of the phenomenon (Annells 1996; Conroy 2003; Gadamer 1988; Laverty 2003). The concept of the hermeneutic circle features in the IPA iterative method of data analysis, which emphasizes moving back and forth through various data and ways of perceiving this data (Smith 2006; Smith, Flowers, and Larkin 2009; Smith, Flowers, and Osborn 1997). IPA, like hermeneutic phenomenology, acknowledges the role of preconceptions in shaping the interpretation process and further proposes that researchers engage in reflexivity which involves acknowledging one’s biases (Smith, Flowers, and Larkin 2009; Smith, Flowers, and Osborn 1997). Thus, with regard to axiological assumptions (Creswell 2007), IPA acknowledges the role of values and biases in shaping the research process. IPA scholars note that it is impossible to gain direct access into research participants’ experiences (Brocki and Wearden 2006; Smith, Flowers, and Larkin 2009; Willig 2008). Researchers rely on interpreting participants’ narratives. This involves a dual hermeneutic “whereby the researcher is trying to make sense of the participant trying to make sense of what is happening to them” (Smith 2011, 10). Meaning within this framework is co-constituted between the researcher and research participants (Shaw 2010). From an epistemological perspective, IPA begins with the supposition that “people’s accounts tell us something about their private thoughts and feelings, and that these in turn are

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implicated in people’s experiences” (Willig 2008, 69). Based on this, IPA inquiry seeks to generate knowledge about the “what” and “how” of participants’ perspectives regarding the phenomenon under study which might be deemed a realist approach (Willig 2008). However, as noted in the preceding discussion, IPA incorporates reflexivity in its acknowledgement that the researcher’s interpretations are shaped by his or her preconceptions (Smith, Flowers, and Larkin 2009). Even so, one of the criticisms leveled against IPA is that though it endorses reflexivity it furnishes no specific guidelines on how to integrate reflexivity in the IPA research process (Willig 2008). The practical application of personal reflexivity in my study entailed constant awareness and critical reflection on my own presuppositions so as to enable me to interact with participants’ experiential accounts with openness and sensitivity (Finlay 2014; Johnson 2000). At a functional level, reflexivity involved keeping a detailed account of considerations and decisions regarding my evolving research ideas, methods and analysis. I maintained a reflexive field journal where I documented my thoughts, feelings, hunches, questions and emerging horizons of understanding. In subsequent paragraphs, I detail the reflexive journey of my research process.

Reflexivity in my Research Process From the conception of my study, I was keenly aware of my positions as (a) a doctoral research student, (b) a woman caregiver who had undergone the experience of caring for my father after he was diagnosed with incurable cancer, and (c) a counseling psychologist with some experience of working with families affected by cancer in Nairobi.

Oscillating Insider–Outsider Positions One of my immediate concerns as I embarked on my fieldwork was to secure insider status. I assumed that my position as a woman from Nairobi, who had experienced family cancer caregiving firsthand, would guarantee me insider status. I incorporated disclosure of my experience of caring for my ill father in explaining the rationale for my study during initial selection interviews. Almost all the participants inquired about why I was specifically interested in women’s experiences of cancer caregiving which gave me an opportunity to share my experience. My brief disclosure statement, “I cared for my father after he was diagnosed with cancer,” seemed to create an immediate connection between my research participants and me in the sense of “you are one of us.” In retrospect, I



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unknowingly employed Wilkinson and Kitzinger’s (2013) utilization strategy to recruit participants for my study. In writing up my research, I began my introduction with a confessional account (Finlay 2002; Smith 2006) of my experience of caring for my ill father. This was followed by a section in my methodology section where I presented a complementary factual (realist) account of how I recruited participants. Here, I explained that selection of participants was based on purposive criterion sampling. In keeping with its phenomenological roots, a fundamental criterion for the selection of participants was the experience of the particular phenomenon under study (Conroy 2003; Creswell 2007; Groenewald 2004). I accessed participants through various gatekeepers namely two medical practitioners at The Nairobi Hospice, personal contacts and research participants’ referrals (snowball sampling). Two categories of participants were selected: women who, at the time of this study, were actively involved in caring for an immediate family member— spouse, child, sibling or parent—with advanced cancer (current caregivers); and women whose loved ones had already passed on at the time of my study (bereaved caregivers). Individual semi-structured in-depth interviews were held with seven current caregivers while four mini-focus groups (Krueger and Casey 2009; McLafferty 2004) were conducted with a total of 13 bereaved caregivers. During the first focus group discussion (FGD1), which had five participants, I noted that more time was needed to allow for the depth and intensity of discussion that ensued. Thus, I reduced the group size of subsequent focus groups to three participants. This proved a suitable number as participants in subsequent focus groups had ample time to share their experiences. The third participant in FGD4 failed to show up despite confirming her attendance. Nonetheless, given the enthusiasm of the other two participants and my knowledge that a focus group can have as few as two participants (Wilkinson 2008), we agreed to proceed with the discussion. In the process of locating potential participants, the majority of the bereaved caregivers expressed enthusiasm about narrating their stories and asked if they would have an opportunity to meet with and share their experiences with other women who had undergone/were undergoing similar experiences as they had never had a chance to do so. In contrast, most current caregivers indicated their willingness to participate in the study on condition that I interviewed them privately and guaranteed anonymity. Thus, participants’ preferences were a pragmatic consideration influencing my decision to utilize individual interviews with current caregivers and focus groups with bereaved caregivers. Additionally, I was

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interested in comparing and contrasting the viewpoints shared retrospectively by bereaved caregivers who had gone “full circle” in the caregiving journey versus the perspectives of those for whom caregiving was an ongoing process at the time of my fieldwork. During my interactions with participants, I oscillated between being regarded as (and feeling like) an insider and sometimes an outsider. Sometimes, this was captured in the manner in which participants’ framed their narratives in the inclusive sense of “we” as women caregivers: It [caregiving] just grows on you. I think it just grows on you. Somewhere, somehow, we must have picked it from our mothers because I don’t think anybody tells the men that you’ve got a sick person in the house and you don’t look after him ... I think women in their nature are just, are more caring; more feeling. They’ve got a sixth sense that the men don’t have. (Watendo, I.I.)

The excerpt depicts caregiving as a gendered role ascribed to “we” as women and further, as both a product of nurture (“picked it from our mothers”) as well as nature. Watendo introduced a comparative dimension in her suggestion that women are better at caregiving than men who lack that “intuitive” sense of caring and thus “miss out” on this important nurturing ability. The implication is that women’s caregiving attributes bestow on them a sense of superiority over men irrespective of how negligible this sense of superiority may be in the broader socio-cultural context. It is notable that my interpretation of Watendo’s comparative dimension of women and men reflected my pre-understandings of women’s caregiving in patrilineal Kenyan communities where women are regarded inferior to men. In other instances participants’ statements revealed their assumptions that I was an insider, coupled with the expectation that I understood the meanings of certain nuances. For example, in a discussion amongst FGD1 participants, Baraka seemed to take for granted that all those present (including the researcher) were familiar with the context and, thus, would understand her sentiments in response to another participant’s (Elimu) narrative: Well, the only thing I’d say, I’m very happy that your [Elimu’s] husband did that [issued a living will] because my mother didn’t do that and it left us in disarray . . . I think that’s very helpful because reality is reality whether you like it or not. If it’s going to happen it’s going to happen . . . don’t be resistant to it because you waste a lot of energy being resistant to it and I kept on telling my sisters this and actually they thought I was an enemy. At one point they just told me “you want your mother to die”



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which is not the case . . . I didn’t know the date but from my senses I could tell that this is not the road to Jahazi Town [parents’ current residence]. This is the road to Mpakani Town [rural home] where the grave was going to be put. (Baraka, FGD1)

As an insider, my historical and cultural pre-understandings about death and burial practices in various Kenyan communities were useful in interpreting Baraka’s narrative. Baraka’ frustration was evident as she contrasted her experience with Elimu’s, faulting her own mother for not being forthright about death. Her euphemism of “the roads” communicates her persuasion that her mother’s death was imminent. In Kenyan communities, it is the norm for people to be buried in their rural homes hence her reference to the road to Mpakani Town, their rural home, “where the grave was going to be put.” Baraka seemed to be more pragmatic about death than her late mother and her sisters. In her opinion talking about death symbolized acceptance of the reality which she considered logical and necessary in the face of terminal illness. Baraka’s sisters’ apprehension reiterates the common belief that speaking about death is summoning death. In several Kenyan communities, including my own community, this belief renders death a taboo topic. My presumption that I was an insider sometimes proved detrimental when I unconsciously imposed my value judgments on participants. It was from participants’ reactions that I recognized such impositions noting that various nuances in their idiographic experiences rendered me an outsider: Interviewer: What have been some of your most fulfilling moments as you have been caring for your mum? I’m sure it’s not all doom and gloom. Zawadi (I.I.): [silence] Really? Interviewer: I don’t know. You tell me. Zawadi: [long silence followed by a soft murmur of the words “anything fulfilling”] Do you know I can’t think of, of, of anything fulfilling that I would say made me feel good or made me happy. Okay, apart from being able to say, being able to make some contribution to it [Interviewer: yeah] eh, which makes me feel good [Interviewer: aha!] That’s it. But I don’t think there’s anything that [brief silence] eh, and, and good is not the word.

My question, with the tag “I’m sure it’s not all doom and gloom,” revealed my value judgment (possibly influenced by my experience as a therapist) that both positive and negative outcomes can emerge from pain and suffering. Zawadi’s response came as a surprise causing me to retreat by

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replacing my surety with a tentative “I don’t know” and throwing the question back to Zawadi. Though I was not aware of it at the time, I later noted that my affirmative responses seemed to “bully” Zawadi into eliciting my desired response.

Reciprocity and Blurred Boundaries Interactions with research participants at times culminated in anxiety linked to blurring of boundaries between my researcher position and other positions. In FGD4, Mwache shared in great detail how her family and community interpreted her sister’s cancer diagnosis: Mwache (FGD4): Mum could not understand. We didn’t have any traces of cancer in our family and no one has died of cancer. So she couldn’t understand how my sister got blood cancer. But you know in my community people have a way of explaining these things: According to our people . . . according to our ethnicity, the people explain everything in terms of witchcraft. She [mum] couldn’t understand how blood can just go missing. Ojima (FGD4): Yes, it didn’t make sense. Mwache: Yeah, “how can blood go missing in someone?”

Mwache’s narrative was framed in her historical and cultural context where “people have a way of explaining things.” Despite my relative unfamiliarity with this framework, my curiosity as a researcher coupled with my desire to gain some insight into the practices of the “Other” helped me follow along keenly, albeit quietly. Towards the end of the discussion, Mwache invited me and Ojima, the other focus group member to reciprocate by sharing our experiences: Mwache (FGD4): Do you dream about your [deceased] sister? . . . I usually want to know, are people seeing the same thing, you know?. . .like do you get the same experience? Yeah. That’s the other thing I want you people [FGD participants] to tell me. Is this in our family only or we’re the same? Ojima (FGD4): I dream about her. I’ve had bad dreams, um, but, I don’t know, maybe I just don’t think too deeply about them. Mwache: I just wanted to see whether people dream the same and if it’s normal.



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In my field notes written immediately following the focus group meeting I commented that “the conversation was digressing so I closed off the formal discussion.” In retrospect, I realized that unfamiliarity with Mwache’s cultural context possibly made me feel threatened because I had nothing to contribute to the conversation. There was also, perhaps, an element of trying to regain control of the group discussion and in so doing assert my authority over my participants in the sense of “I [researcher] ask the questions and you (participants) answer them.” This might be a remnant of my research exposure to traditional research models delineated by a clear power differential between the researcher, who takes charge of the research interaction, and participants. Regrettably, in terminating the discussion abruptly I missed an opportunity to better understand Mwache’s worldview and how it shaped her meaning-making processes. The following account, diarized in my field journal, captures some of my tension, related to blurred boundaries, which occurred “off-the-record” between interviews: I am disappointed with her response after driving quite a long way out of town on her invitation. She should have telephoned me to postpone or cancel the interview if she was not ready for it. I offered to re-schedule the interview but she declined saying that she wants to be over and done with it as her schedule is getting tighter. We sit for an hour as she offloads her current stresses. At this point I am functioning like a therapist and I am not comfortable with this dual relationship but feel obliged to listen because I am in her house. After an hour she says that she feels better after chatting and is now ready to proceed with the interview. (Watendo, I.I. – Field notes, 2nd interview, 24 March 2009)

After a very fruitful first interview with Watendo, I was looking forward to our second interview. Having given all research participants jurisdiction to choose whichever venue was appropriate for interviews, I obliged when Watendo asked me to meet with her in her home. Despite my discomfort with my dual role, I felt obliged to reciprocate Watendo’s goodwill in agreeing to share her story with me. Secondly, given that she was an older woman, it would have been culturally disrespectful for me to decline to engage with her or to interrupt her and insist that we proceed with the interview as planned. Having experienced the stress of caring for my dying father, I empathized with Watendo who was caring for her critically ill father at the time of these interviews. This motivated me to

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silence my personal sentiments and seek to engage with her in a way that was meaningful for her at that specific point in time. In certain instances, blurring of boundaries occurred when participants’ stories appeared to be so intertwined with mine that I felt like they were telling my story. In such moments, I experienced shifts between my researcher and bereaved caregiver positions. In the following excerpt, I present an intrapersonal dialogue between one participant’s experiential account and my reflections as documented in my field journal: So the report came and it was positive. He [husband] had, he truly had cancer and it was, it was a shock. But I think I was just dazed and I, I, you know I have this feeling of wanting to support people and so I don’t allow myself to crash or to crumble . . . and Muntu [husband] was devastated; he was in a state. I’ve never seen him like that before so I had to really be strong for him. (Kazuri, I.I.) I get the impression that Kazuri perceives herself as a strong person. She sounds just like me when I was caring for my dad. My mode of operation was “be strong: you can’t afford to crumble.” In my family I am known as the “strong” one so I was determined to maintain this image no matter how traumatized I felt about my father’s condition. I had to fight the urge to talk to Kazuri about the futility of wearing a facade. In a sense I felt that Kazuri was fighting to keep up a strong front even if she was struggling within her concerning the terminal nature of her husband’s illness. She was determined at all costs not to let her strong persona crumble. (Kazuri, I.I. – Field notes, 1st interview, 17 January 2009)

The excerpts reveal that my interpretation of Kazuri’s perception of strength involved interrogating my presuppositions based on my personal experience. As I listened to her, I struggled not to impose my views and offer my “expert” advice as one who had walked a similar journey. I was determined to interact with Kazuri in my researcher role. A few days after our interview, I received a distress message from Kazuri informing me that her husband’s condition had deteriorated suddenly. At that point, the only thing that seemed right was for me to go to hospital to support her; to be “strong” for her at that moment. I did not anticipate that I would witness her husband’s death shortly after my arrival. A few weeks later, I telephoned her to find out how she was doing and to find out if she would like me to send her a verbatim transcript of our interview to keep as a memory of her narrative experience. Kazuri was very appreciative of the transcript. Kazuri still communicates with me on occasions through our mutual friend who referred her to me for the research interview.



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I grappled with blurred boundaries when I responded to participants’ financial needs revealed during interviews, sometimes of my own accord and other times when prompted by my participants. Despite clearly stating in my informed consent form that there would be no remuneration for participation in the study, there were instances when I gave money to participants, not as remuneration, but on humane grounds. For example, Gazala, a single mother of five caring for her ailing sister, explained that she walked several miles to the hospice where she had gone to seek pro bono services prior to the interview (thus our decision to hold the interview at the hospice) because she could not afford public transport. She added that she would lose a day of work thus would earn no income that day. Likewise, Razwa’s narrative of her struggle to care for her ailing brother under conditions of extreme poverty and while she was jobless, moved me to think about how I might assist her, in whatever way possible. The following excerpts capture the contexts within which Gazala and Razwa cared for their ill sister and brother respectively: You know the doctor told her directly “you have cancer and you need to undergo surgery” . . . I didn’t know what to do, I told her we go and ask how much money they need we went, we asked, we were told 12,000/= [equivalent to R1000/$119].We didn’t have that 12,000/= and we have no way/means of getting it. . . . at home we stayed, that eighth month, that one ended, the ninth, the tenth, yes, the tenth month . . . we have stayed like this, and I hear that cancer it, it spreads; and in all that time we have stayed, she’s not on anything/any medication. She hasn’t gone to any hospital. (Gazala, I.I.) When we got home, I told, I told my husband how the day went [clicks]. I called [parental] home and told them I had been asked for 9,000/= [approximately R800/$90] and that at that time we didn’t have 9,000/=. My father told me he would sell a cow [lowers tone the clicks]. Something told me “no, if he sells the cow what will the others [family members] drink?” (Razwa, I.I.)

My emotions stirred as I listened to accounts of women like Gazala and Razwa realizing how much their financial situation impeded their caregiving efforts. I thought back at my own experience, silently acknowledging that their experiences differed from mine. In such moments I experienced a blurring of boundaries between my head and my heart. My head, which represented the logical doctoral researcher and therapist with clear boundaries, warned me to focus on my research agenda, maintain “professional” boundaries and desist from getting involved in participants’ personal matters. My heart connected

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empathically with my fellow women caregivers as I shared in their suffering. Though she did not ask for any financial assistance, I offered Gazala money for public transport and to compensate for her loss of income that day partly attributed to the time spent during the interview. Following the interview, Razwa explained to me that her greatest need was for a job to enable her to contribute in her home particularly for her ill brother’s upkeep at the time. She requested that I save her number and let her know if I ever heard of a work opportunity. Several months later, following her brother’s death, I recommended her for a potential position. She was successful in her interviews and got the job. We maintained sporadic communication for three years following our initial interview encounter.

Reflexive Positioning and Feminist Research Practice So far, I have engaged with reflexivity by interrogating my various positions (woman, researcher, bereaved family cancer caregiver, counseling psychologist) and how these shaped the interactional dynamics between my research participants and me in the course of my research. In addition, I articulated my theoretical framework (IPA) and highlighted assumptions of this approach with regard to reflexivity in the research process. In this section I demonstrate that my study, though neither initially conceptualized as a feminist study nor based on a feminist framework, informs feminist research. A number of IPA’s theoretical assumptions resonate with those of feminist research hence the possibility that the frameworks may be mutually informative. This is illustrated in subsequent discussion which shows how my understandings of reflexivity have been significantly shaped by feminist research theory and practice in two main areas: challenging assumptions about that which defines and characterizes feminist research, and the notion of power differentials between the researcher and the researched. In challenging assumptions of that which defines and characterizes feminist research, it has been argued that research on issues deemed significant to women’s lives and research that values women in their own right, portraying the uniqueness of their experiences qualifies as feminist research (Worell and Etaugh 1994; Yost and Chmielewski 2013). My study meets these criteria in focusing on caregiving as a gendered role ascribed to women within the particular context of Nairobi. Even so, Crawford (2013) questions the assumption that all research concerning women is feminist research noting that studies about men may also contribute to feminist agendas. She proposes that feminist research be



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determined by its aim; feminist research is aimed at contributing to feminist social change. By foregrounding the taken-for-granted, often ambiguous yet significant gendered role of caregiving ascribed to women and further, explicating the dynamics of caring within patrilineal Kenyan communities, I argue that my study contributes to feminist social change by: (a) furnishing a nuanced perspective of women’s empowerment through highlighting the strength and resilience of women family caregivers despite their inferior historical, cultural and economic positioning in patrilineal communities; (b) giving women a “voice” by providing a textual experiential research-based record of the phenomenological renditions of women whose stories might have remained untold and their pain endured in silence. Following our interviews, several women observed that sharing their stories was not just informative but also therapeutic; (c) utilizing women’s experiences as evidence of the need for integrated care programs that incorporate informal caregivers in addition to psychosocial support programs specifically tailored towards the needs of these informal caregivers. Some of the focus group participants suggested that I consider extending the focus groups into ongoing support groups where they would have the opportunity to mentor other women caregivers. The notion of power differentials between the researcher and research participants is encapsulated in the egalitarian ideal of feminist research and practice. Three assumptions common to IPA and feminist research that have a bearing on power relations in research contexts are: the significance ascribed to personal experiences (Smith, Flowers, and Larkin 2009; Wilkinson 1988); the concept of knowledge as co-constituted by both the researcher and research participants (Crawford 2013; Shaw 2010), and endorsement of intersubjectivity (Van Stapele 2014; Willig 2008). In research focused on women’s personal experiences, research participants are considered experts based on their lived experiences (Yost and Chmielewski 2013). This marks a shift from more traditional approaches to research where the researcher is perceived as the expert. Personal experience includes insider research where women researchers, motivated by their personal experiences, undertake research amongst others who have undergone similar experiences (Wilkinson and Kitzinger 2013), as was the case in my study.

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The implication is a reduction in power hierarchy between the researcher and participants who are perceived to be on a level plane in terms of shared experiences. This lends to collaborative meaning-making as both parties contribute to the knowledge generated within the particular interview interaction. In this context each individual’s subjective reality is legitimate in its own right hence the endorsement of intersubjectivity. However, on the one hand, as evident in my research process, power differentials still exist between the researcher and research participants. The fact that as a researcher I took a lead role not just in the conceptualization of the research but also in the double hermeneutic process of “trying to make sense of research participants trying to make sense of their experiences” (Smith 2011) meant that I determined what to foreground in my analysis and write-up. In the process of interview interactions, I occasionally experienced dissonance between my theoretical knowledge of the process of meaning co-constitution and my preunderstandings regarding the traditional role of the researcher as the expert. On the other hand, some feminist scholars argue that research participants’ power is apparent in research interactions because participants decide what to share with researchers (Jorgenson 2011; Van Stapele 2014). In a study of work–life issues and organizational identities of women engineers, the researcher observed participants’ reluctance to correlate their experiences to gender noting that they instead discursively positioned themselves as privileged in a male-dominated profession (Jorgenson 2011). In my study, Mwache’s decision to frame her narrative from the historical and cultural lenses of her ethnic community reiterates this. Other feminist scholars suggest that researchers’ disclosure in the course of interview interactions, which entails exposure of one’s vulnerability, reduces power inequity by increasing identification between research participants and researchers, as demonstrated in research conducted by a black woman researcher who interviewed black families residing in the northwest of England (Ochieng 2010). My experience differs from the cited studies because, except for disclosure of my caregiving experience during initial interviews with potential research participants, I declined to participate in sharing my experience during interview and focus group interactions. This meant deflecting participants’ questions or deferring these to “later” (after the “official” interview). In retrospect, I suspect that my pre-understandings influenced my reticence to appear vulnerable before research participants as well as my desire to maintain a sense of control of the research encounters by keeping a safe distance. This, in effect, rendered research



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participants subordinate and by so doing maintained the disparity in power relations which I hoped to alleviate through revealing my identity as a bereaved caregiver. Researchers’ disclosure may also be perceived as a means of reciprocity. In “exchange” for participants’ shared experiences, researchers reciprocate by sharing some of their own relevant experiences (Ochieng 2010; Smith 2006). This view of disclosure as reciprocity, though valid, limits reciprocity to the relationship between the researcher and research participants within confines of their research interactions, that is, individual interview or focus group discussion contexts. The findings of my study expand the application of reciprocity beyond the research interaction. Being present with Kazuri at her husband’s death bed and later presenting a verbatim transcription of our interview to her following the death of her husband, and connecting Razwa to a job opportunity represent my attempts at reciprocity. In this context, research interviews emerged not as singular experiences but as beginnings of relationships that continued beyond our research interactions.

Limitations and Future Directions The main limitation of this study is a methodological one. As stipulated earlier, the study was based on a small qualitative sample with a focus on idiographic understanding of the lived experiences of women family cancer caregivers in Nairobi. As such, caution must be exercised in attempts to make generalizations based on these findings. Nevertheless, this limitation does not overshadow the contributions made by this study. This chapter underscores the importance of interrogating and further adapting our research processes to facilitate meaningful engagement with nuanced and complex aspects of culture in the context of gender research. Specifically, this calls for re-conceptualization of the role of reflexivity in research practice. At the onset of my research, my perception of reflexivity was that of a method, utilized in conjunction with individual interviews and focus group discussions, to understand the phenomenon of family cancer caregiving. In my description of methods I utilized Richardson and St. Pierre’s (2005) notion of crystallization, based on the imagery of a crystal in which infinite shapes are perceivable, depending on one’s angle of vision to encapsulate the multiplicity of possible outcomes envisioned from combining methods in my qualitative study (Janesick 2000; Richardson and St. Pierre 2005). Following my experience of reflexive positioning and

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further retrospective interrogation of the same, I am persuaded that reflexivity is not merely a method but also a way of being: Each person brings to bear his or her lived experience, specific understandings, and historical background. This way of being-in-the-world means that researchers cannot help but bring their own involvement and fore-understandings into the research. (Finlay 2002, 534)

Reflexivity thus beckons gender researchers to “reclaim what has been lost” by risking vulnerability and daring to be explicit in documenting their subjective positions and further, how such positions shaped their research processes not only in select sections but throughout their entire research processes (Smith 2006). In my case, this entailed a retrospective process of self “re-flexity,” that is, looking again (Shaw 2010) at my multiple positions with a fresh lens. Out of this process emerged a new realization concerning the uniqueness of research within relational contexts as different from more individualistic contexts. My “off-therecord” experiences beyond interview and focus group discussions remain etched in my memory as a reminder that research is not merely the quest for knowledge. Research involves forging meaningful connections through interactions with participants which often go beyond the confines of research settings and scripts.

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APPENDIX A CONTRIBUTORS

AKOSUA ADOMAKO AMPOFO is a Professor of African and Gender Studies and the Director of The Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. Her areas of scholarly and activist research address issues of African Knowledge Systems; Higher Education; Reproductive Health; Identity Politics; Gender-based Violence; Women’s Work; Masculinities; and Popular Culture (music and religion). Her books as coeditor include African Feminist Research and Activism: Tensions, Challenges and Possibilities and Transatlantic Feminisms: Women’s and Gender Studies in Africa and the Diaspora. [[email protected]] KONI BENSON is a post-doctoral fellow affiliated with the Department of Historical Studies and the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on the urbanization of poverty, development and displacement, and women in resistance movements. She has worked with the International Labour Research and Information Group, and currently works with social justice organisations in South Africa producing life histories of women shack dwellers’ political struggles and resistance. Her work has been published in scholarly journals including the Journal of Southern African Studies, Feminist Africa, and Gender Place and Culture: Feminist Geography. [[email protected]] FLORETTA BOONZAIER is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cape Town. Her work spans feminist, critical, social and post-colonial psychologies, with special interests in intersectional subjectivities, youth subjectivities, gendered and sexual identifications, participatory methodologies and gender-based violence. Her books include South African Women Living with HIV: Global Lessons from Local Voices, as co-editor. In 2010 she received the runner up award in the South African Department of Science and Technology’s Women in



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Science awards, for the category of Distinguished Young Woman Researcher in the Social Sciences or Humanities. [[email protected]] MBUYISELO BOTHA manages media and government relations at Sonke Gender Justice Network, whose aim is promotion of gender equality, prevention of gender-based violence and reduction of the spread of HIV and the impact of AIDS. He was a founder member of the South African Men’s Forum and is currently its Secretary General. He serves on the National Committee for the planning of the annual activities for the 16 Days of Activism Against Violence campaign in South Africa. [[email protected]] AZILLE COETZEE is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Philosophy at Vrije University in Amsterdam. She holds degrees in Law and English Literature, and a Master’s degree in Philosophy from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Her research interests include gender-based violence and the law, feminist philosophy and African feminism. [[email protected]] JENNIFER N. FISH is Chair of the Department of Women’s Studies at Old Dominion University and a faculty member in the Graduate Program in International Studies. Her scholar-activist interests centre on reconciliation and women’s contributions to restructuring society, and on measures of gender equality in Rwanda and the Great Lakes region. Her books include Domestic Democracy: At Home in South Africa, and the co-edited collection Women’s Activism in South Africa: Working across Divides. Her research has contributed to international organisations such as the International Labour Organization and the International Domestic Workers Federation. [[email protected]] JENNIFER GITHAIGA is a postdoctoral fellow in Trauma, Forgiveness and Reconciliation Studies at University of the Free State. She holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Cape Town, a Master’s degree in Counselling Psychology from the United States International University, and a Master’s degree in Communication from Daystar University, Kenya. Her research interest is in contextualisation of qualitative research methods in psychology for cultural relevance. Her main area of interest in this field is on family caregivers in cancer and the challenges faced by professional women in Africa in their caregiver role. [[email protected]]



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PUMLA GOBODO-MADIKIZELA is Senior Research Professor in trauma, forgiveness and reconciliation at the University of the Free State. Her research is concerned with the question of transformation in the aftermath of mass trauma and violence. Her books include, A Human Being Died that Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness, which won the Alan Paton Award in South Africa, and the Christopher Award in the United States, Narrating our Healing: Perspectives on Healing Trauma, as co-author; and Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness: Perspectives on the Unfinished Journeys of the Past, as co-editor. [[email protected]] FAY HODZA holds a Ph.D. in Human and Community Development from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also holds Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Sociology and Social Anthropology from the University of Zimbabwe. He teaches sociology at Monash University, South Africa. His diverse areas of research include gender and sexuality studies, internationalisation of higher education, community crisis interventions, and qualitative research methods. [[email protected]] FAEZA MEYER is a community activist and chairperson of the Cape Town Housing Assembly, an umbrella body that aims to build a citywide movement of working class people fighting for decent housing for all. She has diplomas in Popular Education from the University of Cape Town, and in Community Activism from the International Labour Research and Information Group. She has travelled nationally and internationally to represent the causes she is involved in. Her book co-authored with Koni Benson, Writing Out Loud: Interventions in the History of a Land Occupation tracks 18 months of her experiences of homelessness and resistance to the growing housing crisis in Cape Town. [[email protected]] ELENA MOORE is affiliated with the University of Cape Town as senior research fellow at the Centre for Social Science Research and lecturer in the Department of Sociology. She obtained her Master’s degree in Applied Social Research and PhD from Trinity College, Dublin. Her principal research interests include social change in personal life, intimacy, gender, feminist theories and biographical methods. Her recent publications is a coauthored book, South African Reform of Customary Marriage, Divorce and Intestate Succession: Living Customary Law and Social Realities. [[email protected]]



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KOPANO RATELE is Professor in the Institute of Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and co-director of the Medical Research Council-UNISA Violence, Injury and Peace Research Unit. He has published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters in the areas of men and masculinities, psychology, violence, sexuality, race, culture, and traditions. Ratele is a former president of the Psychological Society of South Africa. His books include Social Psychology: Identities and Relationships, as co-editor, and Inter-Group Relations: A South African Perspective. [[email protected]] SAVANNAH RUSSO is a former Global Health Corps Fellow working as the Research and Documentation Officer for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation in Mbarara, Uganda. She holds a Master’s Degree in International Studies and Women’s Studies from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. She has worked on women’s development programs in Haiti and Rwanda, and with Grandmothers against Poverty and AIDS in South Africa. [[email protected]] ELAINE SALO is associate professor in the departments of Political Science and International Relations, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware, United States. Prior to that, she was the director of the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Her publications include Thirsty for Access: Gender and African Water Policies: A Report on the Findings of a Continent Wide Study of African Water Policies. SAMANTHA VAN SCHALKWYK is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Trauma Forgiveness and Reconciliation Studies at the University of the Free State. Her research interests include gender violence and identity, community-based research methodologies, and the psychosocial aspects of women’s agency within the African socio-spatial landscape. She is currently leading a major study on Gender Reconciliation at the University of the Free State. A collaboration with Gender Reconciliation International, the project explores the relational transformation of gender identities in the context of a series of workshops. Her research has been published in peer reviewed international journals, including Feminism & Psychology. [[email protected]]