Floretta Boonzaier

“He's a Man, and I'm a Woman” Cultural Constructions of Masculinity and Femininity in South African Women's Narratives of Violence

In South Africa, woman abuse is a pervasive social problem. This article explores how abused women give meaning to their experiences. Narrative interviews were used to investigate 15 womens experiences of violence from their partners. In their narratives, women constructed particular gendered identities, which reflected contradictory and ambiguous subjective experiences. Meanings women attached to their experiences of abuse were filtered through the particular social context—characterized by poverty and deprivation—within which their experiences occurred. Womens naming of the violence was linked to broader sociocultural mechanisms that construct woman abuse as a social problem in South Africa.

Violence, violence prevention, and safety: A research agenda for South Africa

Violence is a serious problem in South Africa with many effects on health services; it presents complex research problems and requires interdisciplinary collaboration. Two key meta-questions emerge: (i) violence must be understood better to develop effective interventions; and (ii) intervention research (evaluating interventions, assessing efficacy and effectiveness, how best to scale up interventions in resource-poor settings) is necessary. A research agenda to address violence is proposed.

Woman Abuse in South Africa: A Brief Contextual Analysis

Since the political change in South Africa in 1994, the issue of violence against women has begun to receive attention, along with transformative measures to address the problem (Vetten, 2000b). Recent feminist research has illustrated the importance of culture and context in the maintenance of men’s violence against women. Haj-Yahia (2000), for example, explored the relationship between wife abuse and the sociocultural context of Arab society, and reported that there is a stigma attached to seeking assistance from outside agencies and women are encouraged to maintain a secrecy surrounding the abuse. Similarly, Lui (1999) revealed how institutions in Chinese culture maintain the oppression of women and specifically how strict cultural sanctions against divorce make it challenging for women to deal with abuse. How, then, does the South African context characterized by poverty, unemployment, crime and deprivation influence how women and men understand the violence in their relationships and the kinds of identities they construct? Drawing on interviews with 15 men and their female partners recruited via two agencies that provide programs for victims and perpetrators of intimate violence, I identify two aspects of the South African context which impact on the ways in which men and women make sense of the violence in their relationships. First, I explore how aspects of the economic climate impact upon interpersonal relationships and how these intersect with violence, gender and identity. Second, I explore the intersection of successful masculinity, sexual coercion and marital infidelity.

Narrative Possibilities: Poor Women of Color and the Complexities of Intimate Partner Violence

This article shows how a narrative methodological approach is particularly suited to examining the dynamics of intimate partner violence, especially among poor women of color in South Africa. We show how a narrative approach allowed women to represent their experiences of violence according to their own frames of meaning, examining the complexities of abuse as it is informed by sociocultural factors of gender, poverty, and deprivation. In particular, we show how a narrative approach departs from other qualitative work by enabling women to construct particular forms of identity, thereby giving them agency in authoring their own stories of violence.

Women's Experiences of An Intervention for Violent Men

South Africa has one of the highest rates of intimate partner violence in the world. However, very little research has been done in South Africa on the interventions that combat this violence. We investigated an intervention for domestically violent men through the experiences of six female partners during programme participation. Interpretative phenomenology was used to analyse womens experiences of the intervention programme. During programme participation men continued to dominate female partners by keeping information about domestic violence secret and accusing the woman of being the abuser. Women continued to experience psychological abuse and were ambivalent about the long-term effectiveness of the programme. The study highlights the importance of hearing womens voices when assessing programme effectiveness, predicting future abuse, and increasing the long-term efficacy of intervention programmes.

Men’s constructions of masculinity and male sexuality through talk of buying sex

Commercial sex is an everyday occurrence across a range of contexts in South Africa. In this paper we turn our attention to the often-marginalised role of the buyers of sex by drawing on narrative interviews with male clients of female sex workers recruited through online advertisements in order to explore the ways in which heterosexual men construct, negotiate and perform their masculinity and sexuality through talking about their experiences of paying for sex. We highlight parallels between men’s narratives of paying for sex and dominant discourses of gender and heterosexuality. We show how men draw on heteronormative sexual scripts in constructing and making sense of paid sexual encounters and how men are simultaneously able to construct and enact a particular idealised version of masculinity and male sexuality through their talk on paying for sex. Finally, we discuss how online resources could be used more extensively in future research with the male clients of sex workers.

Determinants of intimate partner violence in Sub-Saharan Africa: a review of prevention and intervention programs

Intimate partner violence (IPV) in sub-Saharan Africa affects 36% of the population. Several African countries rank among the highest globally. In this article, we present evidence on the prevalence, determinants, and impact of IPV across several sub-Saharan African countries interpreted against the backdrop of social ecological theory. We also describe prevention or intervention programs tested in different regions of Africa, selecting only those programs which were published in a journal outlet and which met a high criteria of implementation and methodology (n = 7). Based on our review of the empirical literature, some risk factors for violence documented in Western societies are the same in Africa, including poverty, drinking, a past history of child abuse or posttraumatic stress disorder, and highly traditional gender role beliefs. Low education is also associated with IPV for both women and men. In Africa, partner abuse intersects with the HIV pandemic, making violence prevention especially urgent. African programs to prevent IPV are often incorporated with HIV prevention; community building and community engagement are emphasized more in Africa than in North America or Europe, which invoke more individually focused approaches. Some programs we review lowered HIV exposure in women; others contributed to reduced violence perpetration among men. The programs show sufficient promise to recommend replication and dissemination in sub-Saharan Africa.

“The Only Solution There Is To Fight” Discourses of Masculinity Among South African Domestically Violent Men

This qualitative study investigates the discourses that men used when talking about their experiences of attending a Duluth–cognitive-behavioral-therapy (CBT) domestic violence program in Cape Town, South Africa. Data were collected from 12 men who were recruited from three programs. A discourse analysis of interviews revealed that men drew upon various dominant discourses of masculinity that may reinforce the subordination of, control over, and violence against women. Our findings from this study contribute to the debate surrounding the Duluth model’s effectiveness in South Africa by questioning its successes in transforming violent masculinity.

Methodological disruptions: interviewing domestically violent men across a ‘gender divide’

This article examines the negotiations of power in cross-gender interviews with men on the topic of their violence against women partners. The article locates itself within a body of feminist and pro-feminist work on mens accounts of their own violence toward women, making the argument that when this ‘accounting’ is to be accomplished in an interview, with a woman, the interview dynamics are worthy of close attention. I argue that closer attention to the dynamics of the interview involves seeing interviews as social and dialogical encounters in which the dialogue is shaped by the active involvement of researcher and participants. The analysis draws on unstructured interviews conducted with 15 men who had perpetrated violence against an intimate woman partner and shows how men assert masculine power in the interviews through pursuing their own agendas in order to present themselves as either non-violent or justifiably provoked to violence. I also reflect on how these performances of masculinity open up a discursive space for my own performance of femininity and the challenges this holds for me as a feminist researcher researching mens violence against women. The article ends by exploring some further implications for critical feminist work on mens violence against women.

‘Selves’ in contradiction: Power and powerlessness in South African shelter residents’ narratives of leaving abusive heterosexual relationships

South Africa has one of the most advanced constitutions in the world. Several progressive laws that promise the protection of women, including the Domestic Violence Act, and a range of state-funded bodies have been established to promote women’s rights. Despite these signs of transition to democracy in the post-apartheid era, violence against women remains problematically high. The dominant perspective in both South African and international literature on the high rate of violence against women has been that of women’s ‘powerlessness’. This article goes beyond approaches that emphasise women’s victimhood. It explores women’s agency from the perspective of the narratives of 16 women in two shelters in Cape Town. Drawing from Scott’s (1990) concept of power and resistance, and using a feminist poststructuralist analytic lens, the article provides insight into the complexity of women’s subjectivities ‘post-abuse’. It highlights women’s shifting sense of power in relation to their abusers, and how this imbued women with a sense of agency as seen through their retrospective accounts of their motivations to leave the abusive relationships.