Lindsay Clowes

Narratives of transactional sex on a university campus

Given the imperatives of HIV and gender equality, South African researchers have foregrounded transactional sex as a common practice that contributes to unsafe and inequitable sexual practices. This paper presents findings from a qualitative study with a group of students at a South African university, drawing on narratives that speak to the dynamics of reportedly widespread transactional sex on campus. Since many of these relationships are inscribed within unequal power dynamics across the urban-rural and local-‘foreigner’ divides, and across differences of wealth, age and status that intersect with gender in multiple, complex ways, it is argued that these may be exacerbating unsafe and coercive sexual practices among this group of young people. The paper further argues for a critical, reflexive position on transactional sex, pointing to the way in which participants articulate a binaristic response to transactional relationships that simultaneously serves to reproduce a silencing of a discourse on female sexual desires, alongside a simplistic and deterministic picture of masculinity underpinned by the male sexual drive discourse.

Who needs a father? South African men reflect on being fathered

The legacy of apartheid and continued social and economic change have meant that many South African men and women have grown up in families from which biological fathers are missing. In both popular and professional knowledge and practice this has been posed as inherently a problem particularly for boys who are assumed to lack a positive male role model. In drawing on qualitative interviews with a group of South African men in which they speak about their understandings of being fathered as boys, this paper makes two key arguments. The first is that contemporary South African discourses tend to pathologize the absence of the biological father while simultaneously undermining the role of social fathers. Yet, this study shows that in the absence of biological fathers other men such as maternal or paternal uncles, grandfathers, neighbours, and teachers often serve as social fathers. Most of the men who participated in this study are able to identify men who – as social rather than biological fathers – played significant roles in their lives. Secondly, we suggest that while dominant discourses around social fatherhood foreground authoritarian and controlling behaviours, there are moments when alternative more nurturing and consultative versions of being a father and/or being fathered are evident in the experiences of this group of men.

Coercive sexual practices and gender-based violence on a university campus

abstract When a 22-year-old University of the Western Cape (UWC) female student was stabbed to death by her boyfriend (another student) in her room in the university residence on 25 August 2008. the entire campus was left reeling. Bringing the stark reality of gender-based violence (GBV) so close to home, the tragedy was a powerful reminder of the limits of more than a decade of legislative change, concerted activism, education, consciousness-raising and knowledge production aimed at challenging gender-based power inequalities. This article reflects on the relationships between violence, coercion and heterosexuality on a specific campus by drawing on data generated by a qualitative study at UWC that explored student constructions of heterosexual relationships in the light of national imperatives around HIV/AIDS and GBV. Involving 20 focus groups with male and female students over the course of 2008 and 2009, the study revealed that unequal and coercive practices are common in heterosexual relationships on this campus. The study underlined the necessity of understanding these relationships as produced through power inequalities inherent in normative gender roles, and also drew attention to ways in which gender power inequalities intersect in complex and sometimes contradictory ways with other forms of inequality on campus—in particular, class, age and geographical origin. While both men and women students appeared to experience pressure (linked to peer acceptance and material gain) to engage in (hetero)sexual relationships, it seems that first-year female students from poor, rural backgrounds are particularly vulnerable to the transactional and unequal relationships associated with coercive and sometimes even violent sexual practices. Alcohol and substance abuse also appear to be linked to unsafe and abusive sexual practices, and again it is young female students new to campus life who are most vulnerable. This article draws on the data from this larger study to explore experiences and understandings of the most vulnerable—young female students—in unpacking connections between (hetero)sexuality and violent and coercive sex in an educational institution.

Men in Africa: Masculinities, Materiality and Meaning

Address correspondence to Tamara Shefer, Private Bag X17, Bellville, 7535, South Africa; email: tshefer@uwc.ac.zaal. At a public lecture in Cape Town earlier this year, Professor Sandra Harding, an internationally renowned feminist author, spoke to the question ‘Can men be subjects of feminist thought?’ (1 March 2010, District Six Museum, Cape Town). In her talk, Harding called on men to elaborate critically on their subjective experiences and practices of being boys and men – from childhood to adulthood, and through fatherhood to old age. She argued that while androcentric thinking has dominated knowledge production globally, men’s self-reflexive voices on their own experiences of being boys and men have been relatively silent, particularly through a profeminist and critical gender lens. Harding thus drew attention to an important challenge confronting contemporary psychology, a challenge that underpins the rationale for this Special Edition of the Journal of Psychology in Africa. However, much of our knowledge within the discipline of psychology has been and remains uncritically based on boys’ and men’s experiences and perspectives. More specifically, as Boonzaier and Shefer (2007) argue, most psychological knowledge is not only predominantly based on research with men, but also in most cases, middle-class, white, American men. Studies that problematise and foreground masculinity itself, that challenge masculinity as normative, and that apply a critical, gendered lens, are still relatively marginal in the social sciences and particularly in psychology. This is however beginning to change.

Masculinity, Matrimony and Generation: Reconfiguring Patriarchy in Drum 1951–1983*

In this article, I discuss some of the ways in which Drum tended to ascribe ‘modernity’ to particular practices and processes in opposition to other practices and processes portrayed as ‘traditional’. In mid-twentieth-century South Africa, dominant discourses tended to signal (white) male adulthood through independent decision making alongside financial autonomy. In contrast African discourses tended to signal male adulthood through proximity to family members, through respect for age and seniority and through deference to the praxis of ‘tradition’. In the representations of black men in its pages, Drum magazine negotiated a somewhat disorderly path through these competing racialised discourses. I suggest that Drums claim that black males were indeed men, was made through highlighting and condoning practices that demonstrated similarities and continuities between subordinate black and dominant white versions of manhood. In challenging the racial discourse the magazine paradoxically found itself simultaneously reinforcing western rather than African versions of manhood.

‘Are You Going to be MISS (or MR) Africa?’†Contesting Masculinity in Drum Magazine 1951–1953‡

Drum magazine was first published in March 1951. Like other magazines, it both reflected and shaped the society from which its audience emerged. During 1951, its audience, mainly urban black readers, was able to push the publication away from its original rural focus towards an urban emphasis. Town living, however, meant different things to different people. Thus, while readers were successful in shifting the focus of the magazine, they were less successful in influencing the way the publication presented urban life. This paper explores the struggle between readers, journalists and editors over the Miss Africa beauty contest announced at the beginning of 1952. Although the magazine reluctantly admitted men to the contest, it discriminated against male entrants in a variety of ways over the course of the year, and subsequent competitions barred male contestants entirely. Despite opposition from male readers who wished to be considered beautiful, the men of Drum were largely successful in asserting their own deeply gendered cultural vision of urban life.

Teacher as learner: a personal reflection on a short course for South African university educators

Higher education is understood to play a critical role in ongoing processes of social transformation in post-apartheid South Africa through the production of graduates who are critical and engaged citizens. A key challenge is that institutions of higher education are themselves implicated in reproducing the very hierarchies they hope to transform. In this paper, I reflect critically on my experiences of a course aimed at transforming teaching through transforming teachers. In this paper, I foreground my own positionality as a white female educator as I draw on feminist theorising to reflect on my experiences as a learner in the Community, Self and Identity course. I suggest that we need to teach in ways that are more cognisant of the complexities of the constraints on personal freedom in the past if we are to contribute to the development of social justice in the future.

Student accounts of space and safety at a South African university: implications for social identities and diversity:

Transformation efforts in South African higher education have been under increased scrutiny in recent years, especially following the last years of student activism and calls for decolonization of universities. This article presents data from a participatory photovoice study in which a group of students reflect on their experiences of feeling safe and unsafe at an urban-based historically disadvantaged university. Findings highlight the way in which historical inequalities on the basis of social identities of race, class, and gender, among others, continue to shape experiences, both materially and social-psychologically, in South African higher education. However, and of particular relevance in thinking about a socially just university, participants speak about the value of diversity in facilitating their sense of both material and subjective safety. Thus, a diverse classroom and one that acknowledges and recognizes students across diversities, is experienced as a space of comfort, belonging and safety. Drawing on feminist work on social justice, we argue the importance of lecturer sensitivity and reflexivity to their own practices, as well as the value of social justice pedagogies that not only focus on issues of diversity and equality but also destabilize dominant forms of didactic pedagogy, and engage students’ diverse experiences and perceptions.

Perceptions of staffriding in Post-Apartheid South Africa: the lethal thrill of speed or the masculine performance of a painful past?

Staffriding, or train surfing, involves taking life threatening physical risks by moving around the outside of moving trains. In aiming to better understand this risky practice, this small scale qualitative study used three semi-structured interviews and three focus discussions to understand perceptions of train surfing in South Africas Gauteng province. Semi-structured interviews comprised general station staff (n=2), and a station manager (n=1). The first two focus group discussions held were with ticket marshals (n= 6 per group, with a total of 12), and the last focus group discussion was with commuters (n=4), security personnel (n=6), and a station manager (n=1). Findings revealed that the majority of staffriders were perceived to be young, urban, black boys/men attending suburban schools. Tracing these identity co-ordinates against possible configurations of masculinity, we argue that train surfing represents a particular performance of risky, heteronormative masculinity forged within and against the historical, political and economic legacies that contoured apartheid versions of ‘black’ manhood.

Participating unequally: student experiences at UWC

This paper uses Nancy Fraser’s concept of participatory parity to reflect on data gathered by and from third year students in a final year research module in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape in 2015. During the course students developed a research proposal, collected and shared data with other students, and then used this data to write a final (externally examinable) research report. Employing a participatory photovoice methodology, the students’ research focused on ways in which social and group identities had shaped their experiences of feeling empowered and disempowered on campus. Each student took two photos representing experiences of feeling empowered and two of feeling disempowered on campus and wrote narratives of about 300 words explaining and describing the experience foregrounded by each image. Students shared these narratives and accompanying images with each other, their teachers and the wider university community through a public exhibition in the library. In the paper we draw on Fraser’s concepts of maldistribution, misrecognition and misrepresentation to highlight constraints to equal participation identified by students.