Browsing by Author "Salo, Elaine"
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- ItemOpen AccessDancing with dangerous desires : the performance of femininity and experiences of pleasure and danger by young black women within club spaces(2007) McLaren, Mary Gugu Tizita; Salo, ElaineThis research was carried out in Langa Township, Cape Town and worked with 7 young black women, between the ages of 19 and 26 years old. The aim was to explore the fluidity of identity, in particular gender identity, by exploring the performance of 'normative' femininity and 'hidden/subversive' femininity performed in different spaces. The focus was on 'hidden/subversive' femininity and the experiences of pleasure and danger in clubs spaces in Cape Town. It was found that these experiences centre on appearance, use of alcohol and dancing and expose the way in which young women negotiate between the pleasurable and dangerous that, consciously or unconsciously, push the boundaries of entrenched gender norms. In addition, owing 10 the nature of the research, constructions of masculinity were also explored and discovered to have a profound impact on young women's experiences within club spaces and in their everyday lives, relating to sexual relationships. This study aims to reveal the power and agency of young women, as well as the struggles and restrictions.
- ItemOpen AccessDiscourses of gendered vulnerability in the context of HIV/AIDS: An analysis of the 16 Days of Activism Against Women Abuse Campaign 2007 in Khayelitsha, South Africa(2009) Monte, Loredana; Bennett, Jane; Salo, ElaineThis thesis explores discourses on gender and gender based violence produced in the 16 Days of Activism Against Women Abuse campaign 2007 in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. The public awareness campaign united a number of local, community based organisations that work in the overlapping fields of HIV/AIDS and gender based violence. For the purpose of this study, three of the most vocal organisations in this campaign were chosen as research participants; The local branch of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) Khayelitsha, the Rape Survivors Centre Simelela, and the youth drama group Masibambisane. Assuming that discourses are embedded in unequal relations of power, this study adopts a discourse analytical approach to the 'gendering' of HI VIA IDS to reveal how knowledge and meanings are produced, reproduced and contested between more powerful institutions and a marginalised community. The thesis first explores dominant discourses on HIV/AIDS and gender in development discourse and social and biomedical research, and uncovers how HIV/AIDS risks are mostly related to women's lack of power and inherent vulnerability to violence. Such hegemonic discourses are then also found in international and national guidelines and policy frameworks that address the 'gendered' risks of HIV and AIDS, while at the same time these frameworks also promote approaches to HIV/AIDS that acknowledge contextual and societal factors that shape vulnerability. Eventually, a review of international and national frameworks that address the 'dual epidemics' shows how the so called 'community sector' is often highlighted as a crucial partner in multi-sectoral approaches to HIV/AIDS. The empirical study then aims at locating such discourses in a localised, South African context, and explores the ways in which dominant discourses are reproduced, contested, and redefined by community activists. Empirical data is collected through participant observation with the organisations coordinating the campaign, recording of speeches delivered during the public events, and semi-structured, qualitative interviews with five key members of the organisations. A discursive analysis of the data reveals that femininity and masculinity are mainly constructed in rather conservative ways, portraying women as inherently vulnerable and men as either perpetrators of violence, or protectors of women and children. These constructions of gender are based in a patriarchal, hegemonic notion of masculinity as powerful and responsible for the suffering or salvation of weak and vulnerable women. However, within these hegemonic gender notions, women speakers simultaneously contest their victimhood status by claiming their rights as citizens of South Africa, by relocating power in their collective struggle, and by reframing their vulnerabilities as embedded in intersecting inequalities of gender, class and race, and as members of a community largely marginalised by the state. The multitude of discourses at play in the public campaign point at the necessity for a re-reading of the intersections of HIV/AIDS, gender inequality and gender based violence beyond victim-agent dualisms.
- ItemOpen AccessA feminist anthropology of barriers to implementing the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act (CTOP)(2007) Cox, Phyllida; Salo, ElaineThis study aims to assess barriers within communities and at the community healthcare level that impede delivery of reproductive healthcare rights- in particular it focuses on the South African Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act (CTOP), which came into effect in 1996. In their scoping study of abortion related research in South Africa Varkey and Fonn state that whilst there have been several studies on the barriers to implementing the CTOP Act at the health service level, few have addressed community barriers (2000). I conducted multi-sited fieldwork between two townships in Cape Town, South Africa on the urban periphery of Cape Town, South Africa. The inhabitants of these two communities are black Xhosa speaking South Africans who live in a mix of informal shack, government built as well as self- built housing. The marginal location of these communities in relation the Eurocentric metropolitan centre of Cape Town reflects the legacy of the racialised reordering of the Apartheid era. The socio-economic effects of this legacy are tangibly present in the poverty, criminality and gender based violence that impacts upon the health of these communities. I focused on reproductive health care services for these townships at the community based service delivery level. Although Varkey and Fonn (ibid) distinguish between studies that address health care and studies that address community barriers to healthcare I aim to show how the distinction between the spaces of the community as against the institutional space of public healthcare is somewhat arbitrary. Because this study focuses on the cultural politics of implementing the legislation on abortion, the issues that arise and are analysed encompass seemingly divergent levels and social fields of inter-relationality. These social fields of inter-relationality include in their scope law, policy, rights-based public health care implementation, domestic households and gendered relationships between men and, women;- mothers and daughters, nurses and young women and so on. How such intersecting and interpenetrating levels play out in the lives of individuals can be illustrated most effectively through the anthropological notion of "personhood" as it regulates and informs communal and individual notions of self in the public health care space. For example, as agents in community based health service delivery Nurses embody a personhood in the context of their professional role, which is inseparable from their identity as gendered persons with distinctive ethnic and racial identities within South African communities. These gendered, racial and ethnic identities are embedded in histories of Colonial and Apartheid State planning. A consistent theme in this paper are how these identities influence moral constructions of sexuality and the ambiguities that nurses feel about the women to whom they provide family planning in relation to their own values around appropriate female personhood.
- ItemOpen AccessGugule-tois, it's the place to be! : on bodies, sex respectability and social reproduction : women' s experiences of youth on Cape Town's periphery(2007) Mupotsa, Danai S; Salo, ElaineInitiating this research project I reflected on the subject of popular and youth culture, gender and sexuality; which then drove me to consider an analysis of dress codes and fashion in regards to notions of female respectability. Through my research process, I have often thought that I had digressed considerably; yet as I begin to narrate this story I am both surprised and amazed to find that this is in fact what I have done and thankfully, I believe I have done more. This "full circle," in thinking, doing and now presenting new knowledge was initiated in part due to a personal interest in the gendered socio-political, economic and historical meanings attached to the body surface as a whole, which I soon changed to a consideration of both the bodily surface and its interior. As stated in my research proposal, it was my contention that the female body, as opposed to the normative (or rather socially normalized) male body, has been discursively constructed as defiled, unclean and as reeking with sickness according to dominant paradigms of knowledge and social practice. Through the processes of conquest, colonialism, imperialism, racism and apartheid; black people and especially black women's bodies have suffered this violence. I have an interest in dissecting the manner by which such discourses then translate into common-sense understandings about how we both dress and perform our bodies in various social spaces; about how we begin to construct the discourse of "our culture," of good girls and social misfits, who wear the labels of "prostitute," "lesbian," or "rural," (despite their true actions or conditions) within urban spaces in contemporary Southern Africa; considering the impact of the history of a geographical apartheid, a migrant labour system, the production and re/production of notions of femininity closely associated with domesticity and the very dominant narrative of female respectability.
- ItemOpen AccessMultiple targets, mixing strategies: Complicating feminist analysis of contemporary South African women's movements(2005) Salo, ElaineIn this brief commentary, I want to focus on the importance of identifying the key aspects of identity that motivate women to participate in activism for social change. In doing so, I build on the injunction, variously expressed by Basu (1995), Mohanty (1991) and Mouffe (1992), that women's identities are multiply informed by their racial, ethnic, socio-economic and geographic locations. Consequently, the issues that impel them into action for gender justice, as well as the alliances they choose, will necessarily be informed by these different aspects of their identities. However, the issues that they take up are not of their own choosing. These too are informed by the confluence of geopolitical relations in the historical moment. Multiple shifts have occurred in women's struggles in South Africa, and they have had to invent equally multiple and innovative strategies and spaces of engagement, as well as enter into new alliances with other gendered movements to effect gender justice.
- ItemOpen AccessSomewhere there's a silver lining : women's experiences of infertility on the Cape Flats(2008) Davids, Bianca; Salo, ElaineIn the communities of the Cape Flats, it is expected that all women will bear children and become mothers. Motherhood serves as a social and cultural indicator of femininity and enables women to access social and economic networks that knit them into community. The social and cultural valorization of motherhood in these communities has informed the powerful stigmatization of infertility (or the involuntary nonconformance to motherhood). The stigma associated with infertility affects women in particular, because the inability to bear children is commonly perceived to be a woman's problem. This study explores the cultural constructions of infertility. It examines in particular, the diverse cultural meanings and the stigma associated with infertility. The examination of these cultural meanings challenges the notion that infertility should only be examined in the biomedical realm. My research was conducted over a seven month period with six infertile women and with women who have borne children from different areas on the Cape Flats. The infertile women were the primary informants. Other informants included the mothers with whom the focus group was conducted and specialist informants who were healthcare professionals. The participants were recruited through the primary health care clinic in Manenberg, the network of community newspapers, The Daily Voice and through my own social network. Qualitative research methods were used. The study also used participatory research methods involved because the participants played an active role in the construction of the research process and interview schedules. The primary information used was obtained from in-depth interviews and journals kept by the infertile women. For comparative purposes, a focus group was conducted with a group of mothers. The study illustrates that on the Cape Flats, infertility is constructed as a major cultural and social problem for women. The stigma attached to infertility draws its power from the social and cultural meanings associated with inability of infertile women to live up to the expectation that every adult woman will become a mother. The effects of the social stigma of infertility are especially profound. As I show, bio-medicine does offer some solution, but only to the few who can afford it.
- ItemOpen AccessSomewhere there's a silver lining: women's experiences of infertility on the Cape Flats(2008) Davids, Bianca; Salo, ElaineIn the communities of the Cape Flats, it is expected that all women will bear children and become mothers. Motherhood serves as a social and cultural indicator of femininity and enables women to access social and economic networks that knit them into community. The social and cultural valorization of motherhood in these communities has informed the powerful stigmatization of infertility ( or the involuntary nonconformance to motherhood). The stigma associated with infertility affects women in particular, because the inability to bear children is commonly perceived to be a woman's problem. This study explores the cultural constructions of infertility. It examines in particular, the diverse cultural meanings and the stigma associated with infertility. The examination of these cultural meanings challenges the notion that infertility should only be examined in the biomedical realm. My research was conducted over a seven month period with six infertile women and with women who have borne children from different areas on the Cape Flats. The infertile women were the primary informants. Other informants included the mothers with whom the focus group was conducted and specialist informants who were healthcare professionals. The participants were recruited through the primary health care clinic in Manenberg, the network of community newspapers, The Daily Voice and through my own social network. Qualitative research methods were used. The study also used participatory research methods involved because the participants played an active role in the construction of the research process and interview schedules. The primary information used was obtained from in-depth interviews and journals kept by the infertile women. For comparative purposes, a focus group was conducted with a group of mothers. The study illustrates that on the Cape Flats, infertility is constructed as a major cultural and social problem for women. The stigma attached to infertility draws its power from the social and cultural meanings associated with inability of infertile women to live up to the expectation that every adult woman will become a mother. The effects of the social stigma of infertility are especially profound. As I show, bio-medicine does offer some solution, but only to the few who can afford it.
- ItemOpen AccessWomen and Politics in a Plural Society: The case of Mauritius(2009) Ramtohul, Ramola; Mama, Amina; Salo, Elaine