Browsing by Author "Kruger, Lou-Marie"

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    Gender, community and identity : women and Afrikaner nationalism in the Volksmoeder discourse of Die Boerevrou (1919-1931)
    (1991) Kruger, Lou-Marie; Du Toit, André
    As a feminist exploration of the problematic relationship between Afrikaans women and Afrikaner nationalism, this thesis is primarily concerned with the construction of the social identities of Afrikaans women between 1919 and 1931, the crucial formative years of Afrikaner nationalism. The relationship between women and Afrikaner nationalism is thus addressed by an investigation at the level of intellectual history. The emergence of Afrikaner nationalism at the beginning of the 20th century was accompanied by the articulation of a distinctive gender discourse, the study of which is central to this thesis. Within this discourse, which may be termed the "volksmoeder" discourse, a new identity and new roles were contrived for Afrikaner women. We first investigate the social and historical context in which the discourse was generated and then analyse the "volksmoeder" discourse itself by focusing on texts from Die Boerevrou, a women's magazine launched by Mabel Malherbe in 1919. Rather than taking the Die Boerevrou-texts for granted or seeing them as simple reflections of reality, they are investigated as constructions. The questions of why these particular constructions had appeared in that specific context and what ends they achieved are posed. Rather than simply taking the discursive constructions at face value they are construed as "answers" to certain underlying social and historical issues. On a theoretical level the problem of the construction of gender and ethnic identities is informed by recent work in the field of discourse analysis, while the imagining or invention of nation-communities is discussed with reference to the work of Benedict Anderson, Ernst Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm and Tom Nairn. The investigation of Die Boerevrou-texts as particular articulations of the volksmoeder discourse shows how the social identities of Afrikaans women were socially constructed in the volksmoeder discourse. It suggests that the social subjectivities of Afrikaans women were by no means simple or transparent. In the texts of Die Boerevrou it becomes clear that even while being shaped by Afrikaner nationalism, women themselves were active in the shaping of Afrikaner nationalism. While they were constituted as subjects in the anti-feminist discourse of Afrikaner nationalism, they remained mobile within this discourse: always negotiating, planning, creating and articulating new identities and roles for themselves. The image of women as passive victims of a male Afrikaner discourses is thus denied. However, it is asserted that the volksmoeder discourse as a gender discourse can and should be severely criticised from a feminist perspective.
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    One Meal at a time: Nourishment in the Cape Winelands
    (2017) Truyts, Catherine; Ross, Fiona; Kruger, Lou-Marie
    Emerging fields of inquiry in epigenetics and the 'Developmental Origins of Health and Disease’ (DOHaD) propose the 'first thousand days’ of life as a critical period for the formation of new life. During this time food is one crucial set of signals that edits life, and is particularly pertinent in the South African context where entrenched inequality is marked in statistics of hunger and food insecurity. A landscape of norms, both biomedical and social, comes to bear on the mother-child dyad, with a view to secure future health. This thesis tacks between this imaginary (noting registers of temporality and belonging), and everyday lived experience embedded with practices of care. Based on five months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kylemore in the Cape Winelands, I provide a detailed exploration of the space between prescription and practice. By tracking modalities of care, each chapter pauses at a meal or moment of ingestion. This attention reveals the complexity of food and sociality; the relationship of discourse to the everyday; and multiple, dextrous ways of providing care. Social precarity, shaped by the enduring political economy of the valley, made following the dictats of public health extremely difficult, as they pertain to the 'first thousand days’. I argue that a conceptual poverty exists around the complex forces shaping ingestion and social and biological practices, which presents a 'space between’ social and medical disciplines that requires attention. Nourishment, as an approach and concept is offered to this space, in order to help make visible the complexities of belonging and temporality that are active in between bio-social prescriptions and actual practices.