Browsing by Author "Posel, Deborah"

Now showing 1 - 11 of 11
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    Bodies over Borders and Borders over Bodies: the 'Gender Refugee' and the imagined South Africa
    (2016) Camminga, Bianca; Posel, Deborah; Matebeni, Zethu; Levine, Susan
    This thesis tracks the conceptual journeying of the term 'transgender' from the Global North - where it originated - along with the physical embodied journeying of transgender asylum seekers from countries within Africa to South Africa, and considers the interrelationships between the two. With regards to the term 'transgender', it is the contention of this thesis that it transforms as it travels, taking on meaning in relation to bodies, national homes, institutional frameworks and imaginaries. More specifically, that it has materialised in South Africa - first as a discourse and following this as a politics - due to a combination of social, political and cultural conditions peculiar to the country. In direct correlation to this movement, this thesis argues that in recent years South Africa has seen the emergence of what can be usefully termed 'gender refugees' - people who can make claims to refugee status, fleeing their countries of origin based on the persecution of their gender identity. This study centers on the experiences and narratives of these gender refugees, gathered through a series of life story interviews, highlighting the ways in which their departures, border crossings, arrivals and perceptions of South Africa have been both enabled and constrained by the contested meanings and politics of this emergence of transgender, particularly in relation to the possibilities of the South African Constitution. Through such narratives, this thesis explores the radical constitutional-legal possibilities for transgender in South Africa, the dissonances between the possibilities of constitutional law - in relation to the distinction made between sex and gender - and the pervasive politics/logic of binary 'sex/gender' within South African society. In doing so, this thesis enriches the emergent field of Transgender Studies, and challenges some of the current dominant theoretical and political perceptions of transgender, by offering complex narratives regarding sex, gender, sexuality and notions of home in relation to particular geo-politically situated bodies. This thesis speaks to contemporary international concerns and debates regarding migration and asylum, identity politics, the control of borders, human rights and protections, documentation and the ongoing bureaucratisation of sex/gender.
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    Fashioning transformation? Implications for the politics of recognition among Cape Town youth
    (2014) Van Niekerk, Kate; Posel, Deborah
    This thesis explores the novel idea that fashion may assist in creating social justice and transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. 2Bop takes its inspiration from the classic arcade video games of the eighties and nineties, and the experiences of playing them as a child on the Cape Flats. The brand references Cape Flats 'corner shop culture' and 'Kaapse' (Cape Afrikaans dialect) slang. The thesis looks at the literature around the politics of recognition, pioneered by Charles Taylor, in order to try and understand whether a fashion brand with a broad customer base could produce a shared recognition between young people across pervasive apartheid divides - especially in Cape Town, which is still visibly and geographically divided along lines of race and class. The research was done through in-depth open-ended interviews with 35 participants of different races, classes and backgrounds;; as well as fieldwork done in stores where the brand is sold, and at various events around Cape Town. The participants divided roughly into two groups: a more multiracial, middle class group in the Cape Town City Bowl and an entirely coloured, working class group in Bishop Lavis on the Cape Flats. Through two overarching themes that emerged from the data, nostalgia and authenticity, this thesis reveals the complex ways that people identify with their clothing, their history, and one another. Firstly, 2Bop inspires nostalgia for both playing the actual games, as well as the spaces where the games were played. However these experiences are politicized by the environments in which they were set, and reveal the contradictions of a nostalgia for an 'ordinary' childhood on the Cape Flats that involved both pleasure and pain. This sense of nostalgia is rooted in the anxieties of the present and this is illustrated further by the emphasis put on the brand being 'authentic' and the assertion of boundaries between who 'gets it' and who does not. The ideal of authenticity speaks to anxieties of class and race deprivation and social mobility between Cape Town and the Cape Flats ?the fear of 'selling out', the need to remain connected to one's roots without becoming stuck, the desire to feel like one has ownership of an identity as a young person in a fledgling democracy that is constantly in flux.
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    From manual to makeshift: the practice of community health work in Wallacedene and Bloekombos informal settlements
    (2012) Vale, Beth; Posel, Deborah; Hodes, Rebecca
    This thesis investigates community health workers' negotiation between the prescribed 'manual' for care and the lived realities of their field, exploring how prescriptions of public health are reappropriated through the micro-politics of everyday practice. What inventiveness, agency and tactical manoeuvres are woven between abstract ideals and situational demands? And how are these shaping the content of care? Community health work has been established as the model for health service delivery in resource-poor settings, particularly those hard-hit by AIDS. While its outcomes are widely celebrated, what this success looks like in practice remains under-explored. This dissertation investigates the messy application of this abstract model of care within a specific social context, exploring the place of care in the lives of carers, and how circumstantial pressures shape care delivery in unintended ways.
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    In whose name? a case study of how a small group of gender variant men and women based in Cape Town understand and relate to the terms transgender and transsexual
    (2013) Daitz, Emma; Posel, Deborah
    Using a phenomenological approach and the technique of in-depth interviews, this dissertation investigates how a small sample of gender variant men and women understand, experience, and relate to the terms used to designate them in academic literature and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender/Transsexual (LGBT) activism – namely, ‘transgender’ and ‘transsexual.’ The relevance of such an investigation lies in, amongst other things, the fact that the corpus of theory – queer - that is most frequently applied to in order to theorize the lives of such men and women does not pay adequate attention to the empirical data on their lived experiences.
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    The Life of the Corpse
    (Taylor and Francis, 2009) Posel, Deborah; Gupta, Pamila
    This collection of six articles draws on contributions presented to the international symposium on The Life of the Corpse, convened by the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) in August 2008. The symposium in turn was the culmination of a thematic study group on the same topic. 1 The intellectual animus for both was an interest in considering the cultural politics of death, from the specific vantage point of the corpse and the challenges in meaning-making and regulation that the dead body presents. In particular, as organisers of these forums, 2 we wanted to foreground what we deemed the dualistic life of the corpse: as a material object, on one hand, and a signifier of wider political, economic, cultural, ideological and theological endeavours, on the other. The moment of death produces a decaying body, an item of waste that requires disposal – simultaneous with an opportunity, sometimes an imperative – to recuperate the meaning of spent life, symbolically effacing the material extinction that death represents. Every society, then, has had to face the question: how to reconcile the quest for a dignified end of human life, with a putrefying piece of flesh indistinguishable from other animals? This resource is a postscript of the final published articel, available through Taylor and Francis here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00020180903381248
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    Medicine and the Arts Week 6 - In dialogue about the corpse
    (2015-01-21) Levine, Susan; Posel, Deborah; Smith, Kathryn; Martin, Lorna
    In this video, Susan Levine reflects on how each of the three speakers in previous videos used their different perspectives to address the topic of death and the corpse and poses additional questions to them. Lorna is asked about her interaction with the families of the deceased. Deborah is asked to elaborate on the concept of 'discipline'. Kathryn is asked how her work interfaces with art presentation and representation. This is the sixth video in Week 6 of the Medicine and the Arts Massive Open Online Course.
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    Medicine and the Arts Week 6 - The discipline of death
    (2015-01-21) Posel, Deborah
    In this video, Deborah Posel, a sociologist, explores the journey taken by medical professionals as they become familiar with the intimate details of death and dying. She considers how medical students explore the corpse in order to reveal its mysteries and develop their knowledge of the body with the ultimate goal of preserving life. This is the fourth video in Week 6 of the Medicine and the Arts Massive Open Online Course.
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    Medicine and the Arts Week 6 - The sociology of death
    (2015-01-21) Posel, Deborah
    In this video, sociologist Deborah Posel, discusses the philosophical implications of death, arguing that death is integral to what we understand by "life". She also discusses the symbolic investment in death in human societies and what the treatment of death can tell is about how societies function. She also focuses on how the corpse is used as a powerful, paradoxical, and sometimes taboo representation of both life and death. This is the second video in Week 6 of the Medicine and the Arts Massive Open Online Course.
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    New Pentecostal churches, politics and the everyday life of university students at the University of Zimbabwe
    (2018) Gukurume, Simbarashe; van Wyk Ilana; Posel, Deborah
    In the past 15 years, there has been a concerted ‘Pentecostalisation’ of university spaces in Africa. Despite enormous growth in Pentecostal Charismatic Church membership and activities on African university campuses, and its attendant implications for academic and everyday life, there is hardly any study that explores this phenomenon. Thus, little is known about the complex entanglements between religion, politics and the dynamics of the everyday within the university campus and how this mediates students’ subjectivities. This thesis examines the lived experiences and everyday lives of university students at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ). The thesis is based on the narratives of students drawn through a qualitative methodology and more particularly, through participant observation, semi-structured and in-depth interviews over 15 months. Findings in this study revealed that university students convert and sign-up for new Pentecostal Charismatic Churches (PCCs) because they were imagined as spaces through which young people could forge supportive economic and social networks. PCCs’ gospel of prosperity and ‘spiritual warfare’ technologies were also deeply attractive to students who were caught in the hopelessness and uncertainty wrought by the country’s protracted socio-economic and political crisis. In this context, PCCs cultivate a sense of hope and optimism. However, although new PCCs reconfigure young people’s orientation to the future, many PCC promises remain elusive. The entrance of PCCs onto this university campus has also lead to institutional conflict as new churches struggle against the entrenched historical privilege of mainline churches- and the political influence of their followers in university management. New PCCs on the UZ campus have also become heavily involved in student and national politics, which further complicates their relationship with the university and the state. This thesis demonstrate the extent to which faith permeates every aspect of university experience for those who subscribe to its Pentecostal forms. I argue in this thesis that these complex linkages between faith and university life are mediated by the wider politics of the country, including linkages between the state and the university.
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    The experience of money and the domestic moral economy of a group of young adults in Khayelitsha and their transition to adulthood
    (2022) Spyropoulos, John; Posel, Deborah; Seekings, Jeremy
    This thesis is a qualitative study of patterns of earning, sharing and spending among a cohort of young South African men and women, aged 25 to 35, in Khayelitsha, a mainly poor, Black African residential area of Cape Town. As less skilled ‘youth,' they are rarely able to sustain regular employment and therefore remain intermittently dependent on household income and resident in or near their parents' homes; they may have children but are not married. This thesis interprets how their low wage irregular employment and spending patterns affect relationships of mutuality and the dynamics of redistribution in their households. The thesis then considers how these phenomena change with their transition to ‘adulthood,' which occurred in the context of the COVID19 pandemic. The young adults experience a state of ‘locked in' material and existential depletion while balancing their aspirations, reflected in urgent and often conspicuous consumption, with their obligations in a context of chronic economic stress. As older adults, they progress from an economically dependent status to a mainly precarious adult status in their household where the matrix of domestic obligations and entitlements overwhelm youthful, aspirational spending. The thesis advances our understanding of the lived experience of money of ‘township youth' – as young adults – and then, as they progress into adulthood, of adult decision-making, in their domestic domain. The thesis unpacks and explains this experience in relation to the notion of a ‘domestic moral economy' produced at the nexus of economic and social cultural factors. Here responses of young adults to labour market conditions and consumerism impact on and are in turn impacted by social relations in the household. These responses introduced and embedded in both domestic relations and their social lives among peers and friends, demonstrate the inseparability of external capitalist relation of production from historically instituted social relations in the wider South African moral economy.
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    "The more you stretch them, the more they grow": same-sex marriage and the wrestle with heteronormativity
    (2019) Scott, Lwando; Moore, Elena; Matebeni, Zethu; Posel, Deborah
    With the understanding that marriage is a historically heteronormative institution that was (and in many respects continues to be) underpinned by heteronormativity, in this doctoral thesis I engage the ways that same-sex couples wrestle with heteronormativity in marriage. I move beyond the assimilationist vs. radicalisation debate that was central in same-sex marriage conversations characterised by the disagreement between Sullivan (1996) and Warner (2000). The assimilationist vs. radicalisation debate is too neat and relies on a binary logic of either or, whereas the experiences of same-sex couples in Cape Town, South Africa demonstrate a much more complicated picture. I argue that while same-sex marriage does not radically change the institution of marriage, it does provide a challenge to systems of dominance such a heteronormativity and has a transformational impact on the interpersonal relationships of same-sex couples. It is an interpersonal transformation, that with time, could possibly change the institution. Through marriage, same-sex couples provide alternative ways of reading samesex intimacy, readings that challenge the prejudice and stereotypes built on homonegativity. In wrestling with the norm, in challenging dominant gender and sexuality systems through marriage, same-sex couples are engaged in a process of stretching. They stretch themselves as they become more assertive in making claims about their sexuality, they also stretch those around them to become more open to the possibilities of same-sex intimacy. Ultimately samesex marriage provides alternative ways of reading familiar categories like “husband” and “wife” and reminds us that only our imagination is the limit in the infinite possibilities of relationship construction.