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Chapter 6. A new South African man?
... It should be highlighted that the notion of acts of citizenship is similar to the sociolinguistic concept of "linguistic citizenship" (Stroud 2001(Stroud , 2003(Stroud , 2009; see also Milani & Shaikjee 2013). Stroud explains that linguistic citizenship refers to "the situation where speakers themselves exercise control over their language, deciding what languages are, and what they may mean, and where language issues […] are discursively tied to a range of social issues -policy issues and questions of equity" (Stroud 2001, 353, italics in original). ...
... As Williams and Stroud (this issue) propose, however, linguistic citizenshipand acts of citizenship, for that matter -should not be restricted to describing public events of political mobilisation, but can also be usefully employed in order to understand the many ephemeral and apparently mundane occurrences of agency on grounds of language that unfold in daily interactions -both private and public (see also Milani & Shaikjee 2013). They do so by examining a multilingual skit performed by a famous South African Jewish stand-up comedian -Nik Rabinowitz -at a well-known braaied meat establishment in the Western Cape township of Gugulethu. ...
This volume offers fresh, cutting-edge perspectives on issues of language and citizenship by casting a critical light on a broad spectrum of geo-political contexts – Flanders, Luxembourg, Singapore, South Africa, the UK - and discourse data – policy documents, newspaper articles, ethnographic notes and interviews, skits, bodies in protests. The main aims of the book are to investigate institutional discourses about the relationship between nationality and citizenship, and relate such discourses to more ethnographically grounded interactions; tease out the multiple and often conflicting meanings of citizenship; and explore the different linguistic/semiotic guises that citizenship might take on in different contexts. The book argues that the linguistic/discursive study of citizenship should not only include critical investigations of political proposals about language testing, but should also encompass the diverse, more or less mundane, ways in which various social actors enact citizenship with the help of an array of multivocal, material, and affective semiotic resources. Originally published as a special issue of Journal of Language and Politics 14:3 (2015).
... It should be highlighted that the notion of acts of citizenship is similar to the sociolinguistic concept of "linguistic citizenship" (Stroud 2001(Stroud , 2003(Stroud , 2009; see also Milani & Shaikjee 2013). Stroud explains that linguistic citizenship refers to "the situation where speakers themselves exercise control over their language, deciding what languages are, and what they may mean, and where language issues […] are discursively tied to a range of social issues -policy issues and questions of equity" (Stroud 2001, 353, italics in original). ...
... As Williams and Stroud (this issue) propose, however, linguistic citizenshipand acts of citizenship, for that matter -should not be restricted to describing public events of political mobilisation, but can also be usefully employed in order to understand the many ephemeral and apparently mundane occurrences of agency on grounds of language that unfold in daily interactions -both private and public (see also Milani & Shaikjee 2013). They do so by examining a multilingual skit performed by a famous South African Jewish stand-up comedian -Nik Rabinowitz -at a well-known braaied meat establishment in the Western Cape township of Gugulethu. ...
The main argument advanced in this article that frames this special issue is that citizenship is not just a highly polysemic word employed by the media and other political institutions; it is also a set of norms and (linguistic) behaviours that individuals are socialised into, as well as a series of practices that social actors perform through an array of semiotic means including multilingualism, multivoicedness, the body, and affect. In light of this, it is proposed that the linguistic/discursive study of citizenship should be expanded beyond a rather narrow emphasis on political proposals about language testing to include the diverse, more or less mundane, ways in which citizenship is enacted via an array of
multivocal, material,
and
affective
semiotic resources.
... In our view, however, this phallocentric concern might have less to do with the fact that 'Johannesburg is a high stress area, especially for foreigners who, facing problems such as joblessness, may feel that their masculinity is challenged, or just lose interest in sex because of their stressful situation' (Kadenge and Ndlovu 2012: 475). Rather, the obsession with the penis might well be bound up with 'masculinity in crisis' discourses that have been circulating the globe for the last decades (see also Mills andMullany 2012, Milani andShaikjee 2013). Addressing these discourses from an FCDA perspective, Lazar (2013) has encouraged analysts to not too quickly dismiss the crisis of masculinity argument as a naïve or innocuous display of a tired and dying male power, because crisis could be 'a discursive strategy circulated by men in order to reoccupy centre stage and reclaim patriarchal privilege' (Walsh 2010: 7). ...
... But this should not lead us to too commiserating conclusions about 'poor men' being misrepresented in the herbalist flyers. What appears at first glance to be 'men in crisis' might instead be an astute strategy through which hegemonic masculinity seeks to maintain its dominance in a context of changing social conditions (see also Johnson 1997, Walker 2005, Milani and Shaikjee 2013. ...
This article investigates a corpus of herbalist pamphlets – fairly common, everyday texts found in (South) African cities – which promote the services of traditional healers and promise solutions to a plethora of ailments and life problems. The article's multi-pronged approach brings feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA), corpus linguistics (CS) and multimodal critical discourse studies (MCDS) into dialogue with each other. Encompassing both quantitative and qualitative components, this eclectic framework illustrates the ways in which dominant gendered discourses reproduce a patriarchal and heteronormative order by positioning men and women differently. This dominant form of gendered representation, however, co-exists with more resistant discourses which positively thematise same-sex desire. Essentially, the article demonstrates that herbalist pamphlets are key sites of ‘entanglement’ (Nuttall 2009) where complex identity nexuses of gender, sexuality, race, age and culture intersect and compete with each other within the larger regime of representation in South Africa.
... Focusing on four asylum identification documents drawn from the Greek context, we approached them as a multimodal synecdoche (Milani and Shaikjee 2013) of the nation-state, through which aesthetic materialities stand for identity and are constructed by socially positioned actors (van Leeuwen 2008). In this perspective, asylum identities are restricted to those deriving from legality, status, rights, and obligations result-ing from them (Crawley and Skleparis 2018;Isin 2008;Milani et al. 2020). ...
Reading the asylum governance through its narratives (Bhabha 2013), this paper aims to theorize identification documents as part of the nation-state’s narrativity performed through multimodal bureaucratic materialities. The contemporary narration linked to identification documents in the institutional space of asylum integrates an increasingly sophisticated and multimodal range of resources into its media content (Page 2018). Yet, these multimodal narrative productions are contextually situated practices and semiotic aggregates mirroring power relations and hierarchical positions (Milani 2017). Drawing on a critical multimodal approach to discourse analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen 2021), we explore the multimodal composition of four identification documents provided in the Greek asylum context. This critical approach to their design unveils the dynamic interplay between the verbal and visual elements in performing bordering practices and constructing the specific identities/statuses of the ‘asylum seeker.’ Semiotically, this identity work entails the deployment of digital meaning-making elements such as color, emblems, images, writing, layout, typography, shape, and material. In this sense, third-country nationals seeking international protection are resemiotized within a national (i.e., Greek), regional (i.e., European), and global context. In this context, identification documents can be seen as small institutional stories that reproduce the biopolitics of the nation-state contributing to a banal national semiosis (Milani 2014) of social categorization along broader contexts of globalization and asylum.
... The billboard brings together three pillars of white South African masculinity: cricket (the man on the left is famous Proteas wicket-keeper Mark Boucher), love of 'the bush', and beer. As has been noted before (Mager, 2005;Milani and Shaikjee, 2013), SAB has articulated masculinity as central to its beer brands since at least 1960, which took on a distinctly multiracial feel just before and after 1994. Sports sponsorship and advertising has been central to this masculinist, and racial, project. ...
The militarized response to the rhino poaching crisis in southern Africa exposes poachers to "fatal couplings of power and difference" (Gilmore 2002). While the racialized dimensions of this phenomenon are currently the subject of robust debate, this paper focuses on how race, gender, and sexuality are co-constructed in the anti-poaching discourse. Bringing the work of geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore into conversation with Frantz Fanon's psycho-existential exposition of race, we read several campaign texts against their landscapes, revealing the role that gendered constructions of racial subjects play in justifying the extrajudicial killing of rhino poachers. We conclude that a geographic-linguistic approach to textual analysis usefully exposes the interconnectedness of gender, race, and sexuality at the heart of a modern conservationist campaign, and suggest that this framework complements queer geographic and intersectional approaches to racism.
... Stadler, 2008), advertisements (e.g. Milani & Shaikjee, 2013) and online news (e.g. Disemelo, 2015). ...
In this paper, we examine representations of masculinity in the English-language South African print media. Using both quantitative and qualitative techniques to interrogate a large corpus (18 million words) of English-language newspaper articles on masculinity that appeared in South Africa between 2008 and 2014, we investigate the ways in which different South African masculine types are positioned with respect to one another in the media and examine how these positionings draw on broader tropes of gender, race and social class that circulate in South African society. Ultimately, our goal is to provide a more nuanced picture of gender/sexual hegemony in South Africa that goes beyond a simple opposition between dominant versus subordinate forms of masculinity to explore the range of competing normativities in the region. In doing so, we also aim to contribute to debates about the role of norms and normativities in the theorizing of masculinity more broadly.
... Within this historical and contemporary context, this study assumes that since 'culture is continually shaped by socio-historical and political processes' (Cruz and Sonn 2011:203), an analysis of terms for black male genitalia will provide insights into linguistic gendering practices, because 'words we use to talk about sex have a great deal to do with how we think about gender' (Zimman 2014), and the ways the history of race continues to shape contemporary Southern African masculinities and the black male body. Southern African masculinities have been an active area of research, as shown by studies by Ratele (1998), Morrell (1994Morrell ( , 1998Morrell ( , 2001Morrell ( , 2002, Morrell et al. (2012), Gibson and Hardon (2005), Shefer et al. (2007), Milani (2011), Vetten and Ratele (2013), and Milani and Shaikjee (2013). Most of these studies have shown that Southern African masculinities are inherently contradictory. ...
This article explores the discursive construction of sexual racism through names assigned to the black penis by black male college students in Southern Africa. This analysis reveals use of three frequently occurring metaphors: zoomorphs, weapons and heroic historical figures. Collectively, these frequently occurring metaphors associate Southern African black men with notions of (i) wild, animalistic sexuality, (ii) dangerous, violent behaviour, and (iii) large sexual organs, which were prevalent racist ideologies of black male bodies during the colonial period. In addition, perceptions of sociocultural power dynamics attributed to patriarchy are foregrounded through metaphors related to royalty, indicating that names assigned to male genitalia align not only with the colonial construction of sexual racism but also with patriarchal gender relations. The article concludes by suggesting that names assigned to the black penis embody inherent contradictions that are not only characteristic of Southern African masculinities but also significantly complicate the dichotomy between 'self' and 'other', or 'us' and 'them', in contemporary Southern Africa.
This article analyzes the semiotic representations of gender through the language practices of Cameroonian youth observed in Tu Know Ma Life (You know my life), a YouTube series popular among the French Cameroonian diaspora that follows the daily life of nine young middle- and upper-class Cameroonian immigrants (five women and four men) living in Paris. This series is regarded by its audience as an authentic representation of Cameroonian identity, partly due to its remarkable use of Francanglais, a hybrid youth slang spoken in Cameroon. I analyze how the mediatized representation of Francanglais practices in the first season of the YouTube series contributes to the linguistic construction of gender differentiations. I argue that through the highly gendered use of Francanglais and French by women and men, the series reproduces hegemonic gender ideologies while reinforcing the ideological association between Francanglais and hegemonic heterosexual masculinity.
This handbook is the first volume to offer a sustained theoretical exploration of all aspects of language and race from a linguistic anthropological perspective. A growing number of scholars hold that rather than fixed and pre-determined, race is created out of continuous and repeated discourses emerging from individuals and institutions within specific histories, political economic systems, and everyday interactions. This handbook demonstrates how linguistic analysis brings a crucial perspective to this project by revealing the ways in which language and race are mutually constituted as social realities. Not only do we position issues of race, racism, and racialization as central to language-based scholarship, but we also examine these processes from an explicitly critical and anti-racist perspective. The process of racialization—an enduring yet evolving social process steeped in centuries of colonialism and capitalism—is central to linguistic anthropological approaches. This volume captures state-of-the-art research in this important and necessary yet often overlooked area of inquiry and points the way forward in establishing future directions of research in this rapidly expanding field, including the need for more studies of language and race in non-U.S. contexts. Covering a range of sites from Angola, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Italy, Liberia, the Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, and unceded Indigenous territories, the handbook offers theoretical, reflexive takes on the field of language and race, the larger histories and systems that influence these concepts, the bodies that enact and experience them, and finally, the expressions and outcomes that emerge as a result.
The relationship between gender and advertising has been discussed extensively. Scholarly works have often emanated from the West and have principally centred on visual advertisements, rather than radio (which plays a critical role in the lives of many Africans). Most of these studies have centred on how women are represented in traditionally stereotyped ways. However, recent studies have shown decreases in these stereotypes as ways of responding to changes in gender roles. But do gender-related adverts from Africa reflect the changing statuses and roles of African women (some of which challenge traditional gender stereotypes)? This article investigates how women are represented in Ghanaian radio commercials and indicates whether such representations reproduce, reinforce, or challenge feminine practices. An analysis of thirty-seven gender-related adverts reveals that, although women are rarely represented as challenging gender stereotypes, they are sometimes represented as using certain traditionally stereotyped roles as sources of ‘power’ to challenge other stereotypes. (Advertising, gender stereotypes, women, radio, Ghana, ideals of femininity)*
This chapter investigates a potential shift in representational regimes and the consumerist exploitation of the rectum, a male body part often considered taboo. The analysis is based on a set of advertising texts that promote sex toys that are said to improve the health of the male prostate, as well as produce sexual enjoyment. The chapter also seeks to re-purpose a queer theoretical approach to discourse analysis in light of a neo-Marxian commitment to unveiling the economic rationale underpinning neo-liberal regimes of consumer culture.
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