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White Women and Antiracism in the (Post)Colony of South Africa
... Additionally post-colonial feminists also recognised this scenario as a reminder of how gender, religion and ethnicity marginalise Muslim women. The novel depiction highlighted how Muslim women are marginalised as women and religious minorities as the post-colonial feminist literature emphasised over the special obstacles of women of colour in predominately white, Western society (Coetzee et al., 2024). In compliance to the current finding the other research studies also established that stereotyping affect Muslim woman's identities and relationships as due to unfavourable Islam stereotypes, Dr. Sawsan Jaber (2022) discovered that Muslim American teenagers particularly girls, feel vulnerable and alienated thus stereotypes lower their self-esteem and impair their connections with classmates and instructors, causing a sense of alienation. ...
This Paper examines Muslim women's struggles with social expectations and religious identities in two novels: "The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf" by MohjaKahf and "Does My Head Look Big In This?". In the context of Muslim women's feminine identities amidst conflict due to religious visibility like Hijab in socially anticipated and demanding western settings, modern Anglophone literature is examined. Post-colonial feminist theory is used to analyse the text qualitatively through critical reading revealing literary aspects and representations that underscore Muslim women's struggles in Western countries. The research uses McKee's interpretive textual analysis, emphasising context and various interpretations as the autonomy, resilience, cultural integration, prejudice followed by identity were key words and themes in data collecting.The research revealed that Muslim women's complicated identity struggled between religious visibility and Western social expectations as in Randa Abdel-Fattah's work, the protagonist endured sleeplessness owing to the dread of wearing the headscarf in a potentially hostile situation. This internal conflict demonstrated how societal marginalisation affects Muslim women's mental health, as they must balance their religious identification with the dread of social discrimination. Additionally the conflict between cultural values and social inclusion is another important discovery as Uncle Joe's admonition to hide one's culture for social progress highlighted the conflict between cultural authenticity and social acceptability under which Muslim women and their families feel forced to sacrifice Islamic values for social and economic prospects in the diaspora. Similarly the protagonist's distress when her community is wrongly identified with Islamic radicalism showed how stereotyping affects relationships as this example demonstrated how daily micro-aggressions. On the other hand, Khadra's hijab experience in "The Girl with the Tangerine Scarf" emphasised its symbolic and emotional meaning as her resolve to wear the broken hijab showed her tenacity in keeping her cultural and religious identity despite social pressures. Along with that the ideological conflict between Islamic and Western values is concluded by Khadra's condemnation of Western individualism as her prioritisation of community over self-interest showed the basic difference in values.The research highlighted that Muslim women in Western nations struggle to preserve their religious and cultural identities despite competing social expectations. Identity negotiation is complicated by psychological stress, assimilation pressure, stereotyping and ideological disagreements while the Cultural competency, empathy and inclusive policies that recognise and accept multiple identities are needed to facilitate Muslim women's free expression. Keywords: Identity Negotiation, Religious Visibility, Cultural Integration, Psychological Strain and Stereotyping.
This is the text of a talk given at the 'What's Left of Sexual Democracy' conference, held at Newcastle University May 25-27 2023.
Social movements often face the danger of becoming the very thing they are fighting against. This tension is evident within the student movement, Rhodes Must Fall, at the University of Cape Town. This dialectic is explored through the notion of 'alienation' as a concept of social philosophy. I argue that while the movement emerges from the experience of alienation, certain behaviours internal to the movement can also proceed to cause alienation. The lesson to be learnt from this contradiction is that we are all simultaneously oppressors and oppressed. From this emerges a positive understanding of alienation, as the experience of alienation is not only a negative one. One such positive lesson in this case is the alteration of our understandings of ourselves and others toward an all-inclusive liberation agenda. Failure to heed this could see the transformation potential of such movements like Rhodes Must Fall hijacked by hypocrisy.
New and resurgent movements to decolonise higher education are increasingly found throughout the globe in the context of settler colonies, former colonies, and former colonial metropoles alike. As Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars located in what is currently known as Canada, in this chapter, we reflect on what we have learned from mainstream efforts to address the country’s history of harm toward Indigenous peoples, and specifically, to address the ongoing role of higher education in colonialism. These efforts have created precarious openings for not only reflecting on but also transforming universities within a still-colonial society. Without dismissing the possibilities enabled by these openings, we find that in practice many circular patterns emerge that reproduce underlying colonial ways of knowing, doing, desiring, and being that make up the primary infrastructures of modern modes of existence. While the mainstream academic imperative would require that we follow-up this diagnosis with prescriptive solutions for how to interrupt these colonial patterns in order to arrive at a predetermined decolonised future (decolonisation as a singular event), we suggest instead that decolonisation requires a long-term commitment to sit with and work through our individual and collective investments in harmful patterns so that we might disinvest from them and learn to be otherwise (decolonisation as an ongoing process). Particularly in the context of contemporary crises that are themselves a product of harmful and unsustainable modes of life – climate change, political instability, economic insecurity – only the latter approach to decolonisation offers the potential to open up new possibilities for current and future generations to learn to live together differently on a finite planet. Our conception of decolonisation takes on a holistic view, one that transcends or rather challenges an anthropocentric worldview and begins to take seriously our collective commons as the starting point for conversation around justice, in its substantive form. Further, in this context, the need for alternative horizons of possibility takes on a renewed urgency.
We begin the chapter by briefly reviewing the primary dimensions of colonialism and current efforts to address colonialism in the Canadian higher education context, so as to situate our contribution. Then, we review critical commentaries on the limits of approaches to decolonisation that are premised on the inclusion of (Indigenous) difference and do little to address the underlying colonial conditions of possibility for the institution. Rather than diagnose the problem of inclusion as one of tokenism that can be addressed through more radicalised inclusion (e.g. centring marginalised knowledges), we suggest that inclusion itself is a flawed proposition as it presumes the underlying continuity of what we diagnose as an inherently unsustainable and violent system with its accompanying set of institutions and subjectivities. In order to gesture toward what might be possible if we did not presume that the modern/colonial university can or should be salvaged, we propose two pedagogical invitations that gesture toward the decolonisation of higher education as a complex, multi-layered process of learning to be otherwise: 1) Starting and staying with the complexities and difficulties involved in making change, including the structural complicity of those making change, so as to develop the necessary stamina for long-term transformation; 2) Drawing on Santos’s notion of an ecology of knowledges and ignorances, while developing the ability to discern the contextually-relevant gifts and limitations of all ways of knowing, so as to ultimately cultivate socially, historically, and ecologically accountable pluralistic propositional thinking.
Moi, quad quelque chose me dkpasse, j e ris seulement. DOUALA RESIDENT, August 1993 he following remarks are about subjectivities of "the crisis" and their corol-T lary, the crisis of the subject. The first term refers to the crisis as a constitu-tive site of particular forms of subjectivity. The second term invokes the crisis of the very act of signifying this moment. These two instances, constitution and signification, are decisive elements in the generalized production of violence in the world today. They are also instances of its specificity. The moment being considered, then, is not without date, place or name. In fact, the object of our commentary is a precise phenomenon: contemporaneousness. Its real time can only be called the "immediate present." And it is the spirit (esprit), visibility and profanity of this immediate present that is at the heart of our inquiry.
Dynamics of race in South Africa are deeply entangled within a world system that continues to enable hegemonic white privilege. Prevalent views and behaviours towards “interracial” relationships reveal a rebellion against the non-racial philosophies and policies of the new government and are an indicator of the ongoing salience of race in shaping lived experience. Drawing on interviews with couples in so-called “interracial” relationships, this article argues that unequal power dynamics continue to hyperracialize and regulate these relationships through “privatized” racial boundary policing, even though such relationships are no longer stigmatized and criminalized by the state as in apartheid South Africa. Their experiences of racism show up in two distinct ways: aggressive policing and covert policing; these in turn can lead to self-policing, and perpetuate racial social organization.
This article analyses how issues of race influence the occupational culture of the armed response sector, a particular part of the private security industry, in Durban, South Africa. In addition to analysing the racial hierarchy of the industry, this article examines the ‘Bravo Mike Syndrome' – Bravo Mike meaning black male in NATO phonetic alphabet code. The ‘Bravo Mike Syndrome' refers to the racialised imaginaries of criminals and the subsequent policing practices performed by armed response officers to protect clients from this racially constructed dangerous ‘Other’. However, as the majority of armed response officers are ‘Bravo Mikes’ themselves, there is a constant element of friction in their performances. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article thus analyses how racialised understandings of crime influence, and are reproduced by, private policing practices, thereby contributing to studies on private security occupational cultures and racial profiling.
Nira Yuval-Davis provides a brief introduction to the concept of transversal politics. Like many other feminist activists, I have been in search of a name for what so many of us are doing. 1 I found it when I was invited by Italian feminists from Bologna to a meeting they organised between Palestinian and Israeli (both Jewish and Palestinian) women which took place in 1993. I later learned that there has been a whole tradition of autonomous left politics in Bologna under the name of transversal politics. Before describing what transversal politics is, it is important to state what it is not. Transversal politics has been developed as an alternative to the assimilationist 'universalistic' politics of the Left on the one hand, and to identity politics on the other hand. While the first has proved to be ethnocentric and exclusionary, the second has proved to be essentialist, reifying boundaries between groups and, by homogenising and collapsing individual into collective identities, undemocratic within groups. Transversal politics is based on the following. First, standpoint epistemology, which recognises that from each positioning the world is seen differently, and 1. E.g. 'unity in diversity' -see Nira Yuval-Davis, 'Identity politics and women' s ethnicity' in V.M. Moghadam (ed), Identity Politics and Women, Westview Press, Bolder, Co 1994; and Kuniari Jawayardena, The White Woman Oilier Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Ride, Routledge, London 1995, pl0.
Feminist literary critics and historians have examined the role of a triad of social locations that are also recognisable as psychological conditions, structures of feeling and motivations for action: guilt, innocence and culpability. Feminist literary critics and historians have examined this triad guilt/innocence/culpability in cultural representations of white femininity in the post-apartheid era, because they are trying to write white women into the history of apartheid not simply as zombified non-actors. The attention to white women as perpetrators of anti-black and other forms of racialised violence has been critical for excavating the many forms of domination that constituted apartheid in the period prior to 1994 and in the political project of re-making a post-apartheid society. Thus, they wish to place white women into the history of apartheid as perpetrators of anti-black violence. I am concerned with this, but also with white women as perpetrators of racialised anti-white violence, because intra-racial violence is so intimately connected to the creation of inter-racial violence and the maintenance of white supremacy. Thus, while white women's pursuit of status as caretakers and social guides for blacks has been unmasked as a feature of domination and white supremacy, white women's relationships to poor white women have not been critiqued with the same robustness. This article utilises Marie Elizabeth Rothmann's (1875–1975) volume for The Poor White Study on The Mother and Daughter of the Poor Family (1932) to consider this subject in the vignettes, oral histories and life histories collected for inclusion in the Poor White Study, and in order to urge greater attention to the Poor White Study as a data set for re-thinking guilt, innocence and culpability. I discuss the race, class and gender dynamics of the racialisation of poverty among poor whites, because poor whites were an essential racial formation in the manufacture of Afrikaner nationalism as a gendered national project, and because the institutions and practices of rehabilitation of poor whites participated in a colonial logic of demonisation. I argue that Marie Elizabeth Rothmann's report for the Poor White study provides a cartography of how the history of philanthropy and welfarism bound poor white women and upper-class white women together in a dynamic of intra-racial violence which profoundly illuminates theories about white female guilt and culpability.
In this article I focus on two central tensions around gender. In the first place there exists a tension between the broad, sometimes vague commitments to women's liberation that are rooted in the ANC's history as a national liberation movement and the specific policy directions that it adopts as a party in government. In the former strand there is an emphasis on radical structural change and an overturn of the systemic legacies of apartheid. In the latter, the party's focus on the creation of a black middle class and its failure thus far to deal with the economic marginalization of women make addressing structural inequalities difficult. In order to unpack the first tension, I trace the conflicting meanings of national liberation within the party. Attempts to accommodate this tension are reflected in the way gender as an issue becomes a concern to be addressed through developmentalism, in such a way that the radical or substantive content, which was a feature of the liberation struggle, is lost. In the process, gender concerns have been delinked from feminist concerns. The transfer of gender to development leads us into the second tension in ANC thinking around gender. The ANC's projection of itself as a modernizing force is reflected in gender concerns which locate gender in development, with consequences for what is possible in terms of substantive gender change. This position, though, is often contradicted by the presence within the party of socially conservative and traditional discourses of gender, for whom gender equality is often little more than a rhetorical commitment. In the article I examine why this is so. Cutting across both of these tensions and finding space as a result of them are the party's achievements with respect to gender equality. Both historically and in comparison with other developing countries, the ANC has done more to champion issues of gender equality than any other former national liberation movement. I argue that this track record could have been better. In the final section of this article I examine the history of gender activism in the party over the last 11 years, in order to examine the constraints to further gains.
With sustained challenges to European rule in African and Asian colonies in the early 20th century, sexual prescriptions by class, race and gender became increasingly central to the politics of rule and subject to new forms of scrutiny by colonial states. Focusing on the Netherlands Indies and French Indochina, but drawing on other contexts, this article examines how the very categories of “colonizer” and “colonized” were increasingly secured through forms of sexual control which defined the common political interests of European colonials and the cultural investments by which they identified themselves. The metropolitan and colonial discourses on health, “racial degeneracy,” and social reform from this period reveal how sexual sanctions demarcated positions of power by enforcing middle-class conventions of respectability and thus the personal and public boundaries of race.[sexuality, race-thinking, hygiene, colonial cultures, Southeast Asia]
The South African Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was a significant source of sex education for white youth in particular, and encouraged adults to equip their children with the information that would prepare them for marriage and parenthood. This article argues that while much of the WCTU’s interest in sex education was informed by eugenic anxieties about the health of the new Union of South Africa, the organization’s archive can also be read for evidence of mothers’ reasons for seeking sex education. It suggests there was a heightened demand for sex education in the 1910s–1930s that was driven, in part, by women’s desire to prepare their daughters for adulthood in a rapidly changing society. Analysis of the WCTU’s promotional periodical The White Ribbon (including the rhetoric used by its leadership) is complemented here by an examination of local branch committee minutes and by a quantitative and qualitative study of the educational materials that the organization distributed across South Africa.
In the heated debates over identity politics, few theorists have looked carefully at the conceptualizations of identity assumed by all sides. Drawing on both philosophical sources as well as theories and empirical studies in the social sciences, this book makes a strong case that identities are not like special interests, nor are they doomed to oppositional politics, nor do they inevitably lead to conformism, essentialism, or reductive approaches to judging others. Identities are historical formations and their political implications are open to interpretation. But identities such as race and gender also have a powerful visual and material aspect that eliminativists and social constructionists often underestimate. This book analyses the political and philosophical worries about identity and argues that these worries are neither supported by the empirical data nor grounded in realistic understandings of what identities are. The book develops a more realistic characterization of identity in general through combining phenomenological approaches to embodiment with hermeneutic concepts of the interpretive horizon. Besides addressing the general contours of social identity, the book develops an account of the material infrastructure of gendered identity, compares and contrasts gender identities with racialized ones, and explores the experiential aspects of racial subjectivity for both whites and non-whites. In several chapters the book looks specifically at Latino identity as well, including its relationship to concepts of race, the specific forms of anti-Latino racism, and the politics of mestizo or hybrid identity.
This is a study of South African literature through the prism of narratives of sexual violence. While most incidents of sexual assault in South Africa are interracial, narratives of interracial rape have dominated the national imaginary. South African literature has again and again circled back to images of "black peril" (representations of the rape of white women by black men) and "white peril" representations that show the rape of colonised women by colonising men. Taking an historical and comparative perspective, the book uses as theoretical underpinning Michel Foucault's ideas on sexuality and biopolitics and Judith Butler's speculations on race and cultural melancholia. Avoiding a simplistic feminist perspective, the book examines the complex ways in which race, gender and class work together in the literary texts under examination. Where relevant, it examines the production, dissemination and reception of the selected texts. The books argues for an ethically responsible and dialectical approach that recognises high levels of sexual violence in South Africa, but also examines the racialised inferences and assumptions implicit in representations of bodily violation.
I. Empire of the Home 1. The Lay of the Land 2. "Massa and Maids 3. Imperial Leather 4. Psychoanalysis, Race and Female Fetish II. Double Crossings 5. Soft-Soaping Empire 6. The White Family of Man 7. Olive Schreiner III. Dismantling the Master's House 8. The Scandal of Hybridity 9. "Azikwelwa" (We Will Not Ride) 10. No Longer in a Future Heading
This article considers how the issue of rape in South Africa is discursively constructed by women who have not experienced it. Taking a feminist discursive analytic approach to data from 15 semi-structured interviews, the article identifies four interpretative repertoires which the women used in their talk of rape. These are the statistics repertoire, invoking putatively objective rape statistics; crime repertoire, locating rape within a crisis of crime; race repertoire, naming the racial Other as the rapist; and gender repertoire, explaining rape in terms of normal gendered dynamics and practices. The women chiefly deployed the statistics, crime and race repertoires. These repertoires intersected to construct rape as horrifically prevalent in South Africa yet concerning a classed, raced and spatially-distanced Other'. They also elided a focus on the gendered scripts and power relations which South African feminists implicate centrally in what they deem a national rape crisis.
Debates around deconstruction and difference have influenced, interested, angered and confused feminists in recent years. Cheryl Hendricks and Desiree Lewis discuss trends in current feminist theory
In this paper I explore white attempts to move toward a proactive position against racism that will amount to more than self-Criticism in the following three ways: by assessing the debate within feminism over white women's relation to whiteness; by exploring “white awareness training” methods developed by]udith Katz and the “race traitor” politics developed by Ignatiev and Garvey, and; a case study of white revisionism being currently attempted at the University of Mississippi.
This article critiques dominant feminist analyses of the “Hottentot Venus.” It argues that these analyses of the construction of Black women as “other,” which borrow heavily from poststructuralism, make race and gender transhistorical and metaphysical constructs. The article critiques what has become the theoretical orthodoxy on the “Hottentot Venus.” It takes issue with two presumptions in particular: first, that there was a core image of the Black woman in the nineteenth century, and second, that the fear of the anatomy of the “other” is the source of negative representations of Black sexuality. The article proposes an alternative way of understanding the construction of Black women in colonial discourse. It argues that social relations, rather than psychological dispositions, determine how bodies are seen and perceived.
South Africa has the worst known figures for gender-based violence for a country not at war. At least one in three South African women will be raped in her lifetime. The rates of sexual violence against women and children, as well as the signal failure of the criminal justice and health systems to curtail the crisis, suggest an unacknowledged gender civil war. Yet narratives about rape continue to be rewritten as stories about race, rather than gender. This stifles debate, demonises black men, hardens racial barriers, and greatly hampers both disclosure and educational efforts. As an alternative to racially-inflected explanations, I argue that contemporary sexual violence in South Africa is fuelled by justificatory narratives that are rooted in apartheid practices that legitimated violence by the dominant group against the disempowered, not only in overtly political arenas, but in social, informal and domestic spaces. In South Africa, gender rankings are maintained and women regulated through rape, the most intimate form of violence. Thus, in post-apartheid, democratic South Africa, sexual violence has become a socially endorsed punitive project for maintaining patriarchal order. Men use rape to inscribe subordinate status on to an intimately known ‘Other’ – women. This is generally and globally true of rape, but in the case of South Africa, such activities draw on apartheid practices of control that have permeated all sectors of society.
Les elections sud-africaines de 1938 ont tourne autour d'un poster condamnant les mariages mixtes : le courant dur des nationalistes afrikaner dirige par Malan voulait renverser le gouvernement du Parti Uni de Hertzog et Smuts en montrant le danger pour les hommes de voir les femmes afrikaner mariees a des Noirs qui les feraient travailler. Si le Parti Uni etait aussi contre les mariages mixtes, la legislation ne sui semblait pas etre le meilleur moyen de l'empecher. Cette campagne renforca l'opinion raciste
The post-apartheid era has generated opportunities for cross-racial mixing and socializing among young people inconceivable under apartheid, and this perhaps is no more apparent than in the formation of racially mixed public schools. In this article we draw on an interview study that seeks to investigate Grade 11 (16—17-year-old) young people and their lives and identities in different schools near Durban. We concentrate on interviews conducted with a group of middle-class white girls in a formerly white school and we examine whether and if so how they draw on whiteness when asked to reflect on themselves and their relations with others in and outside the school. While we begin with how these girls spoke about themselves and their relations with others in the school, we focus mainly in this article on these girls’ accounts of cross-racial heterosexual relations outside the school. In their accounts of schooling whiteness was constructed in opposition to versions of blackness associated with racial essentialism and intransigence. What was very striking was how positively they presented (heterosexual) desire when directed to boys of other races, associating this with free will and agency as against ‘constraints’ imposed by their parents, peers and culture. In these accounts their sense of whiteness seemed much less assured and taken for granted than in their accounts of their relations with black girls in school. Whereas, we argue, white girls drew on versions of whiteness (and blackness) in school that reinforced racial divisions and hierarchies, despite presenting themselves as non-racial, their interest in cross-racial heterosexual relations and expressions of cross-racial desire subverted racial essentialisms even if, in some cases, this was extremely limited.
This article is a case study of the Afrikaanse Christelike Vroue Vereniging, from its inception in 1904 to the late 1920s. Did the grass‐roots activities of this women's organisation contribute significantly to the making of ‘Afrikaner’ subjects? Here, it is argued that women were active participants in the construction of Afrikaner nationalism. The ACVV's leaders proclaimed the organisation's support for Afrikaner nationalism, and identified poor ‘Afrikaners’ as recipients of their welfare efforts. However, middle‐class women from the Cape Town and larger platteland towns, and poorer women from isolated rural areas jointed the ACVV for different reasons. The extent to which ACVV members identified with Afrikaner nationalism also varied considerably. By the late 1920s, the ACVV executive's nationalist message had failed to reach significant numbers of its own members on the platteland. Branches in the Cape's industrialising centres actively supported Afrikaner nationalism, and consistently applied ethnic criteria to their welfare work. However, the ‘imagined community’ of many rural members was still the local parish rather than the volk. Even so, it is argued that this women's organisation played an important role in the construction of Afrikaner nationalism. Urban as well as rural ACVVs drew dislocated Afrikaans‐speakers into support networks and church community structures, and so rendered them more accessible to nationalist discourse.
For a country subjected to many decades of rigid censorship, along with various cultural taboos, discussion and argument on matters of sex and sexuality since 1994 has been remarkable. This article examines how and why this is the case. I look at ‘how sex is put into discourse’ and how this discursive constitution of sexuality has been informed by wider dimensions of the post-apartheid order.
Unexpectedly, sexuality has become one of the principal sites of contestation in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper demonstrates and accounts for the politicization of sex and sexuality in South Africa since 1994. The first part examines the discursive constitution of sexuality and the ways in which this has been informed by wider dimensions of the post-apartheid social order. Drawing on this discussion, the second part proposes a reading of the notorious HIV/AIDS controversy, which drew President Mbeki directly into the political fray. The paper argues that the controversy, although immediately concerned with the science and treatment of HIV/AIDS, is also a struggle over the discursive constitution of sexuality, in a form which dramatizes the ways in which recently contentious struggles over the manner of sexuality are enmeshed in the politics of ‘nation-building’, and the inflections of race, class and generation within it.RésuméÉtonnamment, la sexualité est devenue l'un des principaux terrains de contestation dans l'Afrique du Sud post-apartheid. Ce papier démontre et rend compte de la politisation du sexe et de la sexualité en Afrique du Sud depuis 1994. La première partie examine la constitution discursive de la sexualité et l'influence qu'ont exercée sur elle des dimensions plus larges de l'ordre social post-apartheid. Partant de cette discussion, la seconde partie propose une lecture de la fameuse controverse HIV/SIDA qui a plongé le Président Mbeki dans la tourmente politique. Ce papier affirme que cette controverse, bien que traitant directement de la science et du traitement du HIV/SIDA, est aussi une lutte au sujet de la constitution discursive de la sexualité, sous une forme qui met en évidence la manière dont les luttes récentes au sujet de la sexualité sont mêlées à la politique de formation de la nation et aux inflexions de race, de classe et de génération qu/elle implique.
In “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” (Lugones 2007), I proposed to read the relation between the colonizer and the colonized in terms of gender, race, and sexuality. By this I did not mean to add a gendered reading and a racial reading to the already understood colonial relations. Rather I proposed a rereading of modern capitalist colonial modernity itself. This is because the colonial imposition of gender cuts across questions of ecology, economics, government, relations with the spirit world, and knowledge, as well as across everyday practices that either habituate us to take care of the world or to destroy it. I propose this framework not as an abstraction from lived experience, but as a lens that enables us to see what is hidden from our understandings of both race and gender and the relation of each to normative heterosexuality.
In this paper, Weir reconsiders identity politics and their relation to feminist solidarity. She argues that the dimension of identity as “identification-with” has been the liberatory dimension of identity politics, and that this dimension has been overshadowed and displaced by a focus on identity as category. Weir addresses critiques of identification as a ground of solidarity, and sketches a model of identity and identity politics based not in sameness, but in transformative historical process.
The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms “the coloniality of power” and “modernity.” The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the “civilized” West.
In an effort to disentangle the threads of the complex, interwoven fabric of apartheid sexualities, this paper draws on narratives of the Apartheid Archive Project to explore the sexualizing force of racism and the racialising force of gendered sexuality. We do this by isolating three key dynamics operating on both the material and the psychical terrains of apartheid: the construction of the black male body as physically and sexually dangerous; the white ‘neurotic’ desire for the black ‘other’, a desire shaped by the historical conditions of apartheid; and white masculine power and entitlement. Our analysis suggests that it is the very demonization of the black male body that facilitates in white females a desire for that which is terrifying and forbidden and that both dynamics are ultimately in the service of entrenching and rationalizing white male power and privilege.