Contemporary African Mediations of Affect and Access

Helene Strauss, Sarah Olutola, Jessie Forsyth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351794848
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique africaine

Across Africa, new collectivities are shifting the terms within which access to economic opportunity, social belonging, and political agency have historically been understood. Recent years have seen powerful waves of civic mobilization sweep across the continent. Less prominent articulations of contemporary political desire have also been percolating through the diffuse experiences of the African everyday. As differential access to global capitalism and its promises folds into modes of subjection—and escape—that are hard to predict, those who exercise power find ever more ways of guarding the borders and memberships of privileged groups. This book turns to the critically entangled terms of affect and access as a basis for exploring emergent orientations in the field of African cultural theorizing. It pays especial attention to scholarship engaging with the multifaceted coordinates of political and social participation, where complex assemblages of affective attachment, exchange, and realignment work in concert with demands for socio-political and economic forms of access. This book was originally published as a special issue of Safundi.

A peculiar place for a feminist? The New South African woman, True Love magazine and Lebo(gang) Mashile

Pumla Dineo Gqola

Department of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Republic of South Africa

ABSTRACT
Among the least studied aspects of post-apartheid South African public culture is the emergence of the trope of the New South African woman (NSAW). As a feature of public life that receives high circulation in the first two decades of South Africa’s democracy, the NSAW works aspirationally and normatively. In this essay, I am concerned with one feminist artist’s varied engagements with the NSAW. I analyze Lebogang Mashile’s column in and fallout with True Love magazine and delineate features of the NSAW trope, a construction of femininity at once aspirational and restrictive. Throughout this essay, although I draw on the literature on “new women” from other societies in transition, the “new” in NSAW refers to one of a range of highly circulated aspirational subjectivities in post-apartheid South Africa. Consequently, the “new” in the NSAW trope refers to the labeling of commonplace usage of “new South Africa” for South African society after 1994.

Post-apartheid policies of black empowerment, across a range of public social, economic, political and cultural spaces and institutions, have spectacularly stationed the black body at the centre of almost all kinds of public intercourses and activities.¹ (Odhiambo, “The Black Female Body”)

Media discourses on consumption in South Africa are not perceived reductively as a straightforward insistence by Africans on “going West” … but rather in terms of the ways they enable people to devise new ways of doing things in life … and access new resources and sets of strategies directed at the social and individual production of selfhood …. In this regard we should be attentive to the transformative power and local reworkings, not merely culturally homogenising effects, of commercial media discourses, consumer culture and patterns of consumption, and their impact(s) on people’s senses of social membership and individual selfhood.² (Narunsky-Laden, “Identity in Post-apartheid South Africa”)

In the post-apartheid period, South African political and public discourse has been saturated with metaphors of rupture from the past, though many regarded characterizations of the country’s democracy as “a miracle” as obscuring the high cost paid by many for the end of apartheid. When Archbishop Desmond Tutu coined the phrase “the rainbow children of God,” which soon entered widespread media circulation as “the rainbow nation,” there was deliberate movement away from fear of difference to a sentiment expressed later in the South African coat of arms as “unity in diversity.” These narratives, which sought to imagine a country in formation, seem “very tidy before and after,” in their sense of the transformation, whereas “in fact tension and co-existence” are more accurate.³

The future was imagined in metaphors of somatic difference, where such variety could be embraced as a source of pride not division. In other words, the imagined future was an embodied collective self-construction, which is to say imagined, corporeally performed, and envisaged through bodies. Apartheid legislation was unabashedly fixated on the regulation of bodies, with limiting movement, legalizing bodily contact, with measuring hair texture, with the regulation of labor, sexuality, and reproduction, on the punishment of the body through beatings, shootings, and poverty. In a democratic South Africa, the body had to be imagined anew: as free, mobile, flourishing, exploratory. The fall of apartheid coincided with the global rise of an unfettered neoliberal and globalizing world economy, however, which was to have implications for government policy. Indeed this global reality was implicated in the ultimate rejection of social democratic projects, like the Reconstruction and Development Program, in favor of a series of business- and corporate-friendly government programs and policies. The imagining of the material body, and of the body politic, like all nationalist processes, was also a gendered process. Post-apartheid gender-progressive legislation was also often aspirational, inspired, and pushed through by very strategic activists through a range of efforts such as the National Women’s Coalition, which saw women organize across political lines to ensure the laws of the new country would be gender-progressive.

The intersections of post-apartheid class, gender, and race aspiration produced a range of possibilities. One of the most highly circulated was the trope of the New South African woman (NSAW). This trope signaled both a departure from hegemonic apartheid femininities and an attempt to imagine the kind of agentic existence women might aspire to in a free country. At the very base of the trope’s emergence was the recognition that apartheid’s limitations of women’s lives worked through violent intersectionalities of white supremacy, patriarchy, and class oppression, the latter often used interchangeably with economic alienation rather than capitalism, per se. This intersectional triple violence very clearly limited women’s life choices and movement and undervalued them through institutional silencing, policing, and legal minorization.

There is abundant literature on how historically societies in transition have produced new identities, and specifically femininities, at once contesting values of the past and charting new ways of existing as a woman, and as women in the emerging societies.⁴ The trope of the NSAW shares some attributes with the historic performances of femininities explored in this literature. At the same time, the NSAW stands apart in very marked ways. She is linked to the growth of women’s entry into public and politically powerful spaces in various capacities, to women’s and Black Economic Empowerment⁵ to make financially independent decisions and also grow their consumer status. The specific coupling of financial freedom with demonstrable class mobility ultimately leads to the NSAW being a highly corporatized and monetized figure. An attempt to move away from racial oppression and the prescription of women’s lives as seen under apartheid translates in very similar expressions of the NSAW across race.

Scholarship on the rise of “new women” as fictional and/or journalistic creations or actual concrete historical subjects from different localities and temporalities illustrates something about the conditions of her emergence. The “new woman” responds to very specific political conditions, usually when the society of her emergence is in transition accompanied by a hopeful loosening of gender restrictions. Briefly turning to some of this scholarship is instructive on the workings of a gendered imagination in times of flux.

Sally Ledger writes of the emergence of the “new woman” in fiction at the end of the nineteenth century in Western Europe, as “a discursive response to the activities” and political environment of the time, and one that was “predominantly a journalistic phenomenon, a product of discourse.”⁶ Jusová adds an important caution to the imagined new woman Ledger writes of, pointing out the contradictions in how the Fin de Siecle woman was conceived of. She demonstrates that the new woman’s feminist ideals notwithstanding, both her fictional and real-life expressions, also often marked her as “an imperialist feminist,” embodying a subject position in which “[h]er feminist consciousness, was at the same time, informed by her growing sense of privilege.”⁷ This combination of transgressive femininities with an attachment to respectability is traced by Ledger and Jusová, who echoes Jessica Ogden’s work in the Ugandan context. Ogden writes of the presence of both “continuities and discontinuities” in the constructions of womanhood as Uganda transitioned from colonialism to an independent country and links some of these to the signaling of and “a struggle for respectability through economic and symbolic means, through hard work and marriage.”⁸ This attachment to respectability while questioning some of the restrictions that come from being a woman, and moving into power, is also very clearly manifested in the NSAW, as the discussion below will show.

Whereas Ogden, Ledger, and Jusová point to a named phenomenon, Jin Feng’s study of the twentieth-century new woman in Chinese fiction shares further characteristics with the phenomenon that I am concerned with here. Feng’s character is largely unnamed and taken for granted, uncommented on by cultural commentators in ways that directly contradict the high circulation in media of this type of woman. Like Feng’s fictional characters, the NSAW “appears as a highly priviledged urban figure that can take a number of different forms” but unlike the women characters in Feng’s study, the NSAW does not completely transgress the stereotypical feminine roles of good wife.⁹

In yet another context, Meenakshi Thapan traces the emergence and circulation of an idealized representation of the “new” Indian woman in the magazine Femina. Thapan’s “new woman” is a product of radical shifts in Indian collective self-imagination, which is drawn from women’s actual lived experienced as grappling with such shifts as well as other realities. Thapan’s “new Indian woman” is visually constructed, which both contests and conforms to generalized patriarchal femininities, and is framed as “glamorous” through her body in a form of beauty that is constructed a global desirability and that also marks her as “a commercialized product for consumption.”¹⁰ Thapan argues that this construction is part of “legitimizing the recolonization of Indian women’s embodiment in the global economy.”¹¹ Thapan’s study builds indirectly on Malhotra and Rogers’s earlier 2000 work, which is a study of the shifting representations of women on Indian satellite television shows in the 1990s. Malhotra and Rogers had concluded that the most noticeable shift saw women move from “portrayals of women as domestic housewives and mothers, to women as sexual beings who often work outside the home and who have become Westernized” and that although there is a noticeable increase in women’s visibility on television, it is mainly via “characters constructed through patriarchal and nationalist interests, often reverting any progress made in gender-role portrayals to a more traditional status quo.”¹²

Like all the “new women” in the reviewed literature, the NSAW marks a departure from earlier conceptions of women’s status in colonial and apartheid legislation and cities. The NSAW exists in an ambivalent relationship to historical femininities: simultaneously challenging and reinscribing them. Dorothy Driver has demonstrated how the appearance of Black women in South African magazines has always been political.¹³ Focusing specifically on Drum magazine, she demonstrates the manner in which celebrity women—and women who rose to celebrity after appearing on the cover of Drum in the 1950s—embodied an urban, sophisticated, independent Black femininity that challenged hegemonic apartheid constructions of Black women as out of place in the urban realm. At the same time, the presentation of the female body, and sometimes the interview with the celebrity woman on the magazine’s cover, rehearsed patriarchal expectation. In the case of 1950s Drum, as in contemporary presentations of the NSAW, the woman embodies economic progress, consumer status, and achievement as a mode of self-assertion. At the same time, she is cast as consumable.

The NSAW is constructed visually and textually and finds high circulation on television and magazines, like the phenomena in the literature of the “new woman” in India that Thapan and Malhotra and Rogers analyze. She is the aspirational woman that television dramas and popular soap operas se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 A peculiar place for a feminist? The New South African woman, True Love magazine and Lebo(gang) Mashile
• 2 The girls who don’t die: subversions of gender and genre in recent fiction by Lauren Beukes
• 3 Sticky e/motional connections: young people, social media, and the re-orientation of affect
• 4 Mediating women’s globalized existence through social media in the work of Adichie and Bulawayo
• 5 A threatening personification of freedom or: Sobukwe and repression
• 6 “Only words can bury us, not silence”: reading Yvonne Vera’s difficult silences
• 7 Fostering receptivity: cultural translation, ethical solicitation, and the navigation of distance in J.T. Rogers’ The Overwhelming
• 8 Empathy’s echo: post-apartheid fellow feeling
• Index