Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-124). / This research explores the meanings of marriage for South African lesbian women who have accessed marriage as a legal right through the Civil Union Act since its inception in 2006. As a researcher coming from the United States, where same-sex marriage is not nationally available, to South Africa, where same-sex marriage is a constitutionally recognised legal right, my research began with the question, "What has changed?" Because same -sex marriage is highly contested in disparate global spaces, an understanding of how the legislation is being used by those accessing it has the potential to contribute to a body of knowledge encouraging more inclusive legal relationship recognition in spaces where same-sex marriage is not yet legally available. The research makes use of semi-structured in depth interviews with 15 South African lesbian women who have married through the Civil Union Act. The women come from diverse "racial", religious and socio-economic backgrounds. Calling on feminist frameworks theorising marriage as an institution which has historically restricted women's social, political and economic autonomy, in addition to literature framing marriage as a contemporary "battle ground" for human rights, the research attempts to conceptualise the relationship of married lesbian women to their citizenship through their experiences of accessing a legal right embedded in specific cultural, social and religious meanings. The research concludes that while a right critical to the experience of citizenship is being exercised by lesbian women in South Africa, the richer experience theorized as "belonging" has not been fully inscribed in their lived realities. For the lesbian women represented in this research, marriage involves a re- examination of their partnerships as a precondition for the "traditional" celebratory involvement of family and community. Therefore, while marriage has been understood to embody both legal and symbolic meanings, viewing marriage as a human rights issue reveals a fracture between the legal aspects of the institution and the socio-religious contexts that lend it its authority. The research attempts to identify alternative ways of viewing marriage and family constructions by privileging the experience of lesbian women who have accessed marriage from their diverse social and cultural "sites". The research suggests that theorizing marriage from the site of the partners' happiness or fulfilment is a powerful lens with which to destabilise the dominant discourses of respectability most commonly invoked as a point of departure for discussions around same-sex marriage.

There is an overwhelming body of research in the Global North that focuses on the narratives of the impact of a spinal cord injury on men living with paraplegia, while existing research in South Africa and the Global South lacks knowledge on these narratives. This study explored the narratives on the impact of a spinal cord injury on fifteen coloured men living with paraplegia on the Cape Flats. This study adopted a life story approach, as a primary research methodology, and examined how these men constructed and told their life stories, how meanings and experiences of living with paraplegia were conveyed, and how they negotiated the intersection of disability, masculinity, race, class and sexuality in their lives. A participatory action research (PAR) methodology, photo-voice, was used as a complimentary methodology which depicted how these men visually represented the way they think main-stream society sees them and the way they see themselves. Drawing on Frank’s (1995) work on narratives and illness, this study used two life stories and theoretically shows how life stories with a central focus on paraplegia as a spinal cord injury are constructed and narrated. Through a narrative thematic analysis, themes and sub-themes highlighted the complexities and tensions in the construction and performance of masculinities after the injury. The following themes emerged from the narratives: feelings of shame and infantilization, a loss of independency, dehumanizing social perceptions of being a man living with a disability, vulnerability to violence, and challenges in sexual intercourse and intimacy. The narratives also show that a man in this context can develop a positive sense of self through learning to live independently, strategies to prevent violence, redefining sex, and redefining what it means to be a man and ‘disabled’.

Bibliography : leaves 66-71.

Initiating this research project I reflected on the subject of popular and youth culture, gender and sexuality; which then drove me to consider an analysis of dress codes and fashion in regards to notions of female respectability. Through my research process, I have often thought that I had digressed considerably; yet as I begin to narrate this story I am both surprised and amazed to find that this is in fact what I have done and thankfully, I believe I have done more. This "full circle," in thinking, doing and now presenting new knowledge was initiated in part due to a personal interest in the gendered socio-political, economic and historical meanings attached to the body surface as a whole, which I soon changed to a consideration of both the bodily surface and its interior. As stated in my research proposal, it was my contention that the female body, as opposed to the normative (or rather socially normalized) male body, has been discursively constructed as defiled, unclean and as reeking with sickness according to dominant paradigms of knowledge and social practice. Through the processes of conquest, colonialism, imperialism, racism and apartheid; black people and especially black women's bodies have suffered this violence. I have an interest in dissecting the manner by which such discourses then translate into common-sense understandings about how we both dress and perform our bodies in various social spaces; about how we begin to construct the discourse of "our culture," of good girls and social misfits, who wear the labels of "prostitute," "lesbian," or "rural," (despite their true actions or conditions) within urban spaces in contemporary Southern Africa; considering the impact of the history of a geographical apartheid, a migrant labour system, the production and re/production of notions of femininity closely associated with domesticity and the very dominant narrative of female respectability.

Includes bibliographical references (150-157). / This research was carried out in Langa Township, Cape Town and worked with 7 young black women, between the ages of 19 and 26 years old. The aim was to explore the fluidity of identity, in particular gender identity, by exploring the performance of 'normative' femininity and 'hidden/subversive' femininity performed in different spaces. The focus was on 'hidden/subversive' femininity and the experiences of pleasure and danger in clubs spaces in Cape Town. It was found that these experiences centre on appearance, use of alcohol and dancing and expose the way in which young women negotiate between the pleasurable and dangerous that, consciously or unconsciously, push the boundaries of entrenched gender norms. In addition, owing 10 the nature of the research, constructions of masculinity were also explored and discovered to have a profound impact on young women's experiences within club spaces and in their everyday lives, relating to sexual relationships. This study aims to reveal the power and agency of young women, as well as the struggles and restrictions.

The metropolis has featured prominently in queer theory, cultural productions and advocacy work as the ideal site of queer life (Massad, 2002; Gray, 2009; Herring, 2010). Because of the concentration of resources in the metropole and discursive investments in locating ‘outof-the-way places’ (Tsing, 1993) at a temporal and geographic distance from metropolitan centres, I argue that queer organising in ‘out-of-the-way places’ is ‘southerned’. In other words, work that happens at the geographic margins continues to be rendered unrecognisable in a metric of ‘rights’, generated in a specific location and projected as ‘universal’. This dissertation is an account of the way that ‘discursive formations’ (Foucault 1972) shape the context for queer presence and work in ‘out-of-the-way places.’ The ethnographic work presented here was conducted in the United States South and South Africa over a period of two years, during which I collected and analysed public presentations and semi-structured in-depth interviews thematically and with discourse analysis. Through field work in two ‘souths’, the analysis presented here is situated in relation to a body of theoretical work that is interested in spatial and temporal politics of sexuality that frame ‘out-of-the-way places’ as inhospitable to queer existence. The hegemonic discourses of ‘rights’ generated in the metropole renders the kinds of work and existence carried out by queer bodies in ‘out-of-the-way places’ illegible. Queer work is ongoing in ‘out-of-the-way places’. This dissertation seeks to understand how that work is shaped both by the contexts in which the work unfolds and by the metronormative demands placed on what working queerly is supposed to look like. The research concludes that the complexities of queer existence and queer work in the ‘two souths’ represented here must be understood on their own terms rather than through the reductive lens of expectations and interpretations projected from the metropole. In order for queer work to thrive in ‘out-of-the-way places’, historical and contemporary issues that are residues of colonial legacies of resource extraction, violence, exploitation, environmental degradation and restricted access to a range of things not reducible to the metronormative rubric of ‘rights’ must be addressed.

The following study is an exploration of religious Zimbabwean migrant men's representations of lobola. The study was undertaken to strengthen conversations about hegemonic masculinity which often marginalize both the role of religion in shaping masculinities and simultaneously may homogenize the notion of 'cultural tradition'. The research uses qualitative methods which seek to uncover the way in which Zimbabwean men who identify as Christian negotiate aspects of masculinity in relation to their lived experience of undertaking marriage through lobola. My main methodological aim was to allow participants to represent their own experiences, as these engage with both changing economic circumstances and Pentecostal Christianity. In order to analyse the empirical data I employ a theoretical framework which explores contextual and relational understandings of masculinity, religion and marriage. The dominant themes discussed include discourses on normativities; economic migration; religiosity and marriage which are used to further understand narratives of Zimbabwean men's lived experience of lobola. I argue that the negotiation of these intersectional aspects creates zones of tension which Zimbabwean men must negotiate with on an ongoing basis. The study argues that the past two decades of economic and political stress, coupled with a plethora of changing 'norms' about the meaning of heterosexuality, marriage, and partnership, mean that daily performativities of Christian-identified masculinity are both strongly embedded in fixed notions of gender normativity and simultaneously seek to accommodate changing circumstances.

No description available.

Within contemporary scholarship on formations of gender and their connections to violences, important questions concerning the politics of masculinities arise. Leading scholars, such as Kopano Ratele, argue for African contexts to be theorized beyond frameworks developed by scholars such as Connell, Kimmel, and Messerschmidt, whose research is grounded in work outside the continent's histories. At the same time, many scholars and policy-makers share the recommendation that global goals for a sustainable world-order demand the reduction of violence, especially violence against women and girls. Masculinities scholarship has, overall, explored the meaning of violence against women for diverse masculine constituencies in much less depth than it has engaged questions of the constructions of hegemonies, the experiences of violence within men's own lives, and the impact of changing economic and political orders on constructions of masculinity. This thesis seeks to address the gap between theorization on masculinity which respects diversity and complexity and theorization on violence against women, particular intimate partner violence within marriage, which tends to imagine a homogenous perpetrator: husband. It is vitally important to investigate and contextualize the discourses of people gendered as 'men', within very specific contexts, to explore the connections made between 'becoming men' and the meaning of domestic violence in their own spaces. Of particular focus in this thesis is an interrogation of the place of domestic violence in men's social worlds. The thesis contributes to knowledge on masculinities by offering an unusually detailed set of culturally sensitive and contextual insights into the social world that is iteratively navigated by married men in a manner to gain recognition as credible, a world in which previous research has already revealed to include women's experiences of abuse, discrimination, and stigma from their husbands. The thesis uses qualitative methods to generate material from men in north-western Ghana through in-depth interviews and focus group sessions. The work takes as a useful entry point the lived experiences, language, and vernacular understandings of people who are, in twenty-first century Ghana, legally criminalized for domestic violence. While such criminalization is welcome, from diverse points of view, the research undertakes a complex qualitative search into how possible 'perpetrators' themselves construct the connection between masculinity, the contemporary socio-economic order, and violence against women, especially wives. The material is analyzed intensively through thematic discourse analysis, and the argument overall is that that violence against wives is discursively connected to how the 'states' and 'citizens' discursively construct masculinity, femininity, and the credibility of violence within a larger gender-nation battle. The analysis simultaneously reveals a dramatic distinction between the construction of violence against wives as legitimate 'correction' (something far from a criminal court) and its construction as 'abusive,' and thus potentially actionable. This distinction alone deepens an understanding of the difficulty of implementing any Domestic Violence Acts, and also leads to questions about the construction of homosociality as a zone of safety and status, one threatened by behaviour from twenty-first century wives. This thesis both confirms earlier research on masculinities and domestic violence in its clear revelation of discursive collusion between men on the appropriate forms of disciplining intimate partners, and also suggests some debate in this collusion. The overarching contribution of the research comes in its argument that the possibility of domestic violence is embedded within contemporary meanings for masculinity, wifehood, marriage and the nation.

This dissertation engages with critical pedagogic theories and activism from a black feminist perspective. The central argument is that education is not only confined to the formal classroom but also takes place in the most unlikely places outside the classroom. This work is premised on the educational philosophies of liberation, embodiment and freedom of the oppressed and the marginalised. The qualitative research is largely presented as ethnographical research, with the researcher located as both participant in the evolvement of the two educational programmes and as writer of this dissertation. Both educational programmes deal with performance and performativity and aim to give voice to the marginalised bodies and lives in the university environment. The research demonstrates how two marginalised groups claim space on campus through performativity involving the body and voice. In the Edudrama, Reclaiming the P…Word, young black women, via representation of word and body, transform the performance space into one in which the misogynistic and racist gaze is transformed. This feminist theatre is intrinsically related to the feminist political work of reclamation of the black female body, which became invisible and objectified for abuse under colonialism, apartheid and patriarchy. The various feminist elements and processes involved in creating feminist text and theatre are discussed. The praxis involved in these processes is then theorised in terms of critical pedagogy as black feminist intellectual activism. In the case of the lesbian, gay and transgender programme, Loud Enuf, the bodies and voices are used differently in the public campus domain to challenge homophobia. This programme is used to raise awareness about sex, sexuality, sexual orientation and gender identity. This programme is intensely political and challenges ambiguous understandings regarding the notion of equality in South Africa post-1994.