Normalised constructions of masculinity and femininity within a heteronormative social structure have shaped beliefs about women's capacities, characteristics and bodies, and have constructed a hegemonic feminine ideal that has historically excluded the possibility of being simultaneously feminine and athletic. However, following developments in Europe and North America (such as Title IV and WIS) and the increased production and consumption of globalised sports, new and more athletic feminine ideals have emerged and opened spaces for women to form sporting and athletic subjectivities. As a part of this process, women's football, across the world, has grown exponentially, in popular support and participation rates, since the first World Cup was organised in China in 1991 (Hong, 2004; Cox and Thompson, 2000). In South Africa, the development of structures for women's football was late, and women's football is not yet fully professional. In South Africa football is viewed as a game for men, and it remains a flagship masculine sport that serves to maintain and support masculine domination (Pelak, 2005). Because women's participation in a sport like football is considered a transgression, there is a heightened need to mark women's bodies as feminine, so as to reinforce the heteronormative and dichotomous constructions of male/female and masculine/feminine. This thesis presents an exploration of the ambivalent relationship between empowerment and surveillance as it presents itself in the lives of elite level women footballers in South Africa. It discusses empowerment and surveillance as they appear at the most intimate levels of women's sporting experience, and impact on the ways in which women footballers discipline and regulate their bodies within the expectations of heteronormativity, femininity and athleticism. The discussion is based on qualitative, informal interviews with 18 elite level women footballers in South Africa, 12 of which are currently members of the 5 senior women's national football team, Banyana Banyana. The remaining 6 participants are members of one of Cape Town's oldest and most successful women's football teams. The interviews took place at a national team camp in Pretoria in October 2008, and in Cape Town between August and November 2008. Utilising discourse analysis and postmodern feminist standpoint theory this thesis concludes that the empowerment and transformation sport has the potential to offer women should not be assumed to follow directly from participation. Women's access to sports participation and sporting subjectivities is stratified, and a complex and ambivalent relationship exists between empowerment and surveillance. This tense relationship between is particularly evident in analyses of gender/race/class intersections, heteronormativity and through examining women's participation at a professional level. Although the neo-liberal feminine athletic validates sporting subjectivities and offers women in elite-level South African football an arena for physical expression and freedom, this empowerment is deeply embedded within the regulatory schemes produced through constructions of a heteronormative feminine aesthetic.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / As South Africa transitioned into democracy and began negotiating the terms of the new dispensation, the near exclusion of women from the early stages of the negotiations propelled a movement of women across the country, organising to ensure that their needs and aspirations were represented in the defining of the new political order. At the heart of this movement was the Women's National Coalition (WNC), formed in 1991 to identify and advocate for women's primary needs in the post-apartheid Constitution. This created unprecedented opportunities for women from all parts of the country to identify and to organise around commonalities, and it also exposed some of the deep divisions and power inequalities that separated groups of women from each other. In seeking to understand these dynamics, I explore dominant discourses that were employed within the WNC.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 130-142). / This thesis explores the meanings and impact of rape in South Africa for fifteen women located at the University of Cape Town (UCT) who claim to have never experienced rape. Drawing upon feminist post-structuralist theories of subjectivity and taking a discursive analytic approach, the thesis explores how these women construct the phenomenon of rape in their society and thereby imagine themselves. It is based upon empirical data collected through qualitative interviews. Analysis of this data shows that the women discursively construct rape as highly prevalent in South Africa but ordinarily distant from their personal lives, concerning then 'the Other.' However, it is argued that the women also construct themselves as gendered and embodied subjects inherently vulnerable to male violence such as rape. This means that the fear and imagination of rape are not absent from their daily lives, but rather shape their sense of safety, agency, sexuality and citizenship in South Africa. Because these fifteen women deny personal experiences of rape, the thesis shows that they draw on public discourses and their subjective imaginations to theorise rape and rape crisis in post-apartheid South Africa.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 191-204). / The theoretical framework for this research was designed through contemporary work, both international and South Africa, on questions of gender, performativity, and masculinities. In addition, questions of social justice for those marginalized by gender conventions created the context for a qualitative research process in which transgender men's experiences of their subjectivities as 'men' served as a route through which to explore questions of gender surveillance in a post-democratice South Africa...The research contributes significantly to knowledge on often silenced and marginalized communities within African societies, where the majority of alternative sexualities and gender identities are often regarded as 'un-African'. The research concludes that the Trans men's masculinities play a pivital role in the deconstruction of the gender institution as 'natural' by presenting alternatives states of being as viable options within seemingly static boundaries.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 122-131).

Includes bibliographical references (p.115-128). / This thesis explores discourses on gender and gender based violence produced in the 16 Days of Activism Against Women Abuse campaign 2007 in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. The public awareness campaign united a number of local, community based organisations that work in the overlapping fields of HIV/AIDS and gender based violence. For the purpose of this study, three of the most vocal organisations in this campaign were chosen as research participants; The local branch of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) Khayelitsha, the Rape Survivors Centre Simelela, and the youth drama group Masibambisane. Assuming that discourses are embedded in unequal relations of power, this study adopts a discourse analytical approach to the 'gendering' of HI VIA IDS to reveal how knowledge and meanings are produced, reproduced and contested between more powerful institutions and a marginalised community. The thesis first explores dominant discourses on HIV/AIDS and gender in development discourse and social and biomedical research, and uncovers how HIV/AIDS risks are mostly related to women's lack of power and inherent vulnerability to violence. Such hegemonic discourses are then also found in international and national guidelines and policy frameworks that address the 'gendered' risks of HIV and AIDS, while at the same time these frameworks also promote approaches to HIV/AIDS that acknowledge contextual and societal factors that shape vulnerability. Eventually, a review of international and national frameworks that address the 'dual epidemics' shows how the so called 'community sector' is often highlighted as a crucial partner in multi-sectoral approaches to HIV/AIDS. The empirical study then aims at locating such discourses in a localised, South African context, and explores the ways in which dominant discourses are reproduced, contested, and redefined by community activists. Empirical data is collected through participant observation with the organisations coordinating the campaign, recording of speeches delivered during the public events, and semi-structured, qualitative interviews with five key members of the organisations. A discursive analysis of the data reveals that femininity and masculinity are mainly constructed in rather conservative ways, portraying women as inherently vulnerable and men as either perpetrators of violence, or protectors of women and children. These constructions of gender are based in a patriarchal, hegemonic notion of masculinity as powerful and responsible for the suffering or salvation of weak and vulnerable women. However, within these hegemonic gender notions, women speakers simultaneously contest their victimhood status by claiming their rights as citizens of South Africa, by relocating power in their collective struggle, and by reframing their vulnerabilities as embedded in intersecting inequalities of gender, class and race, and as members of a community largely marginalised by the state. The multitude of discourses at play in the public campaign point at the necessity for a re-reading of the intersections of HIV/AIDS, gender inequality and gender based violence beyond victim-agent dualisms.

Bibliography: leaves 113-118. / This research project comes out of my own 7-year engagement with the Zimbabwe women's movement. It reconstructs a herstory of Zimbabwe Women's organising with the aim of reinstating a herstory in order to challenge malestream narratives that seem intent on disappearing women. In doing this it seeks to examine the nature of women's movement in Zimbabwe during the period 1995 - 2000, which facilitates a deeper exploration of women's collective action in a challenging national context.

Bibliography: leaves 76-90. / A total of 813 male and female high school students in the Western Cape between grades 10 and 12 completed a questionnaire survey on their eating attitudes and behaviours. The mean age for the sample was 16.77 years. The survey included a Demographic Questionnaire, the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26), the Bulimic Investigatory Test, Edinburgh (BITE), the Questionnaire of Eating and Weight Patterns Revised (QEWP-R) and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 193-202). / This dissertation examines the meaning of university 'transformation' from the perspective of workers in 'non-core' zones of work. Mergers, outsourcing, retrenching and rightsizing, have become features of the post-apartheid higher education landscape; and they seem set to remain. Through higher education restructuring work has been divided into 'core' and 'non-core' zones of work and 'non-core' work has largely been outsourced. The men and women working in the outsourced zones of 'non-core' work engage in the 'reproductive work' of the university and yet they largely remain hidden from institutional debates of transformation.

Bibliography: leaves 89-92. / The purpose of my investigation was to study gender equality in one of Swaziland's secondary schools. This was a case study. The aim was to determine the extent to which gender equality was being practised, if at all. The study was based on socialization theories presented by some feminists. The theories discussed in this thesis are the Liberal feminist theory, the Socialist feminist theory, the Radical feminist theory, the Psychoanalytic feminist theory, the Postmodern feminist theory and the Third World feminist theory. Feminists believe that early socialization and sex-stereotyped attitudes about boys and girls have a fundamental effect on the processes of education in relation to teaching style and methodology and the way in which learning is negotiated by boys and girls. Feminists believe that the teachers as well as their fellow male students usually marginalize girls at school. In this case study a school in urban Swaziland was selected.