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

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.