Abstract
Zodwa Wabantu, a South African celebrity recently made popular by the <em>Daily Sun</em>, a local tabloid newspaper, is notorious as an older working-class woman who fearlessly challenges social norms of feminine respectability and beauty. Her assertion of sexual autonomy and her forays into self-surveillance and body-modification, mediated by the <em>Daily Sun</em> and other tabloid and social media platforms, could be read as a local iteration of a global postfeminist subjectivity. However, the widespread social opprobrium she faces must be accounted for: Using Connell’s model of the gender order together with a coloniality frame, I argue that northern critiques of postfeminism omit to consider the forms of patriarchy established by colonialism in southern locales such as South Africa. The local patriarchal gender order, made visible within the tabloid reportage, provides the context within which the meaning of Zodwa Wabanu’s contemporary postfeminist identity is constructed. I examine a range of Zodwa Wabantu’s (self)representations in <em>Daily Sun</em> and other digital media in the light of this context, and conclude that a close examination of the local gender order assists in understanding the limits of postfeminism’s hegemony.
Highlights
Zodwa Libram ‘Wabantu,’ the focus of this article, is a minor South African celebrity brought to public attention in 2017 by the popular tabloid newspaper, the Daily Sun
This article proposes that in order to understand postfeminism in southern spaces we need to situate the discourse within the gender relations forged by colonialism and its aftermath
While postfeminism is compatible with global neoliberalism, local gender discourses contend with postfeminism to shape the gender relations deemed appropriate for this context
Summary
Zodwa Libram ‘Wabantu,’ the focus of this article, is a minor South African celebrity brought to public attention in 2017 by the popular tabloid newspaper, the Daily Sun. State housing provided for an idealised patriarchal nuclear family and presumed a household economy centred on the husband’s wage-earning capacity and the wife’s domesticity (Hunter, 2010) This model of urban gender relations was impossible to establish in the highly contested township social terrain, inflected as it was by in-migration from rural areas, mines and their associated material and cultural infrastructures, Western media and cultural forms, and struggle politics (Bank, 2011; Morrell, 1998). A valuable example of how these various elements can combine to shape gender relations in specific locales is provided by Hunter (2010), who carefully examines the evolving post-apartheid gender order in a declining industrial township He locates his analysis within a neoliberal economy, characterised by profound economic instability and unemployment, which has deprived men of their privileged status as breadwinners. Hunter’s work illustrates Connell’s (2009, p. 93) claim that within coloniality there is no fixed gender order, but a “reconfigured terrain” on which new struggles take place—including the establishment of discourses such as postfeminism
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