‘It's not right!’: Death as Gendered Experience in Contemporary South Africa

Abstract

This article examines how the concept of ‘not-rightness’ is embedded in African women's talk and sense-making about death in present-day urban South Africa. Moving from a Christian NGO context in Pretoria's inner city to the surrounding townships, it focuses on the ways women NGO workers engage with notions of rights, empowerment and behavioural change in their concurrent roles as kin, burial society members, widows and lovers of deceased persons. It argues that the senses of not-rightness women express in relation to these gendered roles are newly animated by South Africa's turn to democracy and the dramatic impact of HIV/AIDS; senses which, if subtly, speak to locally salient, vernacularised conceptions of ‘women's rights’ and ‘fidelity’. Through two case studies – the first of the death of an elderly woman; the second of the murder of an interlocutor's boyfriend – the article elucidates the central role of death experiences in women's (re)conceptualisations of gender identity and subjectivity in the post-apartheid moment. More broadly, it reiterates the need to move beyond questions of the limits of rights-based rhetoric to analyses attentive to the complex, contingent and possibly contradictory ways people evoke such discourses.