‘Looking on’ for national daughters:

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although there has been a greater attentiveness to gender as an ideological representation in postapartheid criticism, how the nation relies on the visual to manage gender and construct racialised gender identities is still a developing conversation. This article situates the shifting location of ‘woman’ through a comparative reading of the aporias created between two published versions of Longlive! by Menán du Plessis, an excerpt published by a feminist press (1987) and the finalised version of the novel (1989). Using feminist film theory's analysis of the gaze as a tool, my reading examines the role of looking relations in reinforcing the hegemony of white privilege through an analysis of how the male imperial gaze structures the subjectivity of white daughters for the nation. Through re-presenting and disrupting the male imperial gaze in her depiction of these daughters, Du Plessis's late-apartheid era texts offer sites for developing post-apartheid feminist frameworks sensitive to lingering power differentials.