Narrating Gender and Sex in and through Apartheid Divides

Abstract

In this article I reflect on the way in which racist practices intersect with gender as this emerges in narratives on living through apartheid, from a group of academics in contemporary South Africa. A wide range of literature has explored the complex intersections of ‘race’, gender, class and other forms of difference and power inequality through the history of South Africa before, during and after apartheid. The continued intersection of gender with racist practices and other forms of inequality is more than evident in post-apartheid South Africa and reflected in multiple contexts. While a number of stories of women and their experiences of the violent forms of the intersection of gendered apartheid through rape and abuse have been documented by the TRC and other forms of interrogation, the more ‘normal’ stories of how racist and gendered practices played themselves out in patriarchal apartheid South Africa are arguably not widely documented other than in theoretical terms. A narrative analysis located within a broad discourse analytic framework is utilised here, which foregrounds experiences in the narratives that reflect broader ideologies on ‘race’, class, culture, gender and sexuality and their enmeshment with each other that were salient in apartheid South Africa and arguably are still of relevance today. I explore some of the multiple and complex ways, many of them not new to us, in which normative gender roles and gender power relations, and sexual and intimate practices intersect with racialised discourse and racist practices in home, work and public spaces through the stories that participants tell.