Putting Down Markers: Women and Gender in South African Feminist Scholarship, c. 1980-1990

Abstract

abstract Forty years since the publication of Belinda Bozzoli’s “Marxism, feminism, and South African studies,” its influential contribution to an emergent South African feminist scholarship is evident. The South African academy experienced transformations and contestations in the 1970s regarding Marxist theory and social history, impacting the feminist analyses of women and gender in South Africa. We argue that Bozzoli’s interventions contributed to an intellectual genealogy examining women’s lived experiences, gender relations, racial domination, and political economy. Our discussion centers on major debates and themes in these studies, notably working-class conditions and employment, domestic labour and ideologies of domesticity; feminism and women’s resistance; sexuality and the state; and the statuses of white women. Although we reference some important works in the 1970s that Bozzoli and other commentators drew on, we primarily concentrate on the 1980s, when a wider variety of research on women’s and gender studies appeared. We conclude in 1990, when the government lifted banning orders on political organisations. Many of these academic conversations were intertwined with struggles against the apartheid state. Scholars involved in feminist research prompted new directions in South African studies and contributed to women’s and gender studies becoming established as a field of inquiry.